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not-xpr-art · 3 years

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Art Deep Dives #2 - The History of Fanart

Hi everyone!

This post is part of my Art Deep Dives tag, where I ramble about art-y things, often with some relation to art history in some way.

just so you know, these essays aren’t formal in anyway lol! I just do them for fun & to hopefully be interesting in some way to someone!

This week I’ll be talking about the history and importance of fanart! It’s not the entire history of fanart, just some key moments and points in it that I feel are important!

(this essay is about 2500 words long btw!)

Part 1 - What even is fanart?

I think when a lot of people hear about ‘fanart’, they often think of it as a new thing, something that came along at some point in the last century when media begun to be mass circulated around the world.

But, of course, fanart has existed long before media like Star Wars or Doctor Who were created, and even long before photography was invented, even if it wasn’t necessarily referred to as ‘fanart’ at that time since the concept of ‘intellectual property’ hadn’t been introduced at that point.

So I think at first we need to define what we even mean when we refer to ‘fanart’...

Put simply, it’s artwork made by people who are interested in something created by someone else, such as a TV show, film, book, podcast, video game etc. However, by this definition, where do original characters created by the fans as part of franchises fit into the picture? Or celebrity fanart? Or artists who use famous people’s appearances as the base for their own characters? Or what of artworks of media that have long since passed copyright laws (such as Shakespeare works, Austen works, etc)? And where do illustrations of books fit into this?

So perhaps a wider description would be, artworks made by fans of and inspired by something “belonging” to someone else (either a piece of media or... themselves). The issue of this description is that most portraiture would fit into this. So... are we about to call Thomas Gainsborough or Joshua Reynolds, two of the most famous British portrait painters of the 18th century, fanartists?

I think a lot of people in the art world would scoff at this concept, because even now the feelings surrounding fanart are pretty negative. They see it as less of a valid form of art and instead as ‘derivative’ and ‘unoriginal’. I’ve heard both non-artists and artists alike talk about fanart as ‘not real art’, and then in the next breath they’re praising portraits made by Leonardo da Vinci or Vincent Van Gogh.

I also think it’s important to note that fanart isn’t exclusively portraiture too. Often artists will draw landscapes, still life works or even abstract pieces based on their favourite media. And as previously mention, a lot of artists and writers create their own characters within a world created by another person. So, for all intents and purposes, that is a form of original art, but it is often still put down in comparison to people who make up an entirely new story and world for their characters.

Part 2 - Renaissance artists and Bible fanart!?

One of the most common defences I’ve seen for fanart is that Renaissance artists’ basically did Bible and Mythology fanart, and their artwork is considered ‘masterpieces’ so... that’s that!

Right?

Well, if we’re sticking with the definition of fanart being something based on a series of characters or concepts owned by someone else, then Religious or Mythological based art would definitely fit into this.

(Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Virgin of the Rocks’, currently being held in the National Gallery in London).

But I think it’s important to note that the art world was a very different place in Renaissance Europe. Concepts and characters didn’t belong to any one person or group of people, instead everything was a lot more homogenised. There’s a reason why when we think of figures like Jesus or the Virgin Mary, we have a very particular idea of what they look like (a very white-washed idea, I might add). The same thing goes for portrayals of figures from Greek or Roman mythology. There were often motifs associated with these deities that dated back to Antiquity, and Renaissance artists looked back to this for their inspiration. But there was no one specific point of reference for these ‘characters’ other than the Bible, which didn’t actually ‘belong’ to anyone, not even the church.

So, I think it’s valid to bring up Renaissance artists and how the modern concept of ‘originality’ in art was less important to artists or patrons, and much of the art they did was exclusively works based on something the artist did not come up with. In my first Art Deep Dive, I talked about how History paintings (which were often Religious or Mythology based) were valued for being the product of an ‘artistic genius’ and their connection to spirituality in comparison to portraits or landscapes that depicted the real contemporary world.

But do I think it was actually fanart?

... Probably not... Although I wouldn’t begrudge anyone believing it is, because in a way it does somewhat fit into the definition of fanart. Instead this was to look at how society’s relationship to art has changed drastically in the hundreds of years since that era, as has the purpose of art itself.

And I think it does bring up some interesting discussions of why we are so obsessed with ‘originality’ in art at the moment when it’s not something that was really important before, though!

Part 3 - What about portraiture?

So... What about portraiture huh?

Now, portraiture has existed for as long as art has, essentially, but it took until the Renaissance era and beyond for it to be associated with patrons. Portraiture was more than just ‘old-timey photography’, since it was linked distinctively to a sign of wealth. I mentioned Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds earlier, who were two very influential portrait artists of the 18th century, who both fed into a market of middle and upper class patrons wanting their portraits done in this era.

(This is a piece by Reynolds of the Actress Mrs Siddons as the Tragic Muse).

And in a way this makes portraiture probably the earliest example of fanart as we see it today.

Except, a part of fanart that people who do it (including myself) often bring up is how it’s connected to a sense of passion and love for something. In a way, portraits done purely as commissions for an aristocrat for profit doesn’t necessarily fit into our modern notion of fanart.

This brings us back to that darn description of fanart again. Because in our current world fanart can be defined as work of celebrities done as commissions. Except, perhaps, if you’re a known portrait painter (no one says the designer of the postage stamp did fanart of Queen Elizabeth, despite the fact that it... kind of is?).

So, why is it that a portrait of the Queen is simply a portrait, but one of Billie Eilish is ‘fanart’? Who decides these parameters? And also who decides which one is more ‘worthy’ or ‘valuable’?

Places like the National Portrait Gallery are filled with portraits of famous people from history. But it’s never referred to as the ‘National Fanart Gallery’. I think in a way this boils down to who is doing the art, who the art is of and why they’re painting it. It is funny, though, that the distinction between fanart and portraiture of famous people is so similar that it requires such detailed specifications as to which is which.

So, I think it’s clear to see that where portraiture fits in the history of fanart is a contentious one...

Part 4 - Shakespeare, Fairy Paintings and other 18th/19th Century Curiosities...

From the late 18th until the late 19th century essentially saw the birth to what we now know as ‘fanart’, in a way. The growth of middle-class audiences in the early part of the 1800′s meant that there was a new found desire for landscape, genre and portrait art. And coupled with the growth of secularism, history paintings in their traditional sense had lost appeal.

There was also the small matter of media being so much more accessible and wide spread to bigger audiences due to the industrial revolution. Books were being printed more easily and sold and a reasonable price, not to mention that a significant portion of the population could now actually read, or at the very least were given some form of education. More travel and trade (and also colonialism) also lead to an increase of new kinds of media being explored. Birth of the Gothic genre, Science Fiction, Fantasy, etc, all forms of fiction that we’re very familiar with now were only just entering the public’s consciousness at this point.

Much like now, technological advances were both a blessing and curse to the people of this era. And also like now, art was used as a way to express what was happening in the world. A great example of this is JMW Turner’s Flying ,,, which shows an old ship being transported into harbour by a steamboat, something that was very new to this era. It spoke of the new technologies overpowering the old, and the fears a lot of people had because of this.

This lead to the development of Fairy Paintings, to move to a new time of history painting that was more based on folktales and works of fiction by writers like Shakespeare, and were often used as a form of escapism. William Blake is a prominent figure in this type of painting, along with some Pre-Raphaelite painters.

This is a piece directly based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth by Henry Fuseli and is completely undoubtedly fanart in essentially every way. Many of his works, and the works of his contemporaries, were based on the works of writers like Shakespeare.

This piece, along with most of his other works, was also exhibited in the Tate Gallery way back in the early 19th century. Fanart like this was openly welcomed into galleries in this era, something that’s a far cry from my art teachers in school and college actively discouraging us from doing any kind of fanart for our projects.

The mass appeal of these kinds of art lasted well into the 20th century and even after the advent of photography, which created an entirely new kind of media to be consumed.

I actually think that a lot of this animosity towards fanart stems from a lot of fanart being born from drawing from photos as references, which is why I think artworks that are fanart from an pre-photography era are valued above artworks done now.

Part 5 - The Beginnings of Intellectual Property and Copyright Hell...

Earlier I mentioned how fanart could be defined as work done inspired by media belonging to someone else. However, this begs the question whether a single person or company can actually own such things as characters and story concepts.

Copyright as we know it today essentially originated in the 18th century. Now, I’m not going to go into all the history of copyright here (partly because it’s confusing af), but essentially throughout the 18th and 19th century all across the world, intellectual property laws were brought in for books & later extended to other media types. They basically prevented any other person or publisher being able to copy, distribute or adapt the piece of media. As many may know, copyright laws run out after a certain amount of time (I believe either between 70 or 100 years), by which time they enter the Public Domain and are free to be used in anyway by anyone.

Copyright laws can be a real detriment to fanartists, however, particularly when large companies like Disney cracking down on any small hint of one of their characters in the last few years. This feels particularly insidious to me given how most Disney films are based on old fairy-tales and legends. But in using these centuries old stories and giving them the ‘Disney flavour’, they have been able to essentially repackage the original story for their own profit. Disney of course aren’t the only company to do this, but given how Disney own basically everything media-wise now, they are the biggest perpetrator of this at the moment.

It’s important to note that to this day, copyright doesn’t extend to ideas or themes. As well as this, copyrighted media can be used by people who don’t own it either by asking for permission or via ‘fair use’. But as a lot of Youtubers would tell you, this is often something that is ignored by large companies in favour of holding monopoly over the entire thing.

This is of course not to say that copyright can’t be a good thing. I believe that artists and creators deserve to have the rights to their individual works. The issue is surrounding big conglomerate companies using copyright not as a way of protecting and supporting their in-house artists, but as a way of boosting profits.

My thoughts are that copyright laws should exist to prevent other people or companies from stealing or overtly copying/adapting a work made by someone else, not preventing a small freelance artist from selling a couple prints of a drawing from a film Disney made 20+ years ago based on a stories written hundreds of years ago.

(I know it’s not as simple as this, but you get what I mean lol)

In a big way, copyright laws were what created our modern notion of fanart, since prior to that no-one really had ownership of their works in the same way that copyright allows you. So, even thought I’ve been quite pessimistic about it, fanart really wouldn’t exist without it so... it’s not all bad lol?

Part 6 - Why is any of this important??

I realise that this is a strange question to ask at the end of this essay, but I really wanted to leave my true personal thoughts until the end in order to keep at least a vague sense of being objective through this lol...

To me, fanart is something that made me fall in love with art in the first place, particularly digital art. I was able to find communities of like minded people and make some really good friends, all because of fanart.

I’ve also spoken to other artists who say how fanart allows them to connect to their favourite shows or characters or celebrities, and a way of expressing their love for something! It’s also often a gateway for artists to get into art as children, and some have said how fanart has allowed them to be more creative in general!

Fanart is something so intrinsic to fandom culture, so much so that it has existed for as long as people have loved things (even long before the internet). And I know that a lot of public figures who receive fanart, either of themselves or of works they’ve created, often express genuine happiness of being the inspiration for someone else...

So, fanart is important to us because it’s escapism, it’s freedom, and it brings us together in such a genuine way!

I wrote this essay because I wanted to truly explore where fanart actually came from, and what I ended up discovering is that the artworld has never been clean-cut separated into ‘original art’ and ‘fanart’!

The history of fanart is messy, confusing, but one thing is very clear to me: it doesn’t just run parallel to the history of art as a lot of people assume, it is instead interwoven into the fabric of all art!

So for my fellow fanartists, keep on doing what you’re doing, because your passion and love is palpable in your work, and really isn’t that what fanart is all about anyway??

~~~

Phew... Can you believe I actually did try and keep this short lol?

Anyway, thank you for reaching the end! And a special thank you to the people over at Artfolapp (my username is dangerliesbeforeyou over there btw!) who gave me their thoughts on fanart!

As always, my ask box is open for anyone who’s interested in discussing this further, and I also have an Art Advice Tag if you need help on improving your art!

#art deep dives #fanart #history of fanart #art history #art discussion #essay #history of art #blog post #i'm just... really passionate about fanart ... can u tell lol?#i may do a follow up of this one day since this is far from everything i want to talk about #but i figured 2500 words was enough for now..

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lhs3020b · 3 years

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The Ragged Astronauts, by Bob Shaw

Look! A books post!

I recently found myself in a mood to revisit old books (again), so I found myself re-reading Bob Shaw's "The Ragged Astronauts".

It turned out to be rather different from how I remembered. (Content warnings apply below the cut - this is an interesting book, but it’s also a dark one in places too.)

SYNOPSIS

The planets Land and Overland share a common orbit, revolving around a common centre of gravity. In fact the two objects are remarkably close together, separated by only a few thousand miles. In our universe, this would ensure that both bodies would lie inside the others' Roche Limit, and thus would ensure the destruction of both worlds. However, the region of spacetime in which Land and Overland exist is configured in such a way that the value of Pi is exactly equal to 3 (what this implies for the values of 0, 1, i and the base of natural logarithms is never addressed). Given this, we can assume that at least some of the physics is a bit different; perhaps the tidal force declines even more steeply then it does in our universe. Whatever the case, the Land/Overland planetary binary appears to be dynamically stable, and while both planets have problems, neither of them appears to be in imminent danger of gravitational disruption. The arrangement is implied to have existed for a geological timescale, so however they managed it, Land and Overland appear to be in an equilibrium.

However, due to their remarkable closeness, the two planets have ended up sharing a common atmosphere. This is actually not quite as strange as it sounds - in our universe, there is a category of stars called contact binaries, where two extremely-close stars have gravitationally-distended each other to the point where their atmospheres actually touch. (Seen up close, a contact binary would look a bit like a sort of stellar hourglass, with each star being a lobe of the hourglass.)

The novel opens on Land, whose inhabitants are entirely-unaware both of their folly and of the imminent end of their civilisation.

The lead character, Toller Maraquine, is technically a member of the scholarly Philosophical Order of the Kolcorronian Empire. However, with his short temper, muscular physique and his difficulties with reading (he's implied to be dyslexic, though no-one in Kolcorron would know that term), he feels ill at ease in his birth station. He wants to join the Kolcorronian army, but in practise this is out of reach due to both the internal politics of the royal court and also the strictures of the Kolcorronian aristocracy. (The aristocracy is in some ways closer to a caste system than the "classical" feudal system it presents as. While readers will see it through a European lens, the way it functions and is structured feels a bit more similar to Imperial China, given its centrally-organised bureaucratic orders and the absence of any equivalent to the Three Estates system that was common in parts of medieval Europe.)

However, things are about to change on Land, and Toller may well get what he wanted. Whether he realises it or not, he's about to find himself living the classic morality play - Be Careful What You Wish For.

The Kolcorronian Empire has made itself into a near-dominant world hegemon by exploiting the brakka trees. As part of their reproductive ecology, brakka trees fire their pollen high into the air, dispersing it over wide areas. The tree is essentially a sort of photosynthetic wooden canon; the explosive reactions are powered by two crystalline materials called halvell and pikon, which the trees' roots extract from Land's soil. Halvell and pikon are apparently hypergolic - mix them together and you get a very high-energy bang. Brakka wood is extraordinarily tough - with this sort of biology, it has to be! - and so Kolcorron uses brakka wood in all the places where we'd use metals or ceramics. (In addition, Land is said to be a low density planet that is under-enriched in heavy metallic elements, which seems to have discouraged the development of any native metallurgy.) Kolcorron's technology is entirely based around exploiting the brakka, pikkon and halvell. As such they don't map easily to any era in Earth history; while their society has feudal structures they also have a trade network based around pikon/halvell-powered airships. Honestly at times, their society feels closer to a steampunk age than a purely-medieval one.

Only there's a problem: Kolcorron has chopped down most of the brakka.

Kolcorron, you see, is not a pleasant society. The people who run it seem to vary from greedy to outrightly-sociopathic. Its politics are basically a sort of semi-totalitarian absolute monarchy; even people on the King's advisory high council have to be very careful what they say, and ordinary subjects can basically be conscripted, raped and murdered with impunity by the aristocracy. As such, the aristocrats have little time for things like "factual advice". The Philosophical Order has been trying to warn the government that a severe energy crunch is beginning, and this is deeply-unwelcome news.

But worse news is coming.

Land's people share their planet with the ptertha. Ptertha are gas bag creatures, possessed of a hard-to-determine level of intelligence. Ptertha are also inimical to Landians - when they encounter one, the ptertha explode, showering the person in question with poisonous dust. Anyone exposed to ptertha dust inevitably dies soon after. There is apparently no cure for pterthacosis; the normal response of Kolcorronians is to simply behead a pterthacosis sufferer, apparently on the assumption that trying to treat them is futile. (There is no suggestion that this is about saving the victim from suffering; that would involve a capacity for empathy, which very few people in Kolcorron appear to possess.)

What the Landers don't know is that the brakka and the ptertha are symbiotic species; the ptertha feed on brakka pollen, and in return they protect the sessile trees from any predator. Predators like Landers who keep chopping the brakka down. While the ptertha never show any ability to communicate, they are apparently at least somewhat intelligent, in some way. They are able to adapt their behaviour and apparently even their own biology to help them attack their ground-based enemies.

Up until now, pterthacosis has been a threat to individuals, but society as a whole has been able to cope. All that abruptly changes on a sunny morning, when the ptertha launch a mass attack against Ro-Atabri, Kolcorron's capital city. Only it's worse then that, because pterthacosis has changed - it can now spread in a viral manner, from person to person. With an economy based around outdoor manual labour and nothing resembling a public health system, the empire is swiftly devastated.

In barely two years, two thirds of Kolcorron's population die. By the mid-point of the novel, the monarchy has concluded that organised society has no future on Land, and they're probably right. In fact the evidence supports the conclusion that their species is facing extinction. Civilisation is tottering, and when it falls, there is no expectation that anything will succeed it. And the ptertha? They just keep coming, more deadly with every attack.

But, but, but ... Overland is just _there_, right above everyone's heads. The two planets share a breathable atmosphere. Perhaps, just perhaps, a migration to the neighbouring planet is possible? This is what the Kolcorronian leadership attempts - an interplanetary migration, via hot air balloon.

As a sequence of societally-catastrophic events take place, Toller Maraquine finds himself at the front of all of them, undertaking a personal journey that will take him from the Philosophical Order to the front ranks of the military, and eventually even to the surface of Overland itself.

OBSERVATIONS

This book was ... different ... from how I remembered it. I didn’t remember it being anything like as dark or as violent as it is.

First off, deary me, Land is a bleak place to live. Even before person-to-person transmission of pterthacosis becomes A Thing, the Kolcorronian Empire is a militaristic, authoritarian, dictatorial mess. The other societies on the planet don't seem to be any better; Kolcorron is bordered by tribal societies who practise virgin sacrifices. The opposite hemisphere of the planet is occuped by Chamteth, who appear to be an isolationist, xenophobic, theocratic empire. Kolcorron's response to the brakka shortage and the ptertha-driven economic collapse is to launch a genocidal war of conquest against Chamteth. This isn't to take Chamteth's land - rather, it's simply to steal their better-conserved brakka forests. As it is, Chamteth would probably have seen them off, but the Kolcorronian forces are followed into Chamtethian territory by the new, mutant ptertha. Chamtethians turn out to be even more vulnerable to pterthacosis than Kolcorronians, and their entire society is essentially destroyed within a matter of months. To his credit, Toller is increasingly-nauseated by the horrors that take place within the Chamteth campaign, though it's also notable that he doesn't attempt to repudiate it.

As for gender and representation, well, you won't really find any in this book. There are two female characters, Gesalla Maraquine and Fera Rivoo, but they're not treated well in the narrative. What happens to Gesalla is grim - Kolcorron's ruling family practise a particularly-twisted version of prima noctis, and the walking bipedal monster that is Prince Leddravohr doesn't miss his chance to inflict some personal misery on the Maraquine family. (Arguably Kolcorron's rot is from the top down - King Prad clearly knows what his depraved son is like, and has done nothing to rein him in.)

As for Fera, Toller actually marries her, then forgets she exists halfway through the book. Yes, seriously. The last mention of his wife is that she apparently moved out of the Maraquine household at some point; Toller is entirely unbothered by this. He doesn't even think about her during the evacuation. Admittedly rescuing her from the chaos in Ro-Atabri as the city disintegrates on its final day would have been a tall order, but he doesn't even try.

There is also a lot of bad sex in this book. Basically, any capital-P Problematic sex trope you can imagine? They're all here. The fail is fractal. It's bad even for the mid-80s, which was when this book was published. (It very much belonged to that period when SFF authors suddenly discovered they could write about sex, and the results were near-uniformly dire.)

As for gay Kolcorronians or ethnic minority Kolcorronians, honestly, being either seems likely to be a good way to get yourself an arbitary death sentence. If any exist, they're keeping their heads down. Like I mentioned above, Kolcorron is horrible; honestly, one unexamined question in this book is whether this civilisation is even worth saving. If the Reapers rolled in and Husk'd them all, I think you could argue a case here for it being an improvement.

To top it all off, it's suggested that all this has happened before; during the novel, Toller receives a peculiar stone, composed of a mineral found nowhere on Land. Later, he is surprised to find a deposity of the same material on Overland. Also, the Kolcorronian state religion postulates an external, cyclical exchange of souls between Land and Overland, which possibly is a folk memory of a previous migration between the planets. Oddly, the book and the trilogy it's part of never really do anything with this idea. The colonists on Overland never find any ruins, or any evidence of prior inhabitation by their own kind.

The positive qualities of the novel are that its viewpoint characters aren't 100% horrible - by the end of the book, Toller has turned into a somewhat-improved person than he was at the start. Lain Maraquine is that rarest thing in Kolcorron, a person who is actually genuinely-sympathetic and who actually does care about the welfare of other people. Lord Glo, while a senile drunkard, is also someone who is able to see the bigger picture and his early insights ultimately hold the key to ensuring that at least part of society survives the ptertha crisis. Gesalla turns out to be different from Toller's initial impression of her - honestly, Gesalla's a more interesting person then he is - and the monster Leddravohr at least ends up dead, so there is that. Also the new regime on Overland winds up in the hands of Prince Chakkell, who appears to be the most-sane of the pre-migration ruling quartet. (Chakkell is still fairly-unpleasant in many ways, but he's Lawful Evil than Leddravohr's Chaotic Evil and Prad's Neutral Evil. In fact, his dislike of Toller aside, you can argue a case for Chakkell being more Lawful Neutral, I think. That seems to be about as "benign" as the Kolcorronian monarchy is capable of being.)

The novel is also a page-turner. Awful as Kolcorron is, there is a sort of nightmarish clarity to its demise. It has that "can't look away from the trainwreck" quality. The book doesn't bore you - it may horrify you, it may appall you in places, but you're not bored. Also the mechanics of the inter-planetary migration are well-realised. The Kolcorronians' desperate struggle to flee their own world feels real. (I will admit some skepticism about whether a society undergoing a freefall demographic collapse worse than our Black Death is going to be able to run any large-scale projects, but perhaps sheer desperation counts for something here.)

The setting is also vivid and interesting. The planetary binary and the sky packed full of stars, galaxies and meteors - even during the daytime - was something that made a deep impression on me when I read it the first time. In our age with its increasingly-decarbonised electricity and the beginnings of an electric car transition, the brakka/halvell/pikon oil analogy does feel a bit heavy-handed, but it would have been timely when the book was written in the 1980s.

The last thing I'll note about the book is that it has some odd pacing. There are some rather-jerky time-skips - at one point, we jump two entire years between paragraph-breaks! There are also some sections that drag on longer than they perhaps should.

I don't know whether I can fully recommend this one - really, that depends on your tolerance for problematic content! - but it certainly does provide a unique reading experience.

#LHS reads #books 2021 #bob shaw #the ragged astronauts

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theparanormalperiodical · 3 years

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The REAL Story Behind The Omen (1976) And The 7 Most Terrifying Omens You Should Definitely Know About

You don't get much irony in horror.

You get buckets of fake blood, you get lashings of sexism with subtle notes of transphobia, and you have dozens of plot holes to get twisted up in. But The Omen (1976) in a very dark, very deathy way, was ironic.

Somehow a film about the rise of the Antichrist - AKA the end of the world - would be accompanied by wild animal attacks, sudden deaths, and even a decapitation. Yep, The Omen was, well, an omen. In fact, this cult classic horror flick is known as one of the most cursed films to date as a result of the story put to the screen and the events that took place behind it.

But the infamous tales surrounding this movie is not the only time an omen has preceded horrific events. In fact, we've been searching for signs of what is to come for millennia. Some of these signs still haunt our darkest nightmares.

You need to look out for them.

Today we will be determining just how accurate the portrayal of The Omen is to the prophecies of the Antichrist, the spooky events that took place behind the camera, and any other signs of death or misfortune you should be wary of.

*crow caws in the distance*

First, let's recap The Omen

The Bible is undoubtedly the best-selling book of all time. And, just like many other chart-topping hits, it’s been turned into a whole host of films. Each has suffered its own onslaught of criticism for its unique take on scripture.

The Omen is one of them.

But The Omen doesn’t follow Jesus’ life story, nor does it CGI various jungle animals onto Noah’s ark. It follows the Antichrist from birth to demise across 3 films (including a made-for-TV Canadian movie which we’ve all agreed to not talk about). It charts the rise of Damien as he develops his paranormal powers and loosely fulfils the prophecies set out for the Devil’s spawn.

Our story starts at his mysterious birth: after a woman has a stillborn child, her husband swaps it for a child whose mother died at birth. When Damien is just 5 years old strange things begin to occur. Animals act strangely around him, various aggressive dogs appear - oh, and Damien’s nanny rudely interrupts his birthday party by throwing herself out of a window with a noose around her neck.

Enter a new nanny who is less Mary Poppins and more Mary Most-definitely-a-satanist-who-wants-to-protect-Damien-and-overthrow-Christ. Things get worse (yes, it’s possible) when everyone around Damien begins to slowly work out that he may or may not be the Antichrist and in turn get killed in assorted horrific - but also mildly hysterical - ways.

It’s the father of Damien (the adoptive one, not the actual Devil) who leads the investigation into his origins. He traces back Damien’s origins back to his dead mother’s grave. Turns out she was a jackal.

Enter the Antichrist expert - he gives Damien’s father the low-down on dealing with demonic children, and explains that the naughty-step is simply not enough. He has to be killed on hallowed ground with a collection of knives I’m pretty sure I saw on Antiques Roadshow. He takes the Daggers of Megiddo and his infant son into a local church, forces him onto the altar and prepares to kill him.

The police shoot him before he can do this.

The following films chase up the rest of Damien’s short but eventful life and include: one sex scene, one King Herod-inspired ‘kill all babies born on this day cause one of ‘em is Jesus’, and even a last minute cameo by Christ himself.

Unlike most horror franchises, however, The Omen is not based on some paranormal investigation or a forgotten urban legend - the story inspiring it is kept very close to the hearts of many around the world. It’s this troubling premise which makes this film one of the most terrifying to date. Question is, just how accurate is The Omen to the actual end of days forecasted by Christians?

How accurate was The Omen to actual prophecies regarding the Antichrist?

Like most things mentioned in The Bible and other religious texts, things are typically vague or lost in translation. This means many concepts and stories have been rewritten and rethought in numerous different ways.

The Omen kinda had to connect the dots.

But there are a few defining features of Damien and his life story which are uncomfortably close to what might just be the apocalypse…

First, the Antichrist is supposed to be born as the opposite of Christ: he is not born of God and a virgin, but of Satan and a ‘whore’. Whilst The Omen appears to be slut-shaming a jackal, we do know Damien is the spawn of Satan. His animal mother (which is referenced later in the franchise when Damien is discovered to have Jackal bone marrow cells) is a reference to Jackals’ biblical presence as tricksters.

The Omen also sticks to the dominant line of thought on Damien’s career path. The Antichrist is mentioned 3 times in the New Testament and follows the end of the world, something we see in the dying moments of the final film: the Book of Revelation and other prophetic texts claim he will rule for 7 years before being defeated by Christ/Angel Gabriel’s army. He will be a tyrant, a trickster, rise to power, and (perhaps) claim he is a messiah.

The Omen is an abridged version of this. Damien is at one point a CEO and then an ambassador to the US before he sees an image of Christ when he gives out his last breath.

But here’s the thing.

Everyone has a different take on how the Antichrist will take his first steps to almighty power before being dethroned by the JC. And everyone has a different take on who it is.

Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, the Pope (I’m pretty sure all of the popes have been accused of being the Antichrist), Prince William… Type in a celebrity name - literally any celebrity name - and the word ‘antichrist’ into Google and there will be “proof” of Kate Hudson using satanic subliminal messaging in How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days. By all accounts The Omen is just another version of how the Antichrist could rise and fall.

The Omen does include a few other suitably-satanic references: the Daggers of Megiddo don’t actually exist according to lore, but are associated with the end of the world. Megiddo is the site of the final battle between the Antichrist and Jesus Christ as mentioned in the Book of Revelation. Its Greek name was even ‘Armageddon’.

We also see throughout the franchise a satanist plot to ensure the Antichrist grows up safely and is ready to do his dark bidding. Modern theorists claim the Antichrist will arrive hand-in-hand with a satanic plot to overturn the Christian faith.

The Omen effectively charts out how the world might end. But for many people working on the film, they were experiencing hell in their own way.

What really happened on the set of The Omen?

An omen is defined as a phenomenon that predicts and hints at the future, or signals a change. The birth and rise of the Antichrist probably fits the definition as it signals the Second Coming of Christ, Judgement Day, and numerous other events anticipated by Christians across the globe. It is an omen for the end of the world.

Hell, it’s the ultimate omen. It doesn’t get more omen-ny than that.

But in some weird omen-ception, The Omen was an omen for the people producing the film. *squints in confusion*

Basics, it is now known as one of the most cursed movie sets ever. And here’s why.

Gregory Peck, the father of Damien, allegedly canceled his seat on a flight that would crash and kill everyone on board. When he did finally get on a plane and flew to England his plane was struck by lightning. The film’s writer experienced the same thing on a separate flight days after Peck’s.

The producers and some actors also nearly attended a restaurant one evening when it was destroyed in an explosion. One of these same producers, Mace Neufeld, also happened to check out early from a hotel in London which was blown up by the IRA shortly after.

The special effects designer witnessed traumatic events mirroring the movie far too closely, too: his wife was decapitated in a car crash, a similar event to one we see in the film. Even an animal trainer used for a scene from which Baboons act wildly and crazed around Damien was killed after being mauled by a tiger.

Yeah.

It’s all very ommeny.

But what are the other omens you should be looking out for?

The 7 omens you should most definitely be watching out for

#1 - Crows

All films or TV shows that feature death or war also feature crows. Their fateful cawing has historically been an omen of misfortune or death and is used for foreshadowing as obvious as the colour black. A single crow is an omen of bad luck - a murder of crows (more than five) is an omen of death or illness for either you or someone you know.

In ancient times birds were common omens and it was the type of bird which signaled different positive and negative changes. Crows in particular were believed to be messengers between the mortal world and the afterlife. Witches were also believed to use crows to cast their death spells.

They have since gained a reputation for being cunning and intelligent creatures, much like the jackal mother of Damien in The Omen.

#2 - Owls

I told you - we are convinced birds bring death.

Much like crows, owls are very deathy. Walking under a tree and hear an owl hoot? You or a family member are gon’ die. One lands on your roof? Death is a-coming.

Owls are even historically believed to herald doom with one Roman Emperor - Antonius - dying after an owl was seen perched above his bedroom door. They are considered wise creatures according to ancient civilisations, as if they know something about the future we do not.

The Welsh, on the other hand, believed they bring fertility. If an owl hoot is heard by a pregnant woman she will have an easy labour.

#3 - Doppelgangers

According to German and Irish folklore, seeing an ‘exact replica’ of you born to different parents is a sign of your death. If your family members or your friends see one, beware of impending danger.

These ‘double-goers’ are considered evil twins in folklore. If you spoke to your doppelganger, they’d try and trick you and plan evil ideas in your mind.

Breton and Cornish folklore claim they are Ankou, servants of death himself who thus personify it.

#4 - Death Knocks Thrice

Let’s set the scene: you’ve just ordered a Nandos and you hear the knock at the door. But instead of a halloumi-topped beanie burger, you open the front door to no one.

Rather than a delicious meal you will soon experience death.

Irish, Scottish, and Native American communities follow this folklore and it is referenced in many different films including The Conjuring. The Perron family hear continuous knocking which comes in threes - the Warrens, however, claim it is a demonic entity or spirit mocking the holy trinity.

#5 - Phantom funerals

Funerals normally come after the omen of death, you know, when the actual ‘death’ part has occurred. But fake funerals led by ghosts are an omen of the death of a loved one. They will take the same place and same route of the actual funeral, however.

If you do see one, however, don’t look into the casket; otherwise, it’ll be your own.

(Dun dun duuuh)

It is believed they are sent by fairies who are infamous for causing mischief. A similar phenomenon, ‘the tolaeth before the coffin’, is when one hears the coffin making process or the funeral take place.

#6 - Solar eclipses

We now have the benefit of science and astrology to tell us that sometimes it gets really dark and really cold in the middle of the day. But way back when, the sun effectively disappearing for a few moments was rather more terrifying.

Ancient civilisations believed it was a warning from pissed off gods that they were going to exact some revenge and send some impending danger or death. Most cultures even believed a folkloric beast or native animal was eating the sun. In fact, that’s why many communities would bang pots or pans together during eclipses to scare away the demon doing it.

They are still considered a mysterious sign something bad is about to go down.

#7 - Black butterflies

We end on an omen I’m probably going to incorporate into my aesthetic for 2021. A black butterfly is considered to be a symbol of misfortune and death in some cultures and a positive sign for others. It could also equate to a less lethal ‘death’ - that is the death of a relationship or a project.

It can thus be considered an omen of renewal or rebirth. And lord knows we all need that for next year.

Have you ever seen an omen?

Let me know in a comment below.

If you liked this post make sure you like, reblog, and then hit follow. I post a new article on the paranormal every Saturday and a new ghost story everyday!

*flies away with the black butterflies*

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mxvladdy · 4 years

Text

A Break

Part Trios. More fluff more plot! part 4 will be out eventually, I’ll still bouncing some ideas around with it as I write.

Chapters: 1-2-3-4

Steam wafted up at him, reddening his already pink tinged cheeks. It scalds the very tip of his strong nose. The contrast between his thermos and the frigid tundra air around him was violent, but worth it for the subtle aromas wafting up at him.

Smiling indulgently into his cup he took a small sip savoring the light fruitiness of the blend. It was an interesting mix of flavors, like nothing he would have found at home. Yet very reminiscent of it. The dried pear was crisp and sweet, a gentle tribute to fall as winter beat around him. The blending of it with the smokey molasses taste of the hojicha had him groaning in delight. His sweet tooth was sated by the slight undertones of chestnut and caramel. It hit the back of his throat just right warming him. You had described the tea perfectly. Sweet, strong, and complex.

Just like you. Hanzo flushes pink under his scarf recalling that absolutely radiant smile you had when presenting him with the small tin. A parting gift before his flight. Your newest house blend you said brightly tucking into his pack. It was humbling to think that he was important enough in your life to inspire such a unique gift. Let alone the idea of it gracing your shop’s walls.

Tucking himself deeper into the small alcove Hanzo took in the snowy plains. Finding his center he breathed deeply enjoying the sting of the cold air filling his lungs as the sun rose in front of him. The howling of the wind around him creates a drone as it hits the half wall protecting him. At first, he had marked this nook as a tactical sniper nest, it’s unencumbered view advantages if an attack came. After a few visits, he came up just for the peace it held. The resplendent view was always enough to soothe his frayed nerves after long bouts with his teammates.

Pink and orange lights from the rising sun bounce innocently off the crystalline surfaces of ice clinging to every surface. The rays twinkling on the snow in an almost celestial way. Further on the lights of the nearby fishing village shimmer to the north. A few boats were already setting out for the day. It was nice to be back.

The last time he had been to Russia had been for the family 'business'. A successful venture into expanding their arms trading routes with his late father. While not a leisurely visit by any means, the few times he had been allowed outside the hotel had been wonderful. Springtime in Moscow as he recalled was pleasant. The nip of the last vestiges of winter refreshing. The late season snow and frigid rains at night help to wipe the grime of the past year away, leaving the city smelling clean and virginal. He wished he could have stayed long enough to watch the city come alive.

Would you like it here in a small village? Or in a larger city? Hell, would you even like Russia at all? Hanzo takes another sip watching the last dregs swirl at the bottom contemplatively. Did you like the cold? Once you had commented that you had never seen fresh snowfall. None of any substantial quantity at least. It would be a nice thing to experience with you. Risking frostbite, he shucked his gloves digging out his com. His last internet search looking up at him. He closed it quickly, heartbeat quickening with nerves. Perhaps he’d bring that up on a later date.

Instead, he got comfy opening up a new tab perusing “This year’s hottest vacation destinations”. They were all pretty sure-but lacking something. Neither of you are big on crowds, so perhaps nothing too close to tourist epicenters… No- he needed something quiet and out of the way. He could afford to spoil you easily. Hanzo laughs to himself, already hearing your protests at the amount of money he was thinking of spending. But you deserved it and so much more for his negligence. Yes, he decided then clearing his screen his searches for more private venues. One place jumping out to him.

It was unfortunate that his dreams of taking you home would never come to fruition. Hanamura was enchanting in the wintertime. During the better years at the castle, he and Genji would often take to the rooftops. Building snowmen and inappropriate mounds of snow where the staff could not reach. Then in the evenings would snuggle close under the kotatsu, eventually drifting off after a heavy snack. Hanzo’s smile turns brittle, a wistful sigh escaping him. Taking you anywhere near Japan would be risky. Even with the elders long since buried, and the Shimada Dynasty crippled. If he were to be recognized...

No, anything that put you at risk was unacceptable. Looking back down at his com he nixed anything in the eastern hemisphere. Perhaps Scotland? He didn’t think he had a bounty there; not yet anyway.

[Apologies Agent]

Hanzo starts at the sudden voice in his ear quickly clicking off his com. As if she couldn’t see his search history whenever she pleases. “Athena,” He pressed his finger to his ear to respond. “How can I assist you?”

[Sorry for interrupting your downtime. Your brother wished for me to inform you that he is waiting for you in the commons]

Hanzo gazed blankly out into the white abyss. “What?”

[Brother-commons-now] She repeats unable to hide the mirth in her tone.

“He’s in Nepal-” He argues dumbly pressing his finger harder against his ear.

[He wished it to be a surprise. So surprise.] She disconnects then, snarky voice blowing away with the wind.

Biting back a smile he rose. It wasn’t unlike his brother to drop by unannounced. It has been his defining personality trait since birth. Heh, little shit. Packing up quickly, Hanzo takes one last look out over the last moments of peace he’ll have for the rest of the day. With a calming breath he steps off the ledge landing gracefully to the floor below with a soft womph. His mechanical legs absorb the impact with ease. Walking down the empty corridors his footsteps echoing dully against the metal walls. His teammates having already separated to go about their duties after breakfast. The thought of food making his stomach growl.

Hmmm... Genji and his foolishness could wait a little longer.

Changing directions he took a sharp turn nearly running into a crouching figure in the path. “Ah! Ms. Zhou, are you alright?” He hurries over to the young scientist.

“Morning Hanzo! Ha, yes I’m fine.” She flushes righting her askew glasses. “Wasn’t paying attention to my surroundings- uneven tiling.” Pointing at the raised title that had tripped her. Wordlessly, Hanzo knelled helping to collect the scattered papers and tablets. As she rights herself.

“Where are you headed?” He asked offering to help her carry her belongings.

“Kitchens; need some caffeine to function.” She chuckles leading the way. “Thank you by the way for the Oolong! I’m almost out, didn’t even know how much I was drinking till I was scraping the bottom of the tin. So I guess it's back to coffee for now.”

Hanzo beams inwardly. The cold hiding his flush of pride. “I’m glad you enjoy it. I'll have to order more soon.” He makes a mental note to order more for himself too.

Mei arrives first at the doors to the kitchen and turns. “Would you like to join me? It’s been ages since our last get together.” Hanzo winces, chastising himself for his negligence. It had been quite a long time since they last spoke. She had been one of the first to warm up to him. Shortly after his arrival at headquarters, she had helped him move his extensive collection of literature to his room. From there they began recommending books and articles on their particular interests to each other. Soon their little get togethers became a regular thing and earned them the title of “Overwatch Bookclub” courtesy of Hana. Even though it was only a “club” of two, neither of them minded.

He was about to agree to a bit of good company over breakfast when his com chimed. A very recognizable ringtone at that. Damn- he had almost forgotten. “Perhaps another time? Genji has stopped by and is as impatient as ever.” Hanzo bowed low in apology.

Mei waved his apology off with a smile. “No, no worries!” She brightens clapping her hands together. “Do tell him I say hello!” With a quick nod and another bow Hanzo turns back leaving the young woman to bustle about the kitchens on her own. He walks back up the halls slowly to the large commons. Warmth hits him hard wrapping himself in its comfortable embrace when he enters. The crackling of a large fire flickers bright yellow and red casting a cheery glow over the lone occupant. His brother sat beneath the sole window of the room. The large oval pane of plexiglass looking out over the glacial sea and cliffside. Genji faced towards it, long legs propped up on the small sill texting animatedly. Hanzo’s com lighting up once more obnoxiously.

“Aniki!” Genji chips turning his head to throw his scowling brother a lopsided grin. Hanzo relaxes nerves easing at seeing his little brother smile, his faceplate off and attached to his side. “Surprised!?”

“I would have been more surprised if you had called ahead.” He chuckles placing his jacket and scarf neatly over the back of the chair, sitting across from his brother.

Genji gasps, throwing a hand to his forehead. “You wound me! After all the trouble I went through to bring gifts…”

That piques his interest. His dragons rumbling in excitement. “Oh? And here I thought Nepal was nothing but bitter winds and bells.” Hanzo shot back, eyeing the satchel slung over Genji’s chair expectantly.

“Ha.Ha.” Genji replies sardonically thrusting a large heavy box in his brother’s direction. The parcel was clumsily wrapped, the paper wrinkled from its long journey. Even so, Hanzo smiles looking over at his brother for some kind of ruse.

“What is the occasion?” He slips easily into their native tongue. He peels at the tape slowly, more so to annoy his brother than to preserve the paper. The box underneath was old and worn, having been stored somewhere to age unloved. Faded watermarks and nicks littered the top cover. Some were old. Older than the others. His heart stops, throat clenching tight in realization. “Genji-” He knew this box. He knew some of the nicks in the grain. If he squints he could see the stain he made on the top right corner. Almost hearing the clatter of his tea set against the wood from all those years ago. His worn fingers trace over the grid top. The yew was just as strong and supple as when he was given it. The dragons painstakingly crafted into the sides of the box grinning up at him.

It was a shogi board. It was his shogi board. His first and last gift from his mother. It was bittersweet to recall all the days he spent playing against her in her hospital bed. Connecting over it on the lonely days when Father was out and Genji was still too young to visit. “How?” He whispers voice cracking. He thought he had lost this forever, burned no doubt with the rest of his things when he fled. It had hurt to leave it, more so than any other valuable he had.

Genji watched his brother rediscover the old game. Watching Hanzo's smile turn tender as he gets lost in a memory. Genji turns back to the window rubbing his neck unsure of what to do with this rare display of emotion. He hadn’t expected this reaction. He remembers playing it with him once or twice when he was younger. The few times he did was to humor Hanzo. He never really understood his brother's hyper fixation on it though. Video games were much more entertaining.

“Well~” He starts sunning himself. “After a relaxing time contemplating my navel with my Master. I figured I could use a bit of exercise.” He glances over at his brother flipping him a roguish smirk. Hanzo scoffs rolling his eyes trying- and failing to hide the tears misting at the corners of his eyes. Genji turns back quickly to the window, giving him a little privacy to compose himself. “Just thought I would pop by, say hello and poke at what remains of the ol’ hornet's nest.”

Hanzo chuckles wetly too engrossed in his memories to really chastise his siblings' reckless behavior. He moves on autopilot finding the hidden compartment of the board to pull out the silk bag within. It had held out better than the board thankfully. Opening it he dumps out the hand carved Koma. The alabaster and mother of pearl pieces were blessedly unblemished. He thought he had lost this forever.

“Play a round?” He interrupts his brother’s prattling. “Perhaps all these years apart have made you a better player.” He jokes, wiping quickly at his eyes and clearing his throat.

Genji laughs rising to the challenge. “Bet I could wipe the floor with you.” He drops his feet from the sill and rotates to sit properly at the table jabbing a finger in Hanzo’s face.

His brother scoffs, already setting up the board. “Please, no amount of meditation can train you to sit and focus long enough.”

“Oh, it’s so on…”

Hanzo stretches in his chair smugly hours later. The muttered curses of his brother sweet in his ears.

“You cheat.” Genji pouts helping to clean up the board before getting his feet to flex his legs.

“Hmph!” Hanzo chuckles leaning further over the back of his chair till the world turned upside down. “I do not need such tricks to best you.” He watches his brother putter around the small kitchenette.

Genji returns mocking his brother in a high pitched voice. He flicks at Hanzo’s crooked nose before he could right himself in his seat. “Ya-ya-ya. Next time will be different.” Genji drops back in his chair depositing a few plates, cups, and a tea kettle.

“Doubt it,” Hanzo rubs at his stinging nose.” I am never second best.”

“Up yours,” Genji says sticking his tongue out. “Keep teasing me and I’ll eat all the food I brought myself.”

Hanzo quiets down still grinning. “Oh? Did you go to Mia’s?”

“Ha! If I did I would have fed the deers your half.” Genji ducks out of the way of Hanzo’s kick to the shin. “No, after my little escapade I figured it was best to find a new vacation spot.” He smirks, turning his attention back to his rucksack searching for something. “Decided to take a little ‘hop across the pond’ to the states.”

Hanzo raises a brow. Oddly large jump. Well-out of the two he was the more spontaneous one. Guess some things never change. “I see-” He waits, allowing the theatrics for once. Watching his brother’s movements turn feline, mischief radiating off of him. Uh oh.

“Yeah. Thought I’d mix it up from the big cities. Lay low somewhere a bit smaller.” He peers at Hanzo, eyes alight. “Went to this fabulous little coastal town. Touristy, but quaint.” An odd tingle starts up Hanzo’s spine, his dragons going worryingly silent. “Remember the taffy we used to get from our nanny? The red and pink wrapped ones we would sneak after dinner? Thought I’d try the local ‘saltwater’ taffy.” Genji chortles pulling out the last of his surprises. “Stuff almost undid all of Angie’s hard work.” The tingle picked up to a static like buzzing pinching at his shoulders and jaw. He knit his brows staying silent. He couldn’t- “Luckily, I found this amazing little tea shop down the corner. Figured a hot drink would soften the cement gluing my mouth shut.”

Hanzo’s quib is lost on his tongue. His eyes locking onto the sapphire and gold tin. He couldn’t. Genji’s asinine tale is drowned out by the static building in his ears. The waves of sound mixing with the dizzying panic giving him tunnel vision.

The aroma hit his gut differently than it did this morning.

“Brother? You ok?” Hanzo pulled himself out of his deluge of thoughts. Gaze flicking up to his brother’s. He eyes him worryingly. His arm outstretched holding a small plate out for him. One of your signature macarons resting on it. The little pink flower on top still fresh, not having wilted from the long journey.

“You know.”

“Yes.” Genji nods simply placing the plate down in front of him. The brothers say nothing as Genji prepares and serves the tea. “She seems lovely.”

“How?” The archer hisses baring his teeth in frustration, white knuckling the table. He had been so careful. If Genji knew then who else could?

Genji sat quietly breathing deeply through his nose thinking over the words forming in his mind. He has to choose what he says carefully, watching his brother descending mentally into a panic. Locking himself down. This isn’t what he wanted to happen. Damn, should have listened to Zenyatta. He is a private man rebuilding his life, my student. Give him time and space to grow. Ugh. It was too late to go back now anyway…

“Mei-Don’t worry! She doesn’t know anything!” Genji catches himself quickly as the look of panic grows on his brother’s face. “She shared drinks with me a while back. Said you gave it to her. I know your taste in Oolong and that was not it.” He tries for levity. “You’re a grumpy old man of habit; who I know only imports from Japan. Seeing an American name had me curious.” He pauses taking a sip from his cup. It was really good tea, it matched his brother’s sweet tooth perfectly. On his little trip to the shop, Zen had gifted him a zesty lemon white tea. The smell itself was decadent and the flavor refreshingly tangy. “One web search later and a few wrong turns I found the place. You definitely have a type Aniki! Thought she was gonna put my head through the glass display case for flirting with her.”

Hanzo chokes on air. “Flirt!?” His glare turning thunderous. The urge to throttle the cyborg rising.

“I had to know!” Genji laughs, arms raised in submission. “Between the tea name, and her staunch ‘I have a boyfriend’ I got my answer.”

“No.” Hanzo corrects him jabbing a finger at his stupid polished chrome chest. “You had to stick your nose where it doesn’t belong.” He almost felt bad the deflating look crossing his brother’s face. Almost. “Genji-” He sighs running a hand through his windswept hair. “I know you meant well but I can’t mess this up. I can’t.” He pleads.

Genji frowns leaning forward in his chair. “I just wanted to see what made you so happy…” He hadn’t seen his brother this relaxed-ever. The past months had brought such a change in him. At first, Genji thought that he had finally gotten comfortable with the team. His ever present scowl had relaxed into a more contemplative frown. Still had a ways to go, but at least he's more approachable now. Team dinners and game nights had gotten a new member too. But then he started disappearing for days on end. Not on any missions, not that Genji knew of. His brother's roster was always clear when he disappeared. He assumed that it was old ‘family’ business or loose ends somewhere. But every time Hanzo came back he seemed...lighter. Happy. It was nice to see him treat himself as a person instead of a tool. “I was so excited to see that something, someone brought you some happiness. I apologize for imposing on something so private.”

Hanzo couldn’t bear to keep eye contact. “I don’t deserve it.”

Genji huffs indignantly shaking his head. “Nonsense,” Reaching over and squeezing Hanzo’s strong hand. “Redemption comes in many forms, and living a full life is part of it. You deserve a full life Hanzo, truly.”

A war of emotions crosses Hanzo’s face. They have argued about his grief, guilt so many times before. “I-” Hanzo blinks owlishly, meeting his brother’s stare. His younger sibling’s face a mask of defiant obstinates. Daring him to argue his worth. “Thank you.” He concedes covering Genji’s hand with his free one and squeezes it back. He didn’t deserve this, but he’ll take it for now.

“Excellent!” Genji’s grin returns to full blast moving back to the box of sweets. “I’ll keep it between us- well- and Zen. But you have to tell me allll about her.” He waves his serving knife threateningly.

Hanzo chuckles, pulling the cookie and suspiciously tiny slice of cake towards himself. It looks like he was here for the long haul.

At least there were snacks.

#overwatch #overwatch fanfic #hanzo shimada x reader #hanzo shimada #hanzo x reader

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tlbodine · 4 years

Text

Why Isn’t “Mass Shooter” a Modern Horror Monster?

Horror reflects the anxieties of the culture that produces it. In the 1950s, we got monster movies about radiation-mutated creatures and invaders from beyond the stars, mirroring our Cold War Science fears.

In the 1970s, as “Women’s Liberation” and birth control went mainstream, we see an influx of horrors settled on childbirth and children and family dysfunction.

And as the 70s bled into the 80s, while real-world serial killers were leaving behind trails of victims, the masked psycho was dominating the field with countless slashers.

But now -- throughout the 2010s -- mass shootings loom large our our collective American consciousness. Hardly a week goes by without hearing of one somewhere, and they inspire fear and terror. Yet we haven’t seen them show up to dominate horror media in the way serial killers do -- what’s up with that?

Horror-media discussion about gun violence under the cut!

Before we get started, a caveat: There is media about school shootings. It’s just not usually horror. Most, as you can see from IMDB, is family drama: https://www.imdb.com/list/ls070532039/

And none of them are really particularly mainstream, not in the way we associate with slasher films.

So what’s the difference? Why is a killer with an axe more compelling as a film monster than a killer with a gun?

Some hypotheses:

Primacy: Because mass shootings are frequently in the news/public discussion, it’s always “too soon” - the real-life horror is too horrifying for entertainment. Sounds good on paper, but why isn’t that true for slashers? Those movies were popular when serial killers were at their most active.

Politics: Perhaps political motives are influencing the market. Since gun control is a contentious topic, maybe some powers are motivated toward censorship. But wouldn’t that also censor the family drama type movies? Why would it focus on horror especially?

Logistics: It’s just really hard to make a good horror movie about a mass shooting. Guns kill people pretty quickly and indiscriminately, so you lose the mounting suspense and intimacy of a killer with a knife and other similar horror/slasher conventions.

This last point, I think, bears some further consideration. The more I think on it, the more it seems that the things that make gun violence especially horrifying in real life are also things that make it very hard to put in a horror story:

Mass shootings happen, obviously, in mass. Most horror formulas require characters to be isolated and picked off one by one.

Guns kill people in ways that are impersonal and swift. If you’re killing a stadium of people with an automatic weapon, it’ll take just a few minutes. You can’t stretch that out into a long, lingering torture sequence or whatever.

Gun violence is indiscriminate. Wherever a crowd gathers, a shooter can start killing people. There’s no space for, say, the “horror rules” re: jock, slut, virgin, etc. because morality doesn’t play into it.

A killer methodically making his way through a sorority house, killing its members one by one lends itself more naturally to suspenseful storytelling than a gunman opening fire on a crowd. A killer leaving clues and taunting detectives lends its own narrative structure.

In that regard, it’s pretty obvious: We cannot make a slasher-style film or a torture-porn film about a gunman. It just won’t work.

But perhaps we’re looking at it all wrong. What if we viewed the mass shooter not as a serial killer, but as a force of nature? The disaster movie genre has ample cross-over with horror, and the general formula would work well for a mass shooter:

Introduction to a wide cast of characters as they maneuver into a vulnerable position

The disaster hits, and we move between individuals affected by the calamity, watching their initial reactions

In the ensuing chaos, characters attempt to escape further danger

The danger passed (for now?) some characters manage to survive, now irrevocably changed

Whether the disaster in question is an earthquake, a sharknado, or a school shooting, that formula should work. The key to success lies in the pacing and the large cast, allowing you to stretch out a relatively brief event into a detailed and tense narrative.

So why haven’t we seen that? Outside of, like, one made-for-TV movie I recall watching in the 90s, this presumably straightforward premise hasn’t gained much traction.

The Making of Monsters: Signs and Signifiers

Perhaps the real reason we haven’t seen a lot of horror stories about mass shootings is because there is already so much mythology and symbolism tied to these sorts of narratives, and that symbolism is at odds with the creation of movie monsters.

Guns carry a tremendous amount of cultural significance and baggage, at least in the United States. It’s why they’re so politically contentious. And when something is already heavily laden with symbolic meaning, it’s hard to turn that symbolism into something else in a way that will stick.

Point #1: Guns are a great equalizer. Unlike a knife or sword, skill doesn’t matter all that much when it comes to killing somebody with a gun. You don’t have to be strong or fast or have a ton of training. You just have to point it and pull the trigger -- if you do that enough times, and at a big enough target, you’ll probably hit something. This means that anyone can kill someone with a gun: a skinny nerd, a young child, a petite woman. Guns are the thing that give you, the underdog, a way to compete against them, the big strong enemy.

This leads to Point #2: Good Guys With Guns(tm). As absolutely anyone who has been on the internet for five minutes after Any Sort Of Bad Event will tell you, Bad Things can be stopped by Good Guys With Guns(tm). And while you can debate the merits of armed civilians protecting a group from harm against an active shooter, it’s impossible to deny that, historically, good guys have been armed. Police, military, armed militias, frontiersmen, etc. carry weapons. Which means that “guy with a gun” does not immediately translate, visually or thematically, as “threat” in the same way as wielding a butcher knife in a non-culinary context. A guy with a gun could, at a glance, be a good guy. A guy with a big knife is obviously a villain. Similarly, the Good Guys With Guns(tm) bleeds over into the horror genre. What would the zombie apocalypse be without headshots? How many horror franchises could have been cut short if someone had just shot the killer?

Finally, Point #3: Guns in media have special powers. Gun mythology in film and television is well-developed, with its own set of tropes and expectations. In movies, pointing a gun at someone will automatically make that person comply with whatever you ask them to do -- we even have vernacular about this, “nobody put a gun to your head” -- as if the gun were somehow more powerful than a simple threat and could in fact control behavior. Often, people who are shot in television politely fall over and die quietly; it’s a civilized end, without all of the screaming and thrashing (never mind where they’re shot or what that would would do in real life). And there are so many types of gun. We have a whole video game genre dedicated to it -- collecting guns, learning their various abilities, applying them situationally to achieve various goals. With so many established tropes, writing anything with new tropes and rules runs the risk of generating confusion, disbelief and even hostility in an audience.

So, with all of that in mind, it starts to become clear:

Writing a horror story about gun violence is difficult because guns carry so much mythic significance, and it’s impossible to write about them metaphorically while keeping it clear what that metaphor is.

If I write a story about an atomic-powered lizard who destroys a Japanese town with radiation, it’s easy enough to see that it’s a metaphor for nuclear warfare. But there is no similarly straightforward metaphor for gun violence readily apparent.

But it’s tougher even than that -- because guns themselves aren’t the only thing to have been mythologized.

The Myth of the Lone Gunman

Remember: Guns are the great equalizer.

This knowledge sits in the foundation of storytelling, not just in the fiction we make up but in the way we build narratives around mass shootings in the real world. There are certain tacit assumptions we make about gunmen that may or may not be accurate.

We have a certain narrative framework in place to explain school shootings, for example: The awkward, isolated young man who is bullied until he finally snaps and goes on a killing rampage.

Never mind that this narrative is not wholly supported by facts. It may be true in some cases, but certainly not all. And yet, go back up to that list of mass shooter movies on IMDB and look again at what the majority of them have in common.

This is problematic because, from a mythic perspective, people who are bullied and then stand up to their oppressors are heroes.

In Carrie, when Carrie White destroys the school after being humiliated on prom night, we’re on her side. It feels good to watch her kill all those people who were awful to her. It feels just and righteous and imminently satisfying.

When Spartacus leads a slave revolt, we cheer. When Daenerys Targaryen kills all the masters and uses their heads as mile-markers, we feel triumphant. When Arthur Fleck shoots the smug talk-show host on live television, we think, Well, he had it coming.

Oh, sure. We pay lip service to being horrified. And these dark heroes might die at the end, receiving some karmic retribution for the price of their revenge. But can you say, truthfully, that you have ever once watched a story about an underdog killing his bullies and felt sorriest for the bullies?

So: This is the problem with our cultural narrative about the school shooter. Purposely or not, it puts the shooter in the role of hero.

And not only is that irresponsible, it’s just downright inaccurate.

When Stephen Paddock opened fire on a concert and killed 58 people, he was not firing back at his oppressors.

When Omar Mateen shot up a night club in Florida, he wasn’t getting revenge against his bullies.

When Adam Lanza slaughtered 26 people at an elementary school -- 20 of them young children -- he obviously was not giving his victims what they deserved.

In the real world, mass shooters might be motivated by political ideology and a desire to promote fear -- ie, terrorism. They might be unhappy with some aspect of their lives and decide to “punch down” at a vulnerable group in the worst possible way. They might be looking to become the heroes of certain media narratives, to secure some kind of fame or notoriety. They might want to kill themselves in a way that hurts a lot of other people at the same time. There are lots of reasons why people might commit mass murder.

But the important thing is that the victims are, overwhelmingly, not bullies and oppressors. They are people. Just innocent people in the wrong place at the wrong time. Because mass shootings aren’t really about personal vendettas; they’re about mowing down a bunch of strangers in a few minutes at an impersonal long range.

So here’s my final thought on the topic: We SHOULD tell horror stories about mass shootings.

It’s a topic that’s timely, and it’s a scenario that’s frightening. There’s no reason not to tell these stories. But to make it work -- on a logistic and socially responsible basis -- we need to change our treatment.

Going back to the “disaster movie” idea: It’s time to treat mass shooters in fiction as forces of nature, as oblivious and blindly destructive as a hurricane. It’s time to center the focus on the victims. Never mind the killer and what led him to this moment. Let’s take a minute to think about the people caught in that situation -- the people who fear for their lives, who try to help one another, who fight or flee or hide once the first shot is fired. Let’s write about the moments of humanity shared by two strangers crouched behind something while shots fire all around them. Let’s write about the horror of having your perfectly normal, mundane day suddenly and irrevocably shattered by a stranger with a gun.

There is horror there, real horror, that can be mined and cultivated and turned to art. And it seems to me that embracing that, and shifting the cultural narrative away from valorizing the lone gunman, would be good for art and society.

Are you ready to tell that story?

I am.

#horror #horror media #horror movies #how to write horror #horror stories #gun violence #mass shootings #trigger warnings #long post #Deep dive #horror analysis

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bloodofrobertsmith · 4 years

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The Virgin Mary

I was first inspired to write this biography by an issue of LIFE magazine that was completely about Mary. As I was reading I realized that despite being raised in a Christian household, as well as being surrounded by Serbian Orthodox and Catholic families for most of my young life-- the only thing I truly knew of Mary was that she was the virgin mother of Jesus. It’s important for me to note that although my family was full of devout Christians, I had spent all of my life rejecting it as a non-believer. I still stick to this thought process today.

I had learned later in my first semester of college of the symbolism and religious rites that surround her, but I still did not know anything of the Historical life around her. Was she real? What kind of life did she live? And who really was she? I wanted to know the truth vs myth of who Mary was.

“The young Jewish girl goes to the stone synagogue in Nazareth. She offers devotions in the small women’s section adjacent to the main prayer hall. In chorus with the other congregants, the girl recites Psalms and absorbs their lessons: ‘Abandon yourself to God.’

One extraordinary day she is visited by an angel who asks if she’ll play a part in the birth of God’s son. She answers yes. Perhaps a little more than 2,000 years ago, she makes her way with her husband Joseph, a carpenter, to a village called Bethlehem. Perhaps Bethlehem; some scholars posit Nazareth as more likely. In a stable, for the inn was filled, Mary and Joseph celebrate the birth of a son. They lay the infant in a feeding stall and name him Yeshua -- in Greek: Jesus. she raises Jesus to be a strong, brave young man. A leader of other men. That is the story of Miriam of Nazareth. And that is all we really know,”

But how did we get to this story? If as stated by Jarslov Peikan, we could copy on an eight by eleven sheet everything there is about Mary in the New Testament. Then why is Mary so popular through the ages? I think Mary is the perfect and most original examples of what happens when an idea evolves and grows from its original source.

Miriam of Nazareth: Miriam was born in a small village in Galilee. Known as Mary to the masses, her real name would have been Miriam or Maryamme-- one of the most common names of the day. As a young Jewish woman living in Palestine, she was a second class citizen. Not knowing how to read or write, she worked alongside her mother since she could walk. Basically, she was a poor woman and modern depictions of her are usually able to recognize that, But, the catholic church had a huge role in presenting us with images of a fair-skinned woman robed in blue silk. When she was a Mediterranean woman of low class who would have most definitely worn a simple wool or linen tunics and a shawl over her head.

The political environment of Mary’s life was a complicated one with constant Jewish oppression in the form of Roman legions. The end of the dictatorship of Herod the Great had made way for the Romans to storm into Galilee and squash Jewish revolts. Which I think is a perfect breeding ground for Jewish prophecy of a savior to form in. Josephus, a Jewish writer records that many cities were burned and people murdered by the Romans

Mary and Joseph: So, where does Joseph come into the life of Mary? The popular image of Mary we have come to know is that of a young woman in her early twenties birthing the savior. But, if we think realistically of the time period, she was probably only 12 or 13 years of age when betrothed to Joseph. Who would have been much older than she. However, Mary became pregnant before her marriage to Joseph. Let’s see how the Bible addresses this:

(NCV) Luke 1:26-38:

“God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, to a virgin. She was engaged to marry a man named Joseph from the family of David. Her name was Mary. the angel came to her and said, ‘Greetings The Lord has blessed you and is with you.’ But Mary was very startled by what the angel said and wondered what this greeting might mean. The angel said to her ‘Don’t be afraid Mary; God has shown you his grace. Listen! You will become pregnant and give birth to a son, and you name him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of King David, his ancestor. He will rule over the people of Jacob forever, and his kingdom will never end.’ Mary said to the angel, ‘how will this happen since I am a virgin?’ The angel said to Mary, ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will cover you. For this reason the baby will be Holy and will be the Son of God.’ Mary said, ‘ I am the servant of the Lord. Let this happen to me as you say.’ And the angel went away.”

For the millions of Christians, Catholics, and sub-sets of these practices, the Immaculate Conception is proven fact based on the actual fact the Bible records it as such. The apparently divine conceptions of Jesus Christ, is a miracle -- a simple and unquestionable matter of Faith. But the gospels tell us very little about Mary and the pregnancy itself. Nor does it cover the societal reaction of Mary exposing to her village, let alone her husband. When Joseph had found put, he would have most definitely thought of her as unfaithful. We do know that when Joseph found out, he had the idea to divorce her quietly, as not to expose her to shame and death from the village elders. But the Bible does state that an angel appeared to Joseph and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, Because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, and you are to name his Jesus, because he will save people from their sins.

Since most scholars today consider most of the Bible to be legend and mythology, it could be theorized that Mary, a young girl of no younger than 12 but no older than 16 had been raped by a stranger or Joseph himself. I believe it could be Joseph because I don’t know why he would have motivation to cover up another man’s rape child as the birth of the savior. I theorize essentially, that Mary and Joseph had premarital sex and Mary was impregnated. I will not determine that Joseph actually raped her as there was no such thing as statutory rape back then and they were already betrothed. I know that does not exclude it. But, given the context of the time, That is my estimate. No one will ever know what actually happened probably besides Mary herself.

But was the immaculate conception truly just a couples cover up? Maybe. We probably won't ever really know. I cannot prove or deny what is fundamentally the foundation of 2 major religions and its sub-branches. But, I as someone who believes in nothing, have a hard time thinking that this was simply a Hebrew God formulating the redemption of Man. However, the New Testament, and I suppose history; say that Joseph was a kind man, and did not give away Mary to the Elders or have her stoned for “adultery.” As far as how and exactly when the conception happened, that will continue to remain between Mary and Joseph... Or maybe Mary and herself. Even then, practically impossibly, it could be true that Mary gave birth to the Jewish Messiah.

Mary the Idea: It’s important to address the immaculate conception and life of Mary as the ultimate catalyst for what she would become. So how did Mary become the exalted Saint and Mother of All ideal to the populace?

When taking a look at Mary’s fame, it is not terribly difficult to see her evolution as the Virgin Mother of the Messiah to the Virgin Mother of all the Christian World. Though it is important to know that she is more popularly worshiped by catholic sects, Christianity also celebrated her above any other biblical figure, Save God/Jesus himself.

“Not everyone needs a brother or sister or savior, or accepts that a savior has arrived historically, or will do so one day. But everyone once had a mother.” Basically, even with all the majesty of the universe going on and changing around you, we all need a mother. Even though she is not the only saint to patron mothers, children, motherhood, and orphans-- she is regarded as the Mother of Mothers and Jesus/God is the King of Kings, Having a mother (with special circumstances aside) is the one most universal experiences of life. We all have one and we all want to love them and be loved in return. And Mary is clearly the finest and most ideal example of a mother in all of history. She is the mother of Jesus, How could she herself not be equally perfect?

But as we know, Mary as a mother is not really explored in the Bible. Basically through the centuries, as Christianity spread through European missionaries and expanded as an idea/religion, Mary expanded as well. If Christianity were not so against “false idols” I think she would be a Christian god in her own right. She was also a huge inspiration to poor people as an impoverished second class citizen becoming the “Queen of Heaven.”

Millions of people today and throughout history have turned to Mary for help, fortune, and love. She is the most named after woman in history and the most prayed to saint in all of Catholicism. Mary was a girl whose choices and circumstances made her into the most famous woman ever. Not all to her own credit as I hardly assume she could have predicted this, The spread of Christianity through colonialism was probably the biggest amplification of her life and story. Allowing her to become Mary, Mother of All.

#mary #the virgin mary #catholiscism #history #christianity #religion #jesus christ #the bible #catholic #christian #immaculate conception

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dragonageloree · 5 years

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Sexuality and marriage

Within Thedas, there are several different views with regard to sexuality and marriage. Common to all groups is that marriage is not primarily regarded as a romantic affair, but a duty to one's family.

Cammen and Gheyna

Viewpoints

The Chantry

According to the Chant of Light, Andraste had a spiritual marriage with the Maker. All Andrastian priests are therefore symbolically wedded to the Maker and sworn to celibacy. In the eyes of the Chantry, marriage is both a celebration of tradition and a practical decision. Through a favorable marriage, one can make valuable connections, improve one's social standing, and secure financial stability for oneself and one's family. Love is not necessary for a successful marriage but is nonetheless desirable, as it makes the union stronger. The Chantry permits annulments but not outright divorce.[1]

If Leliana is Divine Victoria and in a romance with the Warden...

Leliana decreed that all members of the Chantry, from initiate to Divine, would be allowed to engage in romantic relationships. When questioned, the Divine pointed to Andraste, who served the Maker while wed to a mortal spouse. In time, many in the Chantry came to accept the Divine's decree that "Love is the Maker's best gift and is infinite."

City Elves

Among city elves, marriage is a rite of passage, the single greatest thing that distinguishes children from adults.[2] Elven children are usually matched by their parents and the alienage elders, and the bride and groom often will not have met each other before the marriage ceremony. Betrothals are often made between families from different alienages in order to promote inter-city trade and relations, as well as to bring new elves into the alienage community. Marriage ceremonies require the approval of the Chantry, and are officiated by one of the Chantry priests. In a community where there is mostly little cause for celebration, a wedding is a tremendous affair, and the whole district will turn out to enjoy the feasting and dancing.

The Dalish

The Dalish appear to be more in line with Fereldan thinking rather than other cultures like Orlais. This means that they tend to take relationships slowly and seriously with each other. Once they have come of age, they may choose a mate with whom to "bond"[3] for life. Elves who bond may exchange small gifts with one another.[4] It is unknown how they view same-sex relationships, but there seems to be no stigma against it. The only thing Dalish may frown upon is the refusal to have children.[5]

Some Dalish clans practice arranged marriages.[6]

The Dalish do not approve of interspecies romance, and this may result in exile from one's clan.[7] This likely stems from the fact that children born of an elf and another species physically take after the other species.[8]

Dwarves of Orzammar

The dwarves of Orzammar are noted for their polyamory (the keeping of multiple intimate partners), especially among the upper classes. While a dwarf has only one legal spouse, many nobles keep concubines, typically noble hunters, who are raised up to be part of the household and have their names recorded in the Memories. A dwarf's caste is determined by that of their same-sex parent, so many casteless offer themselves to nobles or to other higher caste dwarves as sexual partners in the hopes of producing a child of the noble's gender. As dwarven fertility is in dangerous decline due to chronic exposure to darkspawn corruption[9] as well as because of constant war with them, any noble child is considered a blessing, and such offers are rarely turned down. If such a union produces a child of the commoner's gender, however, the infant will be rejected, as it would be part of the lower caste and an embarrassment to the higher caste parent's house if it's allowed to stay with them.

Grey Wardens

Although Grey Wardens are not forbidden from marrying, it is rare for them to do so. Their short lifespans make them poor candidates for parenthood or long-term relationships. Even if they are not killed in battle against the darkspawn, they rarely survive past middle age due to the darkspawn taint. Most Grey Wardens dedicate their brief lives to fulfilling their duty, leaving them little time for pursuits such as family life. Furthermore, the taint makes conceiving a child very difficult (nearly impossible if both partners are Grey Wardens).

Notably, in Dragon Age: The Calling the Grey Wardens Genevieve and Guy are mentioned as having been betrothed.

Grey Wardens may also enjoy a certain reputation for sexual prowess as noted in romance dialog with Morrigan where she will make mention of the famed Grey Warden Garahel's reputation. The allure of Grey Wardens is also intimated in Dragon Age: The Calling in Duncan's brief affair with an awe-struck mage in the Ferelden Circle Tower.

Mages

Mages, because of their outsider status, are not bound to traditional social morals and consequently enjoy greater sexual freedom than most, though the exact degree varies from Circle to Circle. For example, Anders expressed surprise that Emile de Launcet of the Kirkwall Circle was still a virgin at 24, and noted that such a thing would be unheard of in the Fereldan Circle. Mages are discouraged (though not actually forbidden) from marrying and reproducing, as the offspring of mages are very likely to possess magical ability themselves. Dialogue between Wynne and Alistair hints at some form of birth control or abortion being readily available to mages, perhaps to discourage the propagation of magically gifted children. If a mage does produce a child, it is taken from the parents at birth and raised under the supervision of the Chantry.

Those children who prove to have magical ability are immediately transferred to a Circle of Magi in another country, where they are taught to control their powers away from their birth parents. Mages (and non-mages) who do not wish to be separated from their children will sometimes conceal them from the Chantry and either train the child themselves (as Malcolm Hawke did) or hire an apostate as a tutor (as Arlessa Isolde hired Jowan to tutor Connor Guerrin).

The Tevinter Imperium, on the other hand, celebrates the birth of mage-blood children.

Orlais

Aristocrats in Orlais are notorious for their hedonism and extravagance, and sexual relations with multiple partners of either sex are not uncommon. The peasantry is much less tolerant of such behavior, at least in public. Emperor Florian is rumoured to have had an affair with his cousin Meghren, which resulted in Meghren being banished from Orlais to Ferelden. The scandal surrounding their relationship was likely due to their being related, however, not to the fact that they were both men.

Qunari

Qunari do not marry or choose romantic partners. A Qunari's most important relationship is that with his or her colleagues. They do not generally associate mating with love, and recreational sex is treated as a simple biological need. They are capable of feeling and forming emotional bonds with one another, but do not express it sexually, as those who do are re-educated by the Ben-Hassrath.

The Tamassrans keep detailed genealogical records and choose who will mate with whom. They do not allow cross-breeding between races. Familial bonds are not present in Qunari society. Children are raised by the Tamassrans, evaluated, and assigned a job.

Marriage rituals

In Andrastian society marriages are performed by Revered Mothers, such as Mother Boann.

Prospective grooms also appear to enjoy bachelor parties prior to their weddings.[10]

Tests of worth

Among the Dalish it appears that young men must prove themselves as hunters and providers in order to be worthy to marry, as Cammen must prove himself as a hunter before Gheyna will consider him.

Dowry

There appears to be some form of a dowry system used in Andrastian courtship, as mentioned by Aveline Vallen when she is courting Donnic. She notes that three goats and a sheaf of wheat, taken to his mother, would be dowry tradition.

Among the city elves the dowry tradition is even more important. Marriages are arranged between alienages and a dowry is paid to the alienage which is losing a member, in order to compensate for the loss to the community. Cyrion Tabrismentions to the City Elf that a dowry was provided for their marriage.

Dwarves are also known to use a dowry system in their courtship, as Dagna mentions that her father Janar intends to sell her for the highest dowry.

Matchmaking

Matchmaking is practiced in many cultures in Thedas, from the socially engineered pairings of the Qunari to the arranged marriages of human nobility to the matchmaking of the city elves. City elves in particular make use of matchmakers to locate mates in distant alienages. It helps to strengthen ties between separate alienages. The City Elf, notably, is implied to never have met their betrothed prior to their wedding day.

Hahrens in alienages will also help to arrange marriages for those elves who have no parents or means to arrange a marriage on their behalf.[11]

In the Tevinter Imperium, powerful mage families often orchestrate arranged marriages to improve the chances of having children with the potential to become "perfect" mages.[12]

In Antiva, it is acceptable for parents to arrange matches for their children.

Vows

Both the Dalish and Andrastian cultures say vows during the marriage ceremony.

Dalish vows are said in elvish. One version is "Sylaise enaste var aravel. Lama, ara las mir lath. Bellanaris," spoken by an elven Inquisitor in the Trespasser DLC.

Andrastian vows are spoken in Common tongue. One known version of Andrastian vows are, "I swear unto the maker and the Holy Andraste to love this woman the rest of my days." As the female version is never spoken, it is unclear whether these are set vows or something Cullen Rutherford, the person speaking, wrote himself. It is unknown if it is customary for only the male in the relationship to say vows during a ceremony.

Same-gender relationships

Same-gender relations are generally considered strange in Ferelden, but Fereldans do not consider it immoral, and place no particular stigma upon it. Orlesians regard homosexuality as a mere quirk of character, and the Antivan Crows show a winking tolerance for relations with multiple partners of any gender. The Chantry does not seem to have an official view on the subject, and nowhere in Thedas is it prohibited.[13] The Qunari seem to have no taboo on the gender of one's recreational sexual partners, though presumably it would be unthinkable to refuse to perform their procreative obligations for any reason, gender or otherwise.

There is pressure in certain circles, such as the elves and the human nobility, to marry an opposite-gendered partner, but this is motivated by pragmatism rather than morality; a homosexual couple cannot have biological children. For a diminished race like the dwarves, it is vital that every fertile individual produce offspring, and human noble families place great stock in the continuity of bloodlines in order to have clear heirs to noble titles and fortunes, and thus avoid the conflicts that often erupt when succession is not clear.

In Tevinter, same-sex relationships between nobles are largely hidden. These relationships are encouraged with favored slaves.[14]

Interspecies

Interspecies relationships are possible, but frequently frowned upon by most societies. The fertility rate between two parents of different race are very low compared to that of the same race. In particular, elves are bound only to produce elven children with their own kind because their offspring with a human would be Elf-blooded, appearing physically human. Similarly this also happens with dwarves. Subsequently, elves mating with humans is considered traitorous by the rest of their kind and any elf who conceives a child with a human risks expulsion from their community.[8]

A child between a dwarf and a human is a half-dwarf, which would be taller than dwarves but shorter than humans. Such children are extremely rare, as dwarves are comparatively few in number and those living underground are reclusive to outsiders; mating with other species would bring great shame to the dwarf as well as their family because of the social stigma. In addition, the dwarven fertility rate is very low due to the close proximity to the darkspawn taint for many generations.[8]

Nobody in Thedas has any idea what a qunari half-breed might look like, since the Tamassrans prohibit interspecies mating among qunari and there is no evidence of interbreeding between Tal-Vashoth and other races. However, there appears to be no taboo against non-procreative sex with non-qunari.

In Dragon Age: Origins it is also possible to engage in bestiality at the Denerim brothel. The only option are nugshowever.

Prostitution

the interior of Kirwall's brothel, the Blooming Rose

Brothels are legal in Ferelden, Kirkwall and in the dwarven city of Orzammar. Although they are not considered respectable institutions, it is no more taboo to visit them than a seedy tavern or gambling house. Prostitutes would usually cost 10 Gold pieces in the city of Kirkwall during Hawke's residence.

Love legends

If romanced, Leliana will tell the Warden the star-crossed (and likely analogous) tale of Alindra and her soldier lover. Class differences served to separate the pair in life and prevent their desired love match, but the gods ultimately brought the lovers together again after death as stars in the sky.

#dragon age #dragon age inquisition #dragon age origins #dragon age 2 #dragon age lore #dai #dao #da2

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howwelldoyouknowyourmoon · 4 years

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A Critique of Abraham Hicks & The Law of Attraction

by Be Scofield, M.Div

November 11, 2019

New Age guru Abraham Hicks has made many shocking and disturbing statements about rape, slavery, 9/11 victims and Holocaust deaths. She claims “less than 1% of rapes” are “true violations” and the rest are attractions. Hicks believes slavery was “the beginning of a journey that was better” and part of an “overall improvement in humanity.” She says “AIDS is the physical manifestation of not liking yourself.” Hicks and others like Rhonda Byrne, creator of “The Secret,” have taken a partial truth and concretized it into a religious absolutist system known as the Law of Attraction and made millions in the process. The teaching is harmful and a form of spiritual bypassing.

Full Critique:

https://gurumag.com/a-critique-of-abraham-hicks-the-law-of-attraction/

_______________________________

Exactly fifty years prior to the publication of the best selling book and DVD The Secret, Earl Nightingale released a vinyl record in 1956 that set the motivational world on fire. It was called The Strangest Secret and it shared the same fundamental premise as Rhonda Byrne’s 2006 The Secret; we become what we think about and our thoughts create our reality. His self-written and recorded LP sold over 1 million copies making it the first-ever spoken word album to achieve gold status. After his phenomenal success, Nightingale went on to form Nightingale-Conant which became one of the largest self-help audiobook publishers ever. With only a one-word difference between the names did Byrne steal Nightingale’s title and message? We may never know but they are undoubtedly two of the biggest and most successful proponents of the Law of Attraction in the modern era.

New-age guru Esther Hicks, who claims to channel 100 entities known as Abraham is the other largest force behind the spread of the Law of Attraction. One of these entities is supposedly Jesus, another Buddha. ...

Postmodern Salvation

“We must understand that the founder of a cult or new religion has no room for compromise: absolutes are necessary. True believers in mystical psychotherapy will not embrace a gospel with modest claims: it must be all or nothing.” – Martin Larson

While there are no claims of virgin births or bodily resurrections made by the new prophets of positive thinking they do preach many miraculous and magical ideas. And like other religions, the Law of Attraction promises salvation from the difficulties, anxieties and tensions of everyday life, which undeniably fuels its mass cultural appeal. Every era seems to have a book or an influential figure who is able to fill this role.

Charismatic leaders viewed as Godlike speak with authority and conviction. In early videos Hicks can be seen shouting at her audience in a way that is reminiscent of fire and brimstone preachers. It is this unwavering absolutism and belief in her system that has allowed her to convince the masses to drink from the positive thinking well.

The Law of Attraction is perhaps the most accurate form of postmodern religion one could imagine. It is individualistic (no community needed, one person’s thoughts run the world); narcissistic (the universe will supply me with anything I ask for); focused on immediate gratification (it’s central teaching is to “feel good now”); materialistic (strongly emphasizes achieving money and wealth); detached from structural reality (lacks an awareness of political/social/cultural systems) and is hypocritical (claims to be free from religious dogma when it is actually reproducing it).

The Law of Attraction is also similar to dogmatic religion in that criticism or questioning of the system is not allowed. All critique is dismissed as “negative thinking” and practitioners often become very defensive when challenged. Author Barbara Ehrenreich describes this as the “cult of cheerfulness.” The Secret author, Rhonda Byrne warns, “If you are criticizing, you are not being grateful.” Diane Ahlquist in the Idiots Guide to the Law of Attraction states, “Challenging the source can come off as a lack of belief…. If the law of attraction hasn’t worked for you yet, you are probably saying or thinking many things, none of them particularly positive…. The best advice I can give you is to stop questioning the process because by doing so, you’re effectively telling the universe that you don’t trust it.” This is not unlike true Christian believers who have it ingrained within them that doubt, questioning or critique are profound threats to their salvation. With the Law of Attraction however, the leaders have ingeniously convinced practitioners that questioning will lead to them attracting terrible situations to themselves. Thus, practitioners won’t go to hell like Christians may believe if they abandon their belief, rather their lives will become hell. Coach Julia Stewart describes how the Law of Attraction shares a fundamental trait with cults.

“It is the insistence that you replace your current worldview with a completely new one in order to get what you want and that you must control your thoughts and eliminate any deviation from what is prescribed in order to succeed. That robs you of your inner knowing, common sense, intuition, confidence, etc. Then you become dependent upon the Law of Attraction “experts” to help you succeed. Usually they’re happy to sell you more books, programs, coaching, seminars, etc. that explain all over again what and how you should think. Folks do get rich with the Law of Attraction, but it’s usually the sellers, not the buyers.”

Spiritual Growth is NOT Easy

In this quick fix and immediate gratification culture, people want easy solutions to their pain and suffering. Abraham Hicks and her new age teachings provide this easy approach. They don’t actually work, however. The Law of Attraction merely guides people to bypass, escape, deny and suppress those difficult aspects. While the practitioner may experience a brief reprieve from the immediate suffering they are experiencing it won’t last because the core issue was never dealt with. Merely staying positive and thinking happy thoughts won’t address one’s concerns.

Now, more than ever we need to challenge this narrative that spiritual growth is easy. Instead of running away from our pain, shadows and difficult emotions we need tools to embrace them and work with them. Real spiritual growth is tough. There are no quick fixes or easy outs. And we must use discernment to sort through what is a healthy and not healthy form of spirituality.

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Full Critique:

https://gurumag.com/a-critique-of-abraham-hicks-the-law-of-attraction/

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youtube

#Be Scofield #The Law of Attraction #Abraham Hicks #Rhonda Byrne #The Secret #Esther Hicks #Abraham #spiritual growth

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trinuviel · 6 years

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The Rose of Highgarden. On Margaery Tyrell (part 5)

This is the fifth installment of my analysis of Margaery Tyrell and her narrative arc in Game of Thrones (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4). In this post I’m going to take a look at her costumes in season 3. I have previously analysed her costumes in season 2, which were rather unconventional when compared to what was worn by the other female characters of noble birth. Margaery’s season 2 costumes were bold, provocative and rather avantgarde within the sartorial profile of the female nobles of Westeros. The costumes also caused some controversy among the audience of the show. At least one particular costume (the infamous cone dress) was deemed ridiculous and anachronistic since it was obviously inspired by contemporary fashion, more specifically the iconic Bell Dress that Alexander McQueen created for Björk.

While the costumes do serve to as part of the world-building, their function goes beyond looking pretty or period-specific, especially in a fantasy show - even if the world of Westeros is loosely based on medieval Europe.

Clapton approaches costume design from a narrative stand point. What the characters wear is part of the visual language of the story as well as a reflection of the characters and their narrative arcs.

This is something that Clapton repeated stresses in her interviews:

I always try to make the clothes visually tell something. (FIDM Museum Blog)

I always try to tell that story — the costumes for me are narrative and you should be able to look at them [the characters] and understand where they are mentally in their journey. (Insider)

“I don’t think any costume should be looked at in isolation, rather, through the arc of the character. Each thing will tell a story. It might look like a costume is wrong, but actually it’s supposed to look like that. It’s telling you something about the character at the time.” (Winter is Coming)

The costumes are part and parcel of the visual narrative - they echo the psychological journeys of the characters, both in terms of how the characters see themselves or what they want to project, but sometimes they may even subtly foretell future plot points (x).

GIRLISHLY SEXY

As the betrothed of King Joffrey, Margaery sports a new and slightly changed wardrobe in season 3. Gone are the the avantgarde shoulder pieces and gowns. Instead, we are presented with a number of dresses cut from the same template:

A sleeveless wrap-like bodice of patterned cloth with a deep v-neck, a bare back and discretely structured shoulders.

Flowing skirts of lightweight material.

The waist is emphasized by beribboned borders or a metal belt in the shape of a rose on a thorny vine.

The necklines have become less revealing than they were is season 2, though she still shows a bit of cleavage. However, she still shows quite a bit of skin with her sleeveless dresses that also feature cut-outs that bares her back and sometimes her midriff and shoulders.

Hogan McLaughling states the issue quite succinctly:

With Joffrey, Margaery’s approach is the polar opposite of the avant-garde mindset with her now-murdered husband Renly. Her gowns are still beautiful feats of fashion, but the focus is less on the dress and more on her body. (Watchers on the Wall)

The cut-outs offer tantalizing glimpses of her bare skin - these are the dresses of a seductress, and seduction is what Margaery is about in season 3. She is not content with being just a pretty face next to her kingly husband. She wants influence! I have previously discussed how she employs a feminine form of soft power through charity in order to make the people love her - but her sexual charm is another weapon that she strategically deploys in order to bind Joffrey to her. Seduction is another form of soft power, a very intimate one. Cersei is certainly right on the money when she tells Joffrey that Margaery dresses like a “harlot” for a reason.

The sexy silhouettes of Margaery’s dresses are tempered by the soft baby-blue colour, which is carried over from season 2. The baby-blue colour adds a girlish aspect to the flirty dresses, which perfectly corresponds to the studied way that Margaery performs the role of the innocent, bashful and unambitious maid. I have previously mentioned how Clapton used a very similar shade for one of Sansa’s northern dresses in season 1. However, unlike Sansa, Margaery’s maidenly innocence is simply a facade. She might claim to be a virgin in public but the previous season made it clear that she is a confident and sexually experienced woman.

A NEW POLITICAL PLAYER IN KING’S LANDING

As mentioned above, Clapton designs the costumes in relation to character arcs, so the costuming evolves subtly. One of Clapton’s patterns is to reuse a costume from the end of the previous season in the beginning of the new one in order to create a sense of continuity.

Thus, in Margaery’s very first scene in season 3, she’s wearing the dress she wore in the season 2 finale - but with a little tweak. In this case, she wears light blue wrap over her seductive blue dress, which conceals the plunging neckline and serves to introduce a Margaery who is a bit more modest in her attire than the last time we saw her.

She keeps to the light blue colour but as the season progresses, the discrete silver pattern on her bodices is replaced by a bolder floral pattern in bright gold.

The decorative elements become more bold, more golden and more ostentatious - and all of this signals the wealth of the Tyrells. That wealth, based on the agricultural bounty of the Reach, is one of the reasons why they are poised to put their favoured daughter on the throne as Queen Consort. The visual prominence of the golden details on the Tyrell costumes reaches its zenith at the wedding between Sansa Stark and Tyrion Lannister in episode 8.

Now the Tyrell gold almost rivals the famed Lannister gold - and thus the costumes visually highlight the conversation between Cersei and Margaery where Cersei not very subtly warns Margaery about what happens when upstart Houses presume to rival the Lannisters.

At the wedding Margaery, Loras and Olenna Tyrell share a colour palette of dusty blue and bright gold in heavy, patterned fabrics. Visually, they create a coherent whole - a united front, politically, where all the family members work together towards a common goal. Thus, their familial and political unity is expressed visually through the costuming.

Clapton makes another highly symbolic addition to Margaery’s costumes in season 3. The sigil of House Tyrell is a golden rose and throughout the season we see her wearing accessories that feature the Tyrell rose. She wears rings in the shape of a rose - but her metallic belt with a centrally placed rose on a thorny vine is perhaps the most ostentatious example of Margaery adorning herself with her House sigil.

One would think that a noble wearing their family sigil wouldn’t be a big deal but in this case it is - because Margaery didn’t wear the Tyrell rose when she was married to Renly Baratheon, a man who called himself king. She only begins to wear her House sigil in the form of a silver pendant when she arrives in King’s Landing in the last episode of season 2.

So Margaery’s rose shaped accessories only make an appearance after she’s betrothed to King Joffrey. This is not a coincidence! This is not just a case of some pretty accessories, this is a subtle political statement, highlighting that Margaery is working not just for herself but also for the interests of her family. The entire marriage is an expression of Tyrell ambition.

Sure, Margaery wants to be Queen but her father is also pushing hard for this marriage. Neither is Margaery the only Tyrell to wear those rose: both her brother Loras and her grandmother Olenna wears the golden rose. Loras wears a beautiful pin whereas Olenna wears a belt much like Margaery’s (only with more thorny vines) as well as a beautiful golden pattern on one of her blue brocade dresses. Throughout the season the Tyrells have made their presence as new power players felt in King’s Landing - a daughter of their House is poised become Queen, they are feeding the people, winning public affection and their wealth is helping the Lannister regime stay afloat. The prominence of the rose on the Tyrell costumes articulates their status as political power players visually - the golden rose looks set to challenge the golden lion.

A GAME OF CLOTHES

During season 3, Margaery emerges as a political power player in King’s Landing - something Cersei Lannister finds particularly aggravating. Margaery and Cersei stand in opposition to each other since they both seek to influence, even control the king - and Cersei constantly complains about Margaery manipulating Joffrey. She isn’t wrong but she’s the only one who thinks this is a bad thing. The opposition between the two women also finds an expression in the costume design, which costume designer Michele Clapton jokingly refers to as a “costume stand-off” between the two ladies (x).

The costumes of Cersei and Margaery are designed to contrast each other. Where Margaery’s dresses are sleeveless, Cersei’s dresses have long and trailing sleeves. Where Margaery’s dresses are made from light, floaty fabrics, Cersei’s are made from heavier velvet and brocades. Even the colours clash as the picture above proves - the soft baby blue of Margaery’s dress stands in a vivid contrast to the deep crimson of Cersei’s gown. According to Clapton, Margaery’s style ought to be seen as a calculated response to Cersei’s style:

But over the seasons she [Margaery] has refined her look as she has learned how to wield her body to her benefit, explains Clapton. “She honed this look that was girlishly sexy because she could see that it was exactly what Cersei couldn’t do. The more armor and more regal Cersei got, the more girlish and simple Margaery became–very knowing.” (Michele Clapton)

Where Margaery bares her skin, Cersei quite literally covers herself in armour. This particular aspect of the costume design even makes its way into the text itself! In the first episode of the season, Margaery and Loras attends a private dinner party with Joffrey and Cersei. When Joffrey praises Margaery’s rather daring gown, Cersei sees an opportunity to slip in a sarcastic dig at Margaery’s revealing dress:

Cersei: I imagine you might be rather cold.

Margaery deftly deflects Cersei’s snide remark with a sexually charged double-entendre when Joffrey offers to have a shawl brought for her.

Margaery: I’m touched by your concern, Your Grace. Luckily for us Tyrells our blood is quite warm.

Then Margaery returns the “favour” by praising Cersei’s gown, especially the metalwork, i.e. the armour.

Cersei: You might find a bit of armor quite useful once you become queen. Perhaps before.

Cersei’s armoured dresses visually expresses how beleaguered she feels now that Margaery has arrived. Cersei is on the defensive as she can see her already diminished influence over Joffrey disappear. She feels threatened by Margaery, which becomes very clear throughout the season. Curiously enough, the wide boat-neck of Cersei’s gowns in season 3 looks very similar to the neckline of Margaery’s infamous cone dress from season 2. This was a dress Margaery only wore twice, and in both situations she were in a defensive position, either deflecting Petyr Baelish’s prying into the state of her marriage or trying to do damage control after Renly’s murder (x).

Margaery’s dresses might seem deceptively simple but when we take a close look at the costumes in relation to the character and the story, these garments say a lot more than what was initially thought.

To be continued....

#game of thrones #character analysis #margaery tyrell #house tyrell #the rose of highgarden #cersei lannister #natalie dormer

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mergatroid-jones-blog · 5 years

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Twin Mickey

(A short story)

* 1 *

I don't have a name. That's because there's nobody to give me one. There's nobody to call me by it either, due to the nature of my particular birth defect. I'm three eighths of one inch tall. Not only that, I don't have my own body. Not exactly. I live in my brother's head. We're twins I guess. Some kind of conjoined twins--only instead of being conjoined on the outside, I live inside his head. He doesn't know I exist. Nobody does.

For all I know I'm a very common medical phenomenon. Micky's never had a brain scan-- maybe I wouldn't even show up. That's my brother's name: Micky Van Buskirk. It's sort of my name too, since I don't have one. I stole a little piece of my brother's name. I steal a little piece of everything he has. I'm a parasite. That's what I've decided. Or maybe I'm cancer. I certainly don't do anything to help him. All I can do is sit around his head and complain. He can't hear me, no matter how loud I shout. You aren't designed to hear from the inside. I figured that out.

But that doesn't matter. I still scream about everything. What else do I have? It's like I'm chained to the floor in front of the worst TV show, and I can't reach the remote. Forever. My brother really might be king of the idiots. Like all the best idiots, he's just clever enough to convince himself that he's being awfully rational in any given situation. He's convinced himself that everything he's ever done was absolutely the only thing he could have done. He probably thinks he's had a really hard time of it. He hasn't.

I know literally everything about him, but his motives are a mystery to me. Like when he stole Jacob Yockey's jacket in high school. It was sitting there, all lime green and fake-leather, and he just put it in his backpack like he'd been planning it all along. He didn't need the jacket, and he wasn't some kind of kleptomaniac. That was the only time he did something like that. He put it in the back of his closet and there it sat. He didn't wear it, and he didn't have anything against Jacob Yockey either. Jacob Yockey never hurt anybody. One day, Jacob mentioned that his jacket was lost, and my brother was there. Micky laughed, and he said “Soggy pickles.” What the hell is that??

That night, he actually put the jacket on for the first and only time. He was still wet and naked from the shower. He posed and made faces at himself for at least three minutes. My brother is barely five feet tall, quite fat, and covered in thick, curly, black hair. He's not physically attractive. I heard Jacob Yockey lives in Toronto now, and he's gay and breeds expensive dogs. Good for Jacob Yockey I guess. He sure was funny looking in high school.

* 2 *

You would think that self-loathing and egotism would contradict one another, but they make surprisingly genial bedfellows. My brother will be convinced that he is worth less than the scum under a pretty girl's fingernail. Then in the same hour, he'll realize once again that the world is almost entirely idiots, and that he miraculously isn't one. If they'd just ask the non-idiots, the world would get along better. Again, these sentiments seem like a contradiction, but my brother has never noticed the inconstancy. Most people don't seem to notice inconsistencies like that.

Perhaps they would notice if they spent a day as a pimple. That's how I think of myself: a brain-pimple. Like when you get a pimple on the inside of your nose, but deeper. My brother is always picking his nose, and he's not subtle about it. He used to eat his boogers, and he didn't stop until he was sixteen. He really is a disgusting shit. One time when we were about seven, he took off his pants, crawled under the bed, and peed into the carpet. For no reason. What reason could he have possibly had? He just did it to test his body? To test the carpet? That carpet is still there by the way, and I doubt anybody has ever shampooed it. I think I really hate him.

If I had to live in somebody's head, it didn't have to be such a boring nincompoop. Mickey Van Buskirk has never done anything I would care to watch. Weird stuff sure. Gross stuff, definitely. But nothing good. Once he spent a whole day sorta following around this old man who carried a trombone. I guess he thought the guy was a creep, but who's the creep when you're stalking some old guy all day? Weird stuff, he does. Gross stuff he does. I've seen him lick a banister after a pretty girl touched it at least nine different times. Nasty.

* 3 *

What a miserable little shit. Here's what happens every time: he gets a shitty job and he hates it. And he hates it more and more for a whole year. Then he throws a fit, quits, and gets a new shitty job. He's like clockwork. After high school, he told our mom he was going to be a pharmacist. Whatever happened to that? He was never going to be a pharmacist and he probably knew it. I'm sure Mom wasn't fooled. She's not stupid like Mickey.

My brother has only ever had one girlfriend that lasted, and that's because she's an even bigger idiot than he is. Angela is her name. They've broken up four times. They broke up again last week. He made out with her sister Kara. She did it to piss Angela off. He just did it because it was on offer. Fucking idiot. The thing was Angela wasn't actually all that mad about it. Kara was getting revenge for previous transgressions. But it brought up all this drama, and everybody hates each other now.

Good riddance. I hope I never see those two again. Talk about entitled. Not one of the three of them can form a cogent thought. Angela literally sets fires and puts them out for fun. But Mickey can't find words to voice this legitimate concern other than “You're a psycho-bitch.” That doesn't tend to help. But who cares? She walked out and maybe it'll stick. Mickey got good and drunk after that. He got high on pills too. Good. I can share in that. Then he looked at a bunch of “furry” porn. Disgusting. I really hate him.

* 4 *

He had hated his job at the print shop for almost a year, so I wasn't surprised when he threw a tantrum at work. My brother has always been able to throw a tantrum for what seems like no reason. I think he must plan it in advance. The printer was being crap, and Annie was blaming him for it as usual. So he started throwing boxes everywhere and screaming “It's fucking bullshit, and I can't fucking bullshit!” He said the word “bullshit” twenty-seven times in total. I counted. He ripped off his Clayborn Printing shirt, threw it at Annie, and walked out. She didn't say a word. I don't know if she was angry or amused. At least she had to deal with the printer herself. Horrible woman.

Then what did he do? He called Angela crying and babbling incomprehensibly. I was surprised she hung up on him. Good for her. Then his classic pity party. I've seen it a thousand times. He buys a fifth of Wild Turkey and gets some pills. Angela is kind of a pill head and he's kinda one too when he's with her. Then he rolls down the windows (even if it's winter) and blares Linkin Park at full volume all the way to Foy Point in the national forest. It's isolated. It's also incidentally where he lost his virginity to Sarah Spiller who later turned out to be somehow related to us. Good going.

He did what he normally does. He drank as much of the fifth as he physically could. He smoked every cigarette he had. He used his lighter to blow a fireball with the bourbon, then he threw the bottle (still one third full) into a tree. All that was normal. Then he went for the pills, and I noticed he had brought every bottle that Angela had stored at his house. Most of them were almost empty, but it was quite an array. He dumped them all out into a Halloween candy-pile on the picnic table. He was going to kill himself! I screamed at him “YES! Do it! Finally, I'm done with you! I'm fucking done, you piece of living shit-fucking shit!” I really was excited.

* 5 *

He looked at all the pills, and he shuffled them around. There would have been enough to kill ten Mickey Van Buskirks and a thousand brain-pimple brothers. Then he arranged them by color. Then he shuffled them again. Then he took a little yellow one. Then he took a handful. No good. He couldn't swallow them all. He didn't have any water, and the bourbon was all over a tree. He puked. Now there were two Halloween candy-piles.

Foy point overlooks a creek, and it's not all that far down if you go through the brambly parts. Mickey did. He really wanted to die. I was proud of him. He took a Styrofoam cup from Frosty Time, and filled it in the creek. The brambles cut him up, but he was too drunk to care. He took two handfuls of random pills, and swallowed them with creek water. Then he screamed “I did it!”

He had. I've never wanted anything more than to die. I would have been jumping up and down if I had legs. But then, Mickey Van Buskirk had an attack of cowardice. He was too much of a coward even to take the coward's way out. He clutched at his uvula for dear life, and life it gave him. He made himself puke. Then again. Then again. More candy-piles. It was horrible to watch. He was covered in it. If he had waited just five minutes, I bet he would have been too far gone. What a failure.

* 6 *

He woke up the next day, sunburned and thirsty. He was covered in little cuts, and vomit, and Wild Turkey. I woke up too. Alive. I really hate him. Before he drove home (well below the speed limit) he produced his pocket knife. It always makes a satisfying click when he takes out the blade. A lot of things were carved into the picnic table. A crude owl. A penis. A fancy heart. One message said “Be happy.” Another said “Smoke a fat blunt biotch 420!” Another said ambiguously “Is waterlogged and so am I.”

It was important for Mickey to carve something into that table. It must have been important for him to stare at it so long. Something big had happened there, and he needed to commemorate it. He needed to write a message of his own: to speak and be heard. After at least three minutes of staring, he carved his statement on the table very large above the owl. Here's what it says:

“Fuck”

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leviathangourmet · 5 years

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The share of Americans who say sex between unmarried adults is “not wrong at all” is at an all-time high. New cases of HIV are at an all-time low. Most women can—at last—get birth control for free, and the morning-after pill without a prescription.

If hookups are your thing, Grindr and Tinder offer the prospect of casual sex within the hour. The phrase If something exists, there is porn of it used to be a clever internet meme; now it’s a truism. BDSM plays at the local multiplex—but why bother going? Sex is portrayed, often graphically and sometimes gorgeously, on prime-time cable. Sexting is, statistically speaking, normal.

Polyamory is a household word. Shame-laden terms like perversion have given way to cheerful-sounding ones like kink. Anal sex has gone from final taboo to “fifth base”—Teen Vogue (yes, Teen Vogue) even ran a guide to it. With the exception of perhaps incest and bestiality—and of course nonconsensual sex more generally—our culture has never been more tolerant of sex in just about every permutation.

But despite all this, American teenagers and young adults are having less sex.

To the relief of many parents, educators, and clergy members who care about the health and well-being of young people, teens are launching their sex lives later. From 1991 to 2017, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey finds, the percentage of high-school students who’d had intercourse dropped from 54 to 40 percent. In other words, in the space of a generation, sex has gone from something most high-school students have experienced to something most haven’t. (And no, they aren’t having oral sex instead—that rate hasn’t changed much.)

Meanwhile, the U.S. teen pregnancy rate has plummeted to a third of its modern high. When this decline started, in the 1990s, it was widely and rightly embraced. But now some observers are beginning to wonder whether an unambiguously good thing might have roots in less salubrious developments. Signs are gathering that the delay in teen sex may have been the first indication of a broader withdrawal from physical intimacy that extends well into adulthood.

Over the past few years, Jean M. Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University, has published research exploring how and why Americans’ sex lives may be ebbing. In a series of journal articles and in her latest book, iGen, she notes that today’s young adults are on track to have fewer sex partners than members of the two preceding generations. People now in their early 20s are two and a half times as likely to be abstinent as Gen Xers were at that age; 15 percent report having had no sex since they reached adulthood.

Gen Xers and Baby Boomers may also be having less sex today than previous generations did at the same age. From the late 1990s to 2014, Twenge found, drawing on data from the General Social Survey, the average adult went from having sex 62 times a year to 54 times. A given person might not notice this decrease, but nationally, it adds up to a lot of missing sex. Twenge recently took a look at the latest General Social Survey data, from 2016, and told me that in the two years following her study, sexual frequency fell even further.

Some social scientists take issue with aspects of Twenge’s analysis; others say that her data source, although highly regarded, is not ideally suited to sex research. And yet none of the many experts I interviewed for this piece seriously challenged the idea that the average young adult circa 2018 is having less sex than his or her counterparts of decades past. Nor did anyone doubt that this reality is out of step with public perception—most of us still think that other people are having a lot more sex than they actually are.

When I called the anthropologist Helen Fisher, who studies love and sex and co-directs Match.com’s annual Singles in America survey of more than 5,000 unpartnered Americans, I could almost feel her nodding over the phone. “The data is that people are having less sex,” she said, with a hint of mischief. “I’m a Baby Boomer, and apparently in my day we were having a lot more sex than they are today!” She went on to explain that the survey has been probing the intimate details of people’s lives for eight years now. “Every year the whole Match company is rather staggered at how little sex Americans are having—including the Millennials.”

Fisher, like many other experts, attributes the sex decline to a decline in couplehood among young people. For a quarter century, fewer people have been marrying, and those who do have been marrying later. At first, many observers figured that the decline in marriage was explained by an increase in unmarried cohabitation—yet the share of people living together hasn’t risen enough to offset the decline in marriage: About 60 percent of adults under age 35 now live without a spouse or a partner. One in three adults in this age range live with their parents, making that the most common living arrangement for the cohort. People who live with a romantic partner tend to have sex more than those who don’t—and living with your parents is obviously bad for your sex life. But this doesn’t explain why young people are partnering up less to begin with.

Over the course of many conversations with sex researchers, psychologists, economists, sociologists, therapists, sex educators, and young adults, I heard many other theories about what I have come to think of as the sex recession. I was told it might be a consequence of the hookup culture, of crushing economic pressures, of surging anxiety rates, of psychological frailty, of widespread antidepressant use, of streaming television, of environmental estrogens leaked by plastics, of dropping testosterone levels, of digital porn, of the vibrator’s golden age, of dating apps, of option paralysis, of helicopter parents, of careerism, of smartphones, of the news cycle, of information overload generally, of sleep deprivation, of obesity. Name a modern blight, and someone, somewhere, is ready to blame it for messing with the modern libido.

Some experts I spoke with offered more hopeful explanations for the decline in sex. For example, rates of childhood sexual abuse have decreased in recent decades, and abuse can lead to both precocious and promiscuous sexual behavior. And some people today may feel less pressured into sex they don’t wantto have, thanks to changing gender mores and growing awareness of diverse sexual orientations, including asexuality. Maybe more people are prioritizing school or work over love and sex, at least for a time, or maybe they’re simply being extra deliberate in choosing a life partner—and if so, good for them.

Many—or all—of these things may be true. In a famous 2007 study, people supplied researchers with 237 distinct reasons for having sex, ranging from mystical (“I wanted to feel closer to God”) to lame (“I wanted to change the topic of conversation”). The number of reasons not to have sex must be at least as high. Still, a handful of suspects came up again and again in my interviews and in the research I reviewed—and each has profound implications for our happiness.

1. Sex for One

The retreat from sex is not an exclusively American phenomenon. Most countries don’t track their citizens’ sex lives closely, but those that try (all of them wealthy) are reporting their own sex delays and declines. One of the most respected sex studies in the world, Britain’s National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles, reported in 2001 that people ages 16 to 44 were having sex more than six times a month on average. By 2012, the rate had dropped to fewer than five times. Over roughly the same period, Australians in relationships went from having sex about 1.8 times a week to 1.4 times. Finland’s “Finsex” study found declines in intercourse frequency, along with rising rates of masturbation.

In the Netherlands, the median age at which people first have intercourse rose from 17.1 in 2012 to 18.6 in 2017, and other types of physical contact also got pushed back, even kissing. This news was greeted not with universal relief, as in the United States, but with some concern. The Dutch pride themselves on having some of the world’s highest rates of adolescent and young-adult well-being. If people skip a crucial phase of development, one educator warned—a stage that includes not only flirting and kissing but dealing with heartbreak and disappointment—might they be unprepared for the challenges of adult life?

Meanwhile, Sweden, which hadn’t done a national sex study in 20 years, recently launched one, alarmed by polling suggesting that Swedes, too, were having less sex. The country, which has one of the highest birth rates in Europe, is apparently disinclined to risk its fecundity. “If the social conditions for a good sex life—for example through stress or other unhealthy factors—have deteriorated,” the Swedish health minister at the time wrote in an op-ed explaining the rationale for the study, it is “a political problem.”

This brings us to fertility-challenged Japan, which is in the midst of a demographic crisis and has become something of a case study in the dangers of sexlessness. In 2005, a third of Japanese single people ages 18 to 34 were virgins; by 2015, 43 percent of people in this age group were, and the share who said they did not intend to get married had risen too. (Not that marriage was any guarantee of sexual frequency: A related survey found that 47 percent of married people hadn’t had sex in at least a month.)

For nearly a decade, stories in the Western press have tied Japan’s sexual funk to a rising generation of soushoku danshi—literally, “grass-eating boys.” These “herbivore men,” as they are known in English, are said to be ambivalent about pursuing either women or conventional success. The new taxonomy of Japanese sexlessness also includes terms for groups such as hikikomori (“shut-ins”), parasaito shinguru (“parasite singles,” people who live with their parents beyond their 20s), and otaku (“obsessive fans,” especially of anime and manga)—all of whom are said to contribute to sekkusu shinai shokogun (“celibacy syndrome”).

Early on, most Western accounts of all this had a heavy subtext of “Isn’t Japan wacky?” This tone has slowly given way to a realization that the country’s experience might be less a curiosity than a cautionary tale. Dismal employment prospects played an initial role in driving many men to solitary pursuits—but the culture has since moved to accommodate and even encourage those pursuits. Roland Kelts, a Japanese American writer and longtime Tokyo resident, has described “a generation that found the imperfect or just unexpected demands of real-world relationships with women less enticing than the lure of the virtual libido.”

Let’s consider this lure for a moment. Japan is among the world’s top producersand consumers of porn, and the originator of whole new porn genres, such as bukkake (don’t ask). It is also a global leader in the design of high-end sex dolls. What may be more telling, though, is the extent to which Japan is inventing modes of genital stimulation that no longer bother to evoke old-fashioned sex, by which I mean sex involving more than one person. A recent article in The Economist, titled “Japan’s Sex Industry Is Becoming Less Sexual,” described onakura shops, where men pay to masturbate while female employees watch, and explained that because many younger people see the very idea of intercourse as mendokusai—tiresome—“services that make masturbation more enjoyable are booming.”

In their 2015 book, Modern Romance, the sociologist Eric Klinenberg and the comedian Aziz Ansari (who earlier this year became infamous for a hookup gone awry) describe Ansari’s visit to Japan seeking insights into the future of sex. He concluded that much of what he’d read about herbivore men missed the mark. Herbivores, he found, were “interested in sexual pleasure”—just not “through traditional routes.” Among Japan’s more popular recent innovations, he notes, is “a single-use silicone egg that men fill with lubricant and masturbate inside.” One night in Tokyo, Ansari picks one up at a convenience store, heads back to his hotel, and—sorry for the visual—gives it a go. He finds it cold and awkward, but understands its purpose. “It was a way,” he writes, “to avoid putting yourself out there and having an actual experience with another person.”

From 1992 to 2014, the share of American men who reported masturbating in a given week doubled, to 54 percent, and the share of women more than tripled, to 26 percent. Easy access to porn is part of the story, of course; in 2014, 43 percent of men said they’d watched porn in the past week. The vibrator figures in, too—a major study 10 years ago found that just over half of adult women had used one, and by all indications it has only grown in popularity. (Makes, models, and features have definitely proliferated. If you don’t know your Fun Factory Bi Stronic Fusion pulsator from your Power Toyfriend, you can find them on Amazon, which has these and some 10,000 other options.)

This shift is particularly striking when you consider that Western civilization has had a major hang-up about masturbation going back at least as far as Onan. As Robert T. Michael and his co-authors recount in Sex in America, J. H. Kellogg, the cereal maker, urged American parents of the late 19th century to take extreme measures to keep their children from indulging, including circumcision without anesthetic and application of carbolic acid to the clitoris. Thanks in part to his message, masturbation remained taboo well into the 20th century. By the 1990s, when Michael’s book came out, references to masturbation were still greeted with “nervous titters or with shock and disgust,” despite the fact that the behavior was commonplace.

Today, masturbation is even more common, and fears about its effects—now paired with concerns about digital porn’s ubiquity—are being raised anew by a strange assortment of people, including the psychologist Philip Zimbardo, the director of the famous Stanford Prison Experiment, who is enjoying an unlikely second act as an antiporn activist. In his book Man, Interrupted, Zimbardo warns that “procrasturbation”—his unfortunate portmanteau for procrastination via masturbation—may be leading young men to fail academically, socially, and sexually. Gary Wilson, an Oregon man who runs a website called Your Brain on Porn, makes a similar claim. In a popular tedx talk, which features animal copulation as well as many (human) brain scans, Wilson argues that masturbating to internet porn is addictive, causes structural changes in the brain, and is producing an epidemic of erectile dysfunction.

These messages are echoed and amplified by a Salt Lake City–based nonprofit called Fight the New Drug—the “drug” being porn—which has delivered hundreds of presentations to schools and other organizations around the country, including, this spring, the Kansas City Royals. The website NoFap, an offshoot of a popular Reddit message board founded by a now-retired Google contractor, provides community members (“fapstronauts”) a program to quit “fapping”—masturbating. Further outside the mainstream, the far-right Proud Boys group has a “no wanks” policy, which prohibits masturbating more than once a month. The group’s founder, Gavin McInnes, who also co-founded Vice Media, has said that pornography and masturbation are making Millennials “not even want to pursue relationships.”

The truth appears more complicated. There is scant evidence of an epidemic of erectile dysfunction among young men. And no researcher I spoke with had seen compelling evidence that porn is addictive. As the authors of a recent review of porn research note in The Archives of Sexual Behavior, “The notion of problematic pornography use remains contentious in both academic and popular literature,” while “the mental health community at large is divided as to the addictive versus non-addictive nature of Internet pornography.”

This isn’t to say there’s no correlation between porn use and desire for real-life sex. Ian Kerner, a well-known New York sex therapist and the author of several popular books about sex, told me that while he doesn’t see porn use as unhealthy (he recommends certain types of porn to some patients), he works with a lot of men who, inspired by porn, “are still masturbating like they’re 17,” to the detriment of their sex life. “It’s taking the edge off their desire,” he said. Kerner believes this is why more and more of the women coming to his office in recent years report that they want sex more than their partners do.

In reporting this story, I spoke and corresponded with dozens of 20- and early-30-somethings in hopes of better understanding the sex recession. I can’t know that they were representative, though I did seek out people with a range of experiences. I talked with some who had never had a romantic or sexual relationship, and others who were wildly in love or had busy sex lives or both. Sex may be declining, but most people are still having it—even during an economic recession, most people are employed.

The recession metaphor is imperfect, of course. Most people need jobs; that’s not the case with relationships and sex. I talked with plenty of people who were single and celibate by choice. Even so, I was amazed by how many 20-somethings were deeply unhappy with the sex-and-dating landscape; over and over, people asked me whether things had always been this hard. Despite the diversity of their stories, certain themes emerged.

One recurring theme, predictably enough, was porn. Less expected, perhaps, was the extent to which many people saw their porn life and their sex life as entirely separate things. The wall between the two was not absolute; for one thing, many straight women told me that learning about sex from porn seemed to have given some men dismaying sexual habits. (We’ll get to that later.) But by and large, the two things—partnered sex and solitary porn viewing—existed on separate planes. “My porn taste and partner taste are quite different,” one man in his early 30s told me, explaining that he watches porn about once a week and doesn’t think it has much effect on his sex life. “I watch it knowing it is fiction,” a 22-year-old woman said, adding that she didn’t “internalize” it.

I thought of these comments when Pornhub, the top pornography website, released its list of 2017’s most popular searches. In first place, for the third year running, was lesbian (a category beloved by men and women alike). The new runner-up, however, was hentai—anime, manga, and other animated porn. Porn has never been like real sex, of course, but hentai is not even of this world; unreality is the source of its appeal. In a New York–magazine cover story on porn preferences, Maureen O’Connor described the ways hentai transmogrifies body parts (“eyes bigger than feet, breasts the size of heads, penises thicker than waists”) and eroticizes the supernatural (“sexy human shapes” combine with “candy-colored fur and animal horns, ears, and tails”). In other words, the leading search category for porn involves sex that half the population doesn’t have the equipment to engage in, and the runner-up isn’t carnal so much as hallucinatory.

Many of the younger people I talked with see porn as just one more digital activity—a way of relieving stress, a diversion. It is related to their sex life (or lack thereof) in much the same way social media and binge-watching TV are. As one 24-year-old man emailed me:

The internet has made it so easy to gratify basic social and sexual needs that there’s far less incentive to go out into the “meatworld” and chase those things. This isn’t to say that the internet can give you more satisfaction than sex or relationships, because it doesn’t … [But it can] supply you with just enough satisfaction to placate those imperatives … I think it’s healthy to ask yourself: “If I didn’t have any of this, would I be going out more? Would I be having sex more?” For a lot of people my age, I think the answer is probably yes.

Even people in relationships told me that their digital life seemed to be vying with their sex life. “We’d probably have a lot more sex,” one woman noted, “if we didn’t get home and turn on the TV and start scrolling through our phones.” This seems to defy logic; our hunger for sex is supposed to be primal. Who would pick messing around online over actual messing around?

Teenagers, for one. An intriguing study published last year in the Journal of Population Economics examined the introduction of broadband internet access at the county-by-county level, and found that its arrival explained 7 to 13 percent of the teen-birth-rate decline from 1999 to 2007.

Maybe adolescents are not the hormone-crazed maniacs we sometimes make them out to be. Maybe the human sex drive is more fragile than we thought, and more easily stalled.

2. Hookup Culture and Helicopter Parents

I started high school in 1992, around the time the teen pregnancy and birth rates hit their highest levels in decades, and the median age at which teenagers began having sex was approaching its modern low of 16.9. Women born in 1978, the year I was born, have a dubious honor: We were younger when we started having sex than any group since.

But as the ’90s continued, the teen pregnancy rate began to decline. This development was welcomed—even if experts couldn’t agree on why it was happening. Birth-control advocates naturally pointed to birth control. And yes, teenagers were getting better about using contraceptives, but not sufficiently better to single-handedly explain the change. Christian pro-abstinence groups and backers of abstinence-only education, which received a big funding boost from the 1996 welfare-reform act, also tried to take credit. Yet the teen pregnancy rate was falling even in places that hadn’t adopted abstinence-only curricula, and research has since shown that virginity pledges and abstinence-only education don’t actually beget abstinence.

Still, the trend continued: Each wave of teenagers had sex a little later, and the pregnancy rate kept inching down. You wouldn’t have known either of these things, though, from all the hyperventilating about hookup culture that started in the late ’90s. The New York Times, for example, announced in 1997 that on college campuses, casual sex “seems to be near an all-time high.” It didn’t offer much data to support this, but it did introduce the paper’s readers to the term hooking up, which it defined as “anything from 20 minutes of strenuous kissing to spending the night together fully clothed to sexual intercourse.”

Pretty much ever since, people have been overestimating how much casual sex high-school and college students are having (even, surveys show, students themselves). In the past several years, however, a number of studies and books on hookup culture have begun to correct the record. One of the most thoughtful of these is American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus, by Lisa Wade, a sociology professor at Occidental College. The book draws on detailed journals kept by students at two liberal-arts colleges from 2010 to 2015, as well as on Wade’s conversations with students at 24 other colleges and universities.

Wade sorts the students she followed into three groups. Roughly one-third were what she calls “abstainers”—they opted out of hookup culture entirely. A little more than a third were “dabblers”—they hooked up sometimes, but ambivalently. Less than a quarter were “enthusiasts,” who delighted in hooking up. The remainder were in long-term relationships.

This portrait is compatible with a 2014 study finding that Millennial college students weren’t having more sex or sexual partners than their Gen X predecessors. It also tracks with data from the Online College Social Life Survey, a survey of more than 20,000 college students that was conducted from 2005 to 2011, which found the median number of hookups over a four-year college career to be five—a third of which involved only kissing and touching. The majority of students surveyed said they wished they had more opportunities to find a long-term boyfriend or girlfriend.

When I spoke with Wade recently, she told me that she found the sex decline among teens and 20-somethings completely unsurprising—young people, she said, have always been most likely to have sex in the context of a relationship. “Go back to the point in history where premarital sex became more of a thing, and the conditions that led to it,” she said, referring to how post–World War II anxiety about a man shortage led teen girls in the late 1940s and ’50s to pursue more serious romantic relationships than had been customary before the war. “Young women, at that point, innovate ‘going steady,’ ” Wade said, adding that parents were not entirely happy about the shift away from prewar courtship, which had favored casual, nonexclusive dating. “If you [go out with someone for] one night you might get up to a little bit of necking and petting, but what happens when you spend months with them? It turns out 1957 has the highest rate of teen births in American history.”

“We hook up because we have no social skills. We have no social skills because we hook up.”

In more recent decades, by contrast, teen romantic relationships appear to have grown less common. In 1995, the large longitudinal study known as “Add Health” found that 66 percent of 17-year-old men and 74 percent of 17-year-old women had experienced “a special romantic relationship” in the past 18 months. In 2014, when the Pew Research Center asked 17-year-olds whether they had “ever dated, hooked up with or otherwise had a romantic relationship with another person”—seemingly a broader category than the earlier one—only 46 percent said yes.

So what thwarted teen romance? Adolescence has changed so much in the past 25 years that it’s hard to know where to start. As Jean Twenge wrote in The Atlantic last year, the percentage of teens who report going on dates has decreased alongside the percentage who report other activities associated with entering adulthood, like drinking alcohol, working for pay, going out without one’s parents, and getting a driver’s license.

These shifts coincide with another major change: parents’ increased anxiety about their children’s educational and economic prospects. Among the affluent and educated, especially, this anxiety has led to big changes in what’s expected of teens. “It’s hard to work in sex when the baseball team practices at 6:30, school starts at 8:15, drama club meets at 4:15, the soup kitchen starts serving at 6, and, oh yeah, your screenplay needs completion,” said a man who was a couple of years out of college, thinking back on his high-school years. He added: “There’s immense pressure” from parents and other authority figures “to focus on the self, at the expense of relationships”—pressure, quite a few 20-somethings told me, that extends right on through college.

Malcolm Harris strikes a similar note in his book, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials. Addressing the desexing of the American teenager, he writes:

A decline in unsupervised free time probably contributes a lot. At a basic level, sex at its best is unstructured play with friends, a category of experience that … time diaries … tell us has been decreasing for American adolescents. It takes idle hands to get past first base, and today’s kids have a lot to do.

Marriage 101, one of the most popular undergraduate classes at Northwestern University, was launched in 2001 by William M. Pinsof, a founding father of couples therapy, and Arthur Nielsen, a psychiatry professor. What if you could teach about love, sex, and marriage before people chose a partner, Pinsof and Nielsen wondered—before they developed bad habits? The class was meant to be a sort of preemptive strike against unhappy marriages. Under Alexandra Solomon, the psychology professor who took over the course six years ago, it has become, secondarily, a strike against what she sees as the romantic and sexual stunting of a generation. She assigns students to ask someone else out on a date, for example, something many have never done.

This hasn’t hurt the class’s appeal; during registration, it fills within minutes. (It may or may not have helped that a course with overlapping appeal, Human Sexuality, was discontinued some years back after its professor presided over a demonstration of something called a fucksaw.) Each week during office hours, students wait in line to talk with Solomon, who is also a practicing therapist at the university’s Family Institute, not only about the class but about their love woes and everything they don’t know about healthy and pleasurable sex—which, in many cases, is a lot.

Over the course of numerous conversations, Solomon has come to various conclusions about hookup culture, or what might more accurately be described as lack-of-relationship culture. For one thing, she believes it is both a cause and an effect of social stunting. Or, as one of her students put it to her: “We hook up because we have no social skills. We have no social skills because we hook up.” For another, insofar as her students find themselves choosing between casual sex and no sex, they are doing so because an obvious third option—relationship sex—strikes many of them as not only unattainable but potentially irresponsible. Most Marriage 101 students have had at least one romantic relationship over the course of their college career; the class naturally attracts relationship-oriented students, she points out. Nonetheless, she believes that many students have absorbed the idea that love is secondary to academic and professional success—or, at any rate, is best delayed until those other things have been secured. “Over and over,” she has written, “my undergraduates tell me they try hard not to fall in love during college, imagining that would mess up their plans.”

One Friday afternoon in March, I sat in on a discussion Solomon was hosting for a group of predominantly female graduate students in the Family Institute’s counseling programs, on the challenges of love and sex circa 2018. Over rosé and brownies, students shared thoughts on topics ranging from Aziz Ansari’s notorious date (which had recently been detailed on the website Babe) to the ambiguities of current relationship terminology. “People will be like, ‘We’re dating, we’re exclusive, but we’re not boyfriend and girlfriend.’ What does that mean?” one young woman asked, exasperated. A classmate nodded emphatically. “What does that mean? We’re in a monogamous relationship, but …” She trailed off. Solomon jumped in with a sort of relationship litmus test: “If I get the flu, are you bringing me soup?” Around the conference table, heads shook; not many people were getting (or giving) soup.

The conversation proceeded to why soup-bringing relationships weren’t more common. “You’re supposed to have so much before you can get into a relationship,” one woman offered. Another said that when she was in high school, her parents, who are both professionals with advanced degrees, had discouraged relationships on the grounds that they might diminish her focus. Even today, in graduate school, she was finding the attitude hard to shake. “Now I need to finish school, I need to get a practice going, I need to do this and this, and then I’ll think about love. But by 30, you’re like, What is love? What’s it like to be in love?”

He couldn’t escape the sense that hitting on someone in person had, in a short period of time, gone from normal behavior to borderline creepy.

In early May, I returned to Northwestern to sit in on a Marriage 101 discussion section. I had picked that particular week because the designated topic, “Sex in Intimate Relationships,” seemed relevant. As it happened, though, there wasn’t much talk of sex; the session was mostly consumed by a rapturous conversation about the students’ experiences with something called the “mentor couple” assignment, which had involved interviewing a couple in the community and chronicling their relationship.

“To see a relationship where two people are utterly content and committed,” one woman said, with real conviction, “it’s kind of an aha moment for me.” Another student spoke disbelievingly of her couple’s pre-smartphone courtship. “I couldn’t necessarily relate to it,” she said. “They met, they got each other’s email addresses, they emailed one another, they went on a first date, they knew that they were going to be together. They never had a ‘define the relationship’ moment, because both were on the same page. I was just like, Damn, is that what it’s supposed to be like?” About two-thirds of the way through the allotted discussion time, one of the teaching assistants finally interrupted. “Should we transition?” she asked, tentatively. “I wanted to transition to talk about sex. Which is the topic of this week.”

3. The Tinder Mirage

Simon, a 32-year-old grad student who describes himself as short and balding (“If I wasn’t funny,” he says, “I’d be doomed”), didn’t lack for sex in college. (The names of people who talked with me about their personal lives have been changed.) “I’m outgoing and like to talk, but I am at heart a significant nerd,” he told me when we spoke recently. “I was so happy that college had nerdy women. That was a delight.” Shortly before graduation, he started a relationship that lasted for seven years. When he and his girlfriend broke up, in 2014, he felt like he’d stepped out of a time machine.

Before the relationship, Tinder didn’t exist; nor did iPhones. Simon wasn’t particularly eager to get into another serious relationship right away, but he wanted to have sex. “My first instinct was go to bars,” he said. But each time he went to one, he struck out. He couldn’t escape the sense that hitting on someone in person had, in a short period of time, gone from normal behavior to borderline creepy. His friends set up a Tinder account for him; later, he signed up for Bumble, Match, OkCupid, and Coffee Meets Bagel.

Unless you are exceptionally good-looking, the thing online dating may be best at is sucking up large amounts of time.

He had better luck with Tinder than the other apps, but it was hardly efficient. He figures he swiped right—indicating that he was interested—up to 30 times for every woman who also swiped right on him, thereby triggering a match. But matching was only the beginning; then it was time to start messaging. “I was up to over 10 messages sent for a single message received,” he said. In other words: Nine out of 10 women who matched with Simon after swiping right on him didn’t go on to exchange messages with him. This means that for every 300 women he swiped right on, he had a conversation with just one.

At least among people who don’t use dating apps, the perception exists that they facilitate casual sex with unprecedented efficiency. In reality, unless you are exceptionally good-looking, the thing online dating may be best at is sucking up large amounts of time. As of 2014, when Tinder last released such data, the average user logged in 11 times a day. Men spent 7.2 minutes per session and women spent 8.5 minutes, for a total of about an hour and a half a day. Yet they didn’t get much in return. Today, the company says it logs 1.6 billion swipes a day, and just 26 million matches. And, if Simon’s experience is any indication, the overwhelming majority of matches don’t lead to so much as a two-way text exchange, much less a date, much less sex.

When I talked with Simon, he was seven months into a relationship with a new girlfriend, whom he’d met through another online-dating service. He liked her, and was happy to be on hiatus from Tinder. “It’s like howling into the void for most guys,” he explained, “and like searching for a diamond in a sea of dick pics for most girls.”

So why do people continue to use dating apps? Why not boycott them all? Simon said meeting someone offline seemed like less and less of an option. His parents had met in a chorus a few years after college, but he couldn’t see himself pulling off something similar. “I play volleyball,” he added. “I had somebody on the volleyball team two years ago who I thought was cute, and we’d been playing together for a while.” Simon wanted to ask her out, but ultimately concluded that this would be “incredibly awkward,” even “boorish.”

At first, I wondered whether Simon was being overly genteel, or a little paranoid. But the more people I talked with, the more I came to believe that he was simply describing an emerging cultural reality. “No one approaches anyone in public anymore,” said a teacher in Northern Virginia. “The dating landscape has changed. People are less likely to ask you out in real life now, or even talk to begin with,” said a 28-year-old woman in Los Angeles who volunteered that she had been single for three years.

As romance and its beginnings are segregated from the routines of daily life, there is less and less space for elevator flirtation.

This shift seems to be accelerating amid the national reckoning with sexual assault and harassment, and a concomitant shifting of boundaries. According to a November 2017 Economist/YouGov poll, 17 percent of Americans ages 18 to 29 now believe that a man inviting a woman out for a drink “always” or “usually” constitutes sexual harassment. (Among older groups, much smaller percentages believe this.)

Laurie Mintz, who teaches a popular undergraduate class on the psychology of sexuality at the University of Florida, told me that the #MeToo movement has made her students much more aware of issues surrounding consent. She has heard from many young men who are productively reexamining their past actions and working diligently to learn from the experiences of friends and partners. But others have described less healthy reactions, like avoiding romantic overtures for fear that they might be unwelcome. In my own conversations, men and women alike spoke of a new tentativeness and hesitancy. One woman who described herself as a passionate feminist said she felt empathy for the pressure that heterosexual dating puts on men. “I think I owe it to them, in this current cultural moment particularly, to try to treat them like they’re human beings taking a risk talking to a stranger,” she wrote me. “There are a lot of lonely, confused people out there, who have no idea what to do or how to date.”

I mentioned to several of the people I interviewed for this piece that I’d met my husband in an elevator, in 2001. (We worked on different floors of the same institution, and over the months that followed struck up many more conversations—in the elevator, in the break room, on the walk to the subway.) I was fascinated by the extent to which this prompted other women to sigh and say that they’d just love to meet someone that way. And yet quite a few of them suggested that if a random guy started talking to them in an elevator, they would be weirded out. “Creeper! Get away from me,” one woman imagined thinking. “Anytime we’re in silence, we look at our phones,” explained her friend, nodding. Another woman fantasized to me about what it would be like to have a man hit on her in a bookstore. (She’d be holding a copy of her favorite book. “What’s that book?” he’d say.) But then she seemed to snap out of her reverie, and changed the subject to Sex and the City reruns and how hopelessly dated they seem. “Miranda meets Steve at a bar,” she said, in a tone suggesting that the scenario might as well be out of a Jane Austen novel, for all the relevance it had to her life.

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How could various dating apps be so inefficient at their ostensible purpose—hooking people up—and still be so popular? For one thing, lots of people appear to be using them as a diversion, with limited expectations of meeting up in person. As Iris, who’s 33, told me bitterly, “They’ve gamified interaction. The majority of men on Tinder just swipe right on everybody. They say yes, yes, yes to every woman.”

Stories from other app users bear out the idea of apps as diversions rather than matchmakers. “Getting right-swiped is a good ego boost even if I have no intention of meeting someone,” one man told me. A 28-year-old woman said that she persisted in using dating apps even though she had been abstinent for three years, a fact she attributed to depression and low libido: “I don’t have much inclination to date someone.”

“After a while it just feels exactly the same as getting good at a bubble-popping game. I’m happy to be good at it, but what am I really achieving?” said an app user who described herself as abstinent by choice. Another woman wrote that she was “too lazy” to meet people, adding: “I usually download dating apps on a Tuesday when I’m bored, watching TV … I don’t try very hard.” Yet another woman said that she used an app, but only “after two glasses of white wine—then I promptly delete it after two hours of fruitless swiping.”

Many critiques of online dating, including a 2013 article by Dan Slater in The Atlantic, adapted from his book A Million First Dates, have focused on the idea that too many options can lead to “choice overload,” which in turn leads to dissatisfaction. Online daters, he argued, might be tempted to keep going back for experiences with new people; commitment and marriage might suffer. Michael Rosenfeld, a sociologist who runs a longitudinal study out of Stanford called “How Couples Meet and Stay Together,” questions this hypothesis; his research finds that couples who meet online tend to marry more quickly than other couples, a fact that hardly suggests indecision.

Maybe choice overload applies a little differently than Slater imagined. Maybe the problem is not the people who date and date some more—they might even get married, if Rosenfeld is right—but those who are so daunted that they don’t make it off the couch. This idea came up many times in my conversations with people who described sex and dating lives that had gone into a deep freeze. Some used the term paradox of choice; others referred to option paralysis (a term popularized by Black Mirror); still others invoked fobo (“fear of a better option”).

And yet online dating continues to attract users, in part because many people consider apps less stressful than the alternatives. Lisa Wade suspects that graduates of high-school or college hookup culture may welcome the fact that online dating takes some of the ambiguity out of pairing up (We’ve each opted in; I’m at least a little bit interested in you). The first time my husband and I met up outside work, neither of us was sure whether it was a date. When you find someone via an app, there’s less uncertainty.

As a 27-year-old woman in Philadelphia put it: “I have insecurities that make fun bar flirtation very stressful. I don’t like the Is he into me? moment. I use dating apps because I want it to be clear that this is a date and we are sexually interested in one another. If it doesn’t work out, fine, but there’s never a Is he asking me to hang as a friend or as a date? feeling.” Other people said they liked the fact that on an app, their first exchanges with a prospective date could play out via text rather than in a face-to-face or phone conversation, which had more potential to be awkward.

Anna, who graduated from college three years ago, told me that in school, she struggled to “read” people. Dating apps have been a helpful crutch. “There’s just no ambiguity,” she explained. “This person is interested in me to some extent.” The problem is that the more Anna uses apps, the less she can imagine getting along without them. “I never really learned how to meet people in real life,” she said. She then proceeded to tell me about a guy she knew slightly from college, whom she’d recently bumped into a few times. She found him attractive and wanted to register her interest, but wasn’t sure how to do that outside the context of a college party. Then she remembered that she’d seen his profile on Tinder. “Maybe next time I sign in,” she said, musing aloud, “I’ll just swipe right so I don’t have to do this awkward thing and get rejected.”

Apart from helping people avoid the potential embarrassments (if also, maybe, the exhilaration) of old-fashioned flirting, apps are quite useful to those who are in what economists call “thin markets”—markets with a relatively low number of participants. Sexual minorities, for example, tend to use online dating services at much higher rates than do straight people. (Michael Rosenfeld—whose survey deliberately oversampled gays and lesbians in an effort to compensate for the dearth of research on their dating experiences—finds that “unpartnered gay men and unpartnered lesbians seem to have substantially more active dating lives than do heterosexuals,” a fact he attributes partly to their successful use of apps. This disparity raises the possibility that the sex recession may be a mostly heterosexual phenomenon.)

In all dating markets, apps appear to be most helpful to the highly photogenic. As Emma, a 26-year-old virgin who sporadically tries her luck with online dating, glumly told me, “Dating apps make it easy for hot people—who already have the easiest time.” Christian Rudder, a co-founder of OkCupid (one of the less appearance-centric dating services, in that it encourages detailed written profiles), reported in 2009 that the male users who were rated most physically attractive by female users got 11 times as many messages as the lowest-rated men did; medium-rated men received about four times as many messages. The disparity was starker for women: About two-thirds of messages went to the one-third of women who were rated most physically attractive. A more recent study by researchers at the University of Michigan and the Santa Fe Institute found that online daters of both genders tend to pursue prospective mates who are on average 25 percent more desirable than they are—presumably not a winning strategy.

The very existence of online dating makes it harder for anyone to make an overture in person without seeming inappropriate.

So where does this leave us? Many online daters spend large amounts of time pursuing people who are out of their league. Few of their messages are returned, and even fewer lead to in-person contact. At best, the experience is apt to be bewildering (Why are all these people swiping right on me, then failing to follow through?). But it can also be undermining, even painful. Emma is, by her own description, fat. She is not ashamed of her appearance, and purposefully includes several full-body photos in her dating profiles. Nevertheless, men persist in swiping right on her profile only to taunt her—when I spoke with her, one guy had recently ended a text exchange by sending her a gif of an overweight woman on a treadmill.

An even bigger problem may be the extent to which romantic pursuit is now being cordoned off into a predictable, prearranged online venue, the very existence of which makes it harder for anyone, even those not using the apps, to extend an overture in person without seeming inappropriate. What a miserable impasse.

4. Bad Sex (Painfully Bad)

One especially springlike morning in May, as Debby Herbenick and I walked her baby through a park in Bloomington, Indiana, she shared a bit of advice she sometimes offers students at Indiana University, where she is a leading sex researcher. “If you’re with somebody for the first time,” she said evenly, “don’t choke them, don’t ejaculate on their face, don’t try to have anal sex with them. These are all things that are just unlikely to go over well.”

I’d sought out Herbenick in part because I was intrigued by an article she’d written for The Washington Post proposing that the sex decline might have a silver lining. Herbenick had asked whether we might be seeing, among other things, a retreat from coercive or otherwise unwanted sex. Just a few decades ago, after all, marital rape was still legal in many states. As she pushed her daughter’s stroller, she elaborated on the idea that some of the sex recession’s causes could be a healthy reaction to bad sex—a subset of people “not having sex that they don’t want to have anymore. People feeling more empowered to say ‘No thanks.’ ”

Bloomington is the unofficial capital of American sex research, a status that dates back to the 1940s, when the Indiana University biologist Alfred Kinsey’s pioneering sex surveys inaugurated the field. It retains its standing thanks partly to the productivity of its scientists, and partly to the paucity of sex research at other institutions. In 2009, Herbenick and her colleagues launched the ongoing National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior, which is only the second nationally representative survey to examine Americans’ sex lives in detail—and the first to try to chart them over time. (The previous national survey, out of the University of Chicago, was conducted just once, in 1992. Most other sex research, including Kinsey’s, has used what are known as convenience samples, which don’t represent the population at large. The long-running General Social Survey, which much of Jean Twenge’s research is based upon, is nationally representative, but poses only a few questions about sex.)

I asked Herbenick whether the NSSHB’s findings gave her any hunches about what might have changed since the 1990s. She mentioned the new popularity of sex toys, and a surge in heterosexual anal sex. Back in 1992, the big University of Chicago survey reported that 20 percent of women in their late 20s had tried anal sex; in 2012, the NSSHB found a rate twice that. She also told me about new data suggesting that, compared with previous generations, young people today are more likely to engage in sexual behaviors prevalent in porn, like the ones she warns her students against springing on a partner. All of this might be scaring some people off, she thought, and contributing to the sex decline.

“If you are a young woman,” she added, glancing down at her daughter, “and you’re having sex and somebody tries to choke you, I just don’t know if you’d want to go back for more right away.”

Some of herbenick’s most sobering research concerns the prevalence of painful sex. In 2012, 30 percent of women said they’d experienced pain the last time they’d had vaginal intercourse; during anal intercourse, 72 percent had. Whether or not these rates represent an increase (we have no basis for comparison), they are troublingly high. Moreover, most women don’t tell their partners about their pain. J. Dennis Fortenberry, the chief of adolescent medicine at Indiana University’s medical school and a co-leader of the NSSHB, believes that many girls and women have internalized the idea that physical discomfort goes with being female.

A particularly vivid illustration of this comes from Lucia O’Sullivan, a University of New Brunswick psychology professor who has published research documenting high rates of sexual dysfunction among adolescents and young adults. That work grew out of a lunch several years ago with a physician from the university’s student-health center, who told O’Sullivan that she was deeply concerned by all the vulvar fissures she and her colleagues were seeing in their student patients. These women weren’t reporting rape, but the condition of their genitals showed that they were enduring intercourse that was, literally, undesired. “They were having sex they didn’t want, weren’t aroused by,” O’Sullivan says. The physician told her that the standard of care was to hand the women K‑Y Jelly and send them on their way.

Painful sex is not new, but there’s reason to think that porn may be contributing to some particularly unpleasant early sexual experiences. Studies show that, in the absence of high-quality sex education, teen boys look to porn for help understanding sex—anal sex and other acts women can find painful are ubiquitous in mainstream porn. (This isn’t to say that anal sex has to be painful, but rather that the version most women are experiencing is.) In a series of in-depth interviews, Cicely Marston of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine found that teenage boys experimenting with anal sex—perhaps influenced by what they’ve seen in porn—may find that sudden, unlubricated penetration is more difficult than it looks, and more agonizing for the recipient. Some of her subjects appear to have pressured their partner; others seem to have resorted to what another researcher described to me, clinically, as “nonconsensual substitution of anal for vaginal sex.”

In my interviews with young women, I heard too many iterations to count of “he did something I didn’t like that I later learned is a staple in porn,” choking being one widely cited example. Outside of porn, some people do enjoy what’s known as erotic asphyxiation—they say restricting oxygen to the brain can make for more intense orgasms—but it is dangerous and ranks high on the list of things you shouldn’t do to someone unless asked to. Tess, a 31-year-old woman in San Francisco, mentioned that her past few sexual experiences had been with slightly younger men. “I’ve noticed that they tend to go for choking without prior discussion,” she said. Anna, the woman who described how dating apps could avert awkwardness, told me she’d been choked so many times that at first, she figured it was normal. “A lot of people don’t realize you have to ask,” she said.

As Marina Adshade, a professor at the University of British Columbia who studies the economics of sex and love, said to me, “Men have bad sex and good sex. But when sex is bad for women, it’s really, really bad. If women are avoiding sex, are they trying to avoid the really bad sex?”

Sex takes time to learn under the best of circumstances, and these are not the best of circumstances. Modeling your behavior after what you’ve seen on-screen can lead to what’s known as “spectatoring”—that is, worrying about how you look and sound while you’re having sex, a behavior the sex researchers William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson long ago posited was bad for sexual functioning. Some young women told me they felt pressured to emulate porn actresses—and to achieve orgasm from penetration alone, which most women can’t do. “It took me a while to be comfortable with the fact that I don’t have to be as vocal during sex as the girls seem to be in porn,” a 24-year-old woman in Boston said. A 31-year-old in Phoenix explained that in her experience, porn has made men “expect that they can make any woman orgasm by just pounding away.”

Learning sex in the context of one-off hookups isn’t helping either. Research suggests that, for most people, casual sex tends to be less physically pleasurable than sex with a regular partner. Paula England, a sociologist at NYU who has studied hookup culture extensively, attributes this partly to the importance of “partner-specific sexual skills”—that is, knowing what your partner likes. For women, especially, this varies greatly. One study found that while hooking up with a new partner, only 31 percent of men and 11 percent of women reached orgasm. (By contrast, when people were asked about their most recent sexual encounter in the context of a relationship, 84 percent of men and 67 percent of women said they’d had an orgasm.) Other studies have returned similar results. Of course, many people enjoy encounters that don’t involve orgasms—a third of hookups don’t include acts that could reasonably be expected to lead to one—but the difference between the two contexts is striking. If young people are delaying serious relationships until later in adulthood, more and more of them may be left without any knowledge of what good sex really feels like.

As I was reporting this piece, quite a few people told me that they were taking a break from sex and dating. This tracks with research by Lucia O’Sullivan, who finds that even after young adults’ sex lives start up, they are often paused for long periods of time. Some people told me of sexual and romantic dormancy triggered by assault or depression; others talked about the decision to abstain as if they were taking a sabbatical from an unfulfilling job.

Late one afternoon in February, I met up with Iris, the woman who remarked to me that Tinder had been “gamified,” at the Lemon Collective, a design studio and workshop space in the Petworth neighborhood of Washington, D.C. The collective hosts DIY and design classes as well as courses geared toward the wellness of Millennial women; Valentine’s Day had been celebrated with a wildly oversubscribed real-estate workshop called “House Before Spouse.” (“We don’t need partners to be financially savvy and create personal wealth,” the event’s description said. “Wine and cheese will be served, obviously.”)

As we chatted (over, obviously, wine), Iris despaired at the quality of her recent sexual interactions. “I had such bad sex yesterday, my God, it was so bad,” she said wearily. “He basically got it in and—” She banged a fist against her palm at a furious tempo. It was the first time she’d slept with this man, whom she had met on Tinder, and she wondered aloud whether she could coach him. She was doubtful, though; he was in his 30s—old enough, she thought, to know better.

Iris observed that her female friends, who were mostly single, were finding more and more value in their friendships. “I’m 33, I’ve been dating forever, and, you know, women are better,” she said. “They’re just better.” She hastened to add that men weren’t bad; in fact, she hated how anti-male the conversations around her had grown. Still, she and various platonic female friends—most of whom identified as straight—were starting to play roles in one another’s lives that they might not be playing if they had fulfilling romantic or sexual relationships. For instance, they’d started trading lesbian-porn recommendations, and were getting to know one another’s preferences pretty well. Several women also had a text chain going in which they exchanged nude photos of themselves. “It’s nothing but positivity,” she said, describing the complimentary texts they’d send one another in reply to a photo (“Damn, girl, your tits!”). She wasn’t ready to swear off men entirely. But, she said, “I want good sex.” Or at least, she added, “pretty good sex.”

5. Inhibition

“Millennials don’t like to get naked—if you go to the gym now, everyone under 30 will put their underwear on under the towel, which is a massive cultural shift,” Jonah Disend, the founder of the branding consultancy Redscout, told Bloomberglast year. He said that designs for master-bedroom suites were evolving for much the same reason: “They want their own changing rooms and bathrooms, even in a couple.” The article concluded that however “digitally nonchalant” Millennials might seem—an allusion, maybe, to sexting—“they’re prudish in person.” Fitness facilities across the country are said to be renovating locker rooms in response to the demands of younger clients. “Old-timers, guys that are 60-plus, have no problem with a gang shower,” one gym designer told The New York Times, adding that Millennials require privacy.

Some observers have suggested that a new discomfort with nudity might stem from the fact that, by the mid-1990s, most high schools had stopped requiring students to shower after gym class. Which makes sense—the less time you spend naked, the less comfortable you are being naked. But people may also be newly worried about what they look like naked. A large and growing body of research reports that for both men and women, social-media use is correlated with body dissatisfaction. And a major Dutch study found that among men, frequency of pornography viewing was associated with concern about penis size. I heard much the same from quite a few men (“too hairy, not fit enough, not big enough in terms of penis size,” went one morose litany). According to research by Debby Herbenick, how people feel about their genitals predicts sexual functioning—and somewhere between 20 and 25 percent of people, perhaps influenced by porn or plastic-surgery marketing, feel negatively. The business of labiaplasty has become so lucrative, she told me in an email, “that you will actually see billboards (yes, billboards!) in some cities advertising it.”

As one might imagine, feeling comfortable in your body is good for your sex life. A review of 57 studies examining the relationship between women’s body image and sexual behavior suggests that positive body image is linked to having better sex. Conversely, not feeling comfortable in your own skin complicates sex. If you don’t want your partner to see you getting out of the shower, how is oral sex going to work?

Maybe, for some people, it isn’t. The 2017 iteration of Match.com’s Singles in America survey (co-led by Helen Fisher and the Kinsey Institute’s Justin Garcia) found that single Millennials were 66 percent less likely than members of older generations to enjoy receiving oral sex. Which doesn’t bode particularly well for female pleasure: Among partnered sex acts, cunnilingus is one of the surest ways for women to have orgasms.

Ian Kerner, the New York sex therapist, told me that he works with a lot of men who would like to perform oral sex but are rebuffed by their partner. “I know the stereotype is often that men are the ones who don’t want to perform it, but I find the reverse,” he said. “A lot of women will say when I’m talking to them privately, ‘I just can’t believe that a guy wants to be down there, likes to do that. It’s the ugliest part of my body.’ ” When I asked 20-somethings about oral sex, a pretty sizable minority of women sounded a similar note. “Receiving makes me nervous. It feels more intimate than penetration,” wrote one woman. “I become so self-conscious and find it difficult to enjoy,” wrote another.

Over the past 20 years, the way sex researchers think about desire and arousal has broadened from an initially narrow focus on stimulus to one that sees inhibition as equally, if not more, important. (The term inhibition, for these purposes, means anything that interferes with or prevents arousal, ranging from poor self-image to distractedness.) In her book Come as You Are, Emily Nagoski, who trained at the Kinsey Institute, compares the brain’s excitement system to the gas pedal in a car, and its inhibition system to the brakes. The first turns you on; the second turns you off. For many people, research suggests, the brakes are more sensitive than the accelerator.

That turn-offs matter more than turn-ons may sound commonsensical, but in fact, this insight is at odds with most popular views of sexual problems. When people talk about addressing a lack of desire, they tend to focus on fuel, or stimulation—erotica, Viagra, the K‑Y Jelly they were handing out at the New Brunswick student-health center. These things are helpful to many people in many cases, but they won’t make you want to have sex if your brakes are fully engaged.

In my interviews, inhibition seemed a constant companion to many people who’d been abstinent for a long time. Most of them described abstinence not as something they had embraced (due to religious belief, say) so much as something they’d found themselves backed into as a result of trauma, anxiety, or depression. Dispiritingly but unsurprisingly, sexual assault was invoked by many of the women who said they’d opted out of sex. The other two factors come as no great shock either: Rates of anxiety and depression have been rising among Americans for decades now, and by some accounts have risen quite sharply of late among people in their teens and 20s. Anxiety suppresses desire for most people. And, in a particularly unfortunate catch‑22, both depression and the antidepressants used to treat it can also reduce desire.

“I have a therapist and this is one of the main things we’re working on,” a 28-year-old woman I’ll call April wrote to me, by way of explaining that, owing to intense anxiety, she’d never slept with anyone or been in a relationship. “I’ve had a few kisses & gone to second base (as the kids say) and it really has never been good for me.” When we later spoke by phone, she told me that in adolescence, she’d been shy, overweight, and “very, very afraid of boys.” April isn’t asexual (she gives thanks for her Magic Bullet vibrator). She’s just terrified of intimacy. From time to time she goes on dates with men she meets through her job in the book industry or on an app, but when things get physical, she panics. “I jumped out of someone’s car once to avoid him kissing me,” she said miserably. As we were ending the conversation, she mentioned to me a story by the British writer Helen Oyeyemi, which describes an author of romance novels who is secretly a virgin. “She doesn’t have anyone, and she’s just stuck. It’s kind of a fairy tale—she lives in the garret of a large, old house, writing these romantic stories over and over, but nothing ever happens for her. I think about her all the time.”

In exchanges like these, I was struck by what a paralyzing and vicious cycle unhappiness and abstinence can be. The data show that having sex makes people happier (up to a point, at least; for those in relationships, more than once a week doesn’t seem to bring an additional happiness bump). Yet unhappiness inhibits desire, in the process denying people who are starved of joy one of its potential sources. Are rising rates of unhappiness contributing to the sex recession? Almost certainly. But mightn’t a decline in sex and intimacy also be leading to unhappiness?

Moreover, what research we have on sexually inactive adults suggests that, for those who desire a sex life, there may be such a thing as waiting too long. Among people who are sexually inexperienced at age 18, about 80 percent will become sexually active by the time they are 25. But those who haven’t gained sexual experience by their mid-20s are much less likely to ever do so. The authors of a 2009 study in The Journal of Sexual Medicine speculated that “if a man or woman has not had intercourse by age 25, there is a reasonable chance [he or she] will remain a virgin at least until age 45.” Research by Stanford’s Michael Rosenfeld confirms that, in adulthood, true singledom is a far more stable category than most of us have imagined. Over the course of a year, he reports, only 50 percent of heterosexual single women in their 20s go on any dates—and older women are even less likely to do so.

Other sources of sexual inhibition speak distinctly to the way we live today. For example, sleep deprivation strongly suppresses desire—and sleep quality is imperiled by now-common practices like checking one’s phone overnight. (For women, getting an extra hour of sleep predicts a 14 percent greater likelihood of having sex the next day.) In her new book, Better Sex Through Mindfulness, Lori Brotto, an obstetrics-and-gynecology professor at the University of British Columbia, reviews lab research showing that background distraction of the sort we’re all swimming in now likewise dampens arousal, in both men and women.

How can such little things—a bad night’s sleep, low-grade distraction—defeat something as fundamental as sex? One answer, which I heard from a few quarters, is that our sexual appetites are meant to be easily extinguished. The human race needs sex, but individual humans don’t.

Among the contradictions of our time is this: We live in unprecedented physical safety, and yet something about modern life, very recent modern life, has triggered in many of us autonomic responses associated with danger—anxiety, constant scanning of our surroundings, fitful sleep. Under these circumstances, survival trumps desire. As Emily Nagoski likes to point out, nobody ever died of sexlessness: “We can starve to death, die of dehydration, even die of sleep deprivation. But nobody ever died of not being able to get laid.”

When Toys “R” Us announced this spring—after saying it had been struggling because of falling birth rates—that it would be shutting down, some observers mordantly remarked that it could be added to the list of things that Millennials had destroyed.

Societal changes have a way of inspiring generational pessimism. Other writers, examining the same data I’ve looked at, have produced fretful articles about the future; critics have accused them of stoking panic. And yet there are real causes for concern. One can quibble—if one cares to—about exactly why a particular toy retailer failed. But there’s no escaping that the American birth rate has been falling for a decade.

At first, the drop was attributed to the Great Recession, and then to the possibility that Millennial women were delaying motherhood rather than forgoing it. But a more fundamental change may be under way. In 2017, the U.S. birth rate hit a record low for a second year running. Birth rates are declining among women in their 30s—the age at which everyone supposed more Millennials would start families. As a result, some 500,000 fewer American babies were born in 2017 than in 2007, even though more women were of prime childbearing age. Over the same period, the number of children the average American woman is expected to have fell from 2.1 (the so-called replacement rate, or fertility level required to sustain population levels without immigration) to 1.76. If this trend does not reverse, the long-term demographic and fiscal implications will be significant.

A more immediate concern involves the political consequences of loneliness and alienation. Take for example the online hate and real-life violence waged by the so-called incels—men who claim to be “involuntarily celibate.” Their grievances, which are illegitimate and vile, offer a timely reminder that isolated young people are vulnerable to extremism of every sort. See also the populist discontent roiling Europe, driven in part by adults who have so far failed to achieve the milestones of adulthood: In Italy, half of 25-to-34-year-olds now live with their parents.

When I began working on this story, I expected that these big-picture issues might figure prominently within it. I was pretty sure I’d hear lots of worry about economic insecurity and other contributors to a generally precarious future. I also imagined, more hopefully, a fairly lengthy inquiry into the benefits of loosening social conventions, and of less couple-centric pathways to a happy life. But these expectations have mostly fallen to the side, and my concerns have become more basic.

Humans’ sexual behavior is one of the things that distinguish us from other species: Unlike most apes, and indeed most animals, humans have sex at times and in configurations that make conception not just unlikely but impossible (during pregnancy, menopause, and other infertile periods; with same-sex partners; using body parts that have never issued babies and never will). As a species, we are “bizarre in our nearly continuous practice of sex,” writes the UCLA professor Jared Diamond, who has studied the evolution of human sexuality. “Along with posture and brain size, sexuality completes the trinity of the decisive aspects in which the ancestors of humans and great apes diverged.” True, nobody ever died of not getting laid, but getting laid has proved adaptive over millions of years: We do it because it is fun, because it bonds us to one another, because it makes us happy.

A fulfilling sex life is not necessary for a good life, of course, but lots of research confirms that it contributes to one. Having sex is associated not only with happiness, but with a slew of other health benefits. The relationship between sex and wellness, perhaps unsurprisingly, goes both ways: The better off you are, the better off your sex life is, and vice versa. Unfortunately, the converse is true as well. Not having a partner—sexual or romantic—can be both a cause and an effect of discontent. Moreover, as American social institutions have withered, having a life partner has become a stronger predictor than ever of well-being.

Like economic recessions, the sex recession will probably play out in ways that are uneven and unfair. Those who have many things going for them already—looks, money, psychological resilience, strong social networks—continue to be well positioned to find love and have good sex and, if they so desire, become parents. But intimacy may grow more elusive to those who are on less steady footing.

When, over the course of my reporting, people in their 20s shared with me their hopes and fears and inhibitions, I sometimes felt pangs of recognition. Just as often, though, I was taken aback by what seemed like heartbreaking changes in the way many people were relating—or not relating—to one another. I am not so very much older than the people I talked with for this story, and yet I frequently had the sense of being from a different time.

Sex seems more fraught now. This problem has no single source; the world has changed in so many ways, so quickly. In time, maybe, we will rethink some things: The abysmal state of sex education, which was once a joke but is now, in the age of porn, a disgrace. The dysfunctional relationships so many of us have with our phones and social media, to the detriment of our relationships with humans. Efforts to “protect” teenagers from most everything, including romance, leaving them ill-equipped for both the miseries and the joys of adulthood.

In October, as I was finishing this article, I spoke once more with April, the woman who took comfort in the short story about the romance novelist who was secretly a virgin. She told me that, since we’d last talked, she’d met a man on Tinder whom she really liked. They’d gone on several dates over the summer, and fooled around quite a bit. As terrified as she had been about getting physically and emotionally intimate with another person, she found, to her surprise, that she loved it: “I never thought I would feel that comfortable with someone. It was so much better than I thought it was going to be.”

As things progressed, April figured that, in the name of real intimacy, she should explain to the man that she hadn’t yet had sex. The revelation didn’t go over well. “I told him I was a virgin. And he broke up with me. Beforehand, I figured that was the worst thing that could happen. And then it happened. The worst thing happened.” She paused, and when she spoke again her voice was steadier and more assured. “But I’m still here.”

#psychology #mental health #mental illness #parenting #child development #feminism #anti-feminism #archive #article #sociology

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