New Post has been published on https://holaafrica.org/compulsive-heterosexuality-maybe-you-are-born-with-it-maybe-you-are-a-little-queer/
Compulsive heterosexuality: Maybe you are born with it. Maybe you are a little queer
Here is a question for you: re you straight or is it just compulsory heterosexuality?
In a lot of ways a lot of us don’t think about this. From when we are tiny humans we are paired across the ‘two’ genders.
Awwwwww, such a cute boy you will break little girls hearts.
You will make a pretty wife one day?
Is that your boyfriend?
Straightness is often seen as the default and not only that a very particular type of straightness. One that involves monogamy and babies and marriage and a whole societal set up.
But in this internet age, sexuality is something we are thinking about more and more. Who are we attracted to? Who turns me on? Who makes me think of forever? Why is this Tik Tok of a queer woman licking her lips making me feel some type of way?
These are some real questions.
Despite these deep ponderings we are socialised to think about our sexuality in different ways and one of those tricky sticky ways is to be straight enter – compulsive heterosexuality.
‘Compulsory heterosexuality’ aka ‘Comphet’ aka ‘the idea that heterosexuality is the expected norm’. The phrase “compulsory heterosexuality” originally referred to the assumption by a male-dominated society that the only normal sexual relationship is between a man and a woman.
Adrienne Rich popularized the phrase “compulsory heterosexuality” in her 1980 essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Rich, who died in 2012, was a prominent feminist poet and writer who came out as a lesbian in 1976. In the essay, she argued from a specifically lesbian feminist point of view that heterosexuality is not intrinsic in human beings.
‘Nor is it the only normal sexuality’, Rich said. She further asserted that women can benefit more from relationships with other women than from relationships with men. ‘Heterosexuality may not be a “preference” at all but something that has had to be imposed, managed, organised, propagandised, and maintained by force.’ – Adrienne Rich
After the Am I A Lesbian MasterDoc remerged in the Tik Tok streets folx started thinking about this again. Created by Angali Luiz is tackled the obstacles that many lesbian faced when coming out that were *outside* of the classics i.e. family, religion etc etc. In a Vice interview she said that, ‘I realised I loved women when I was a teenager, but I never quite knew if my attraction for men was real or a social construct I took in as a facet of my identity.’
The Lesbian Masterdoc’s primary focus is the social and internal obstacles known as compulsory heterosexuality and heteronormativity and the internalized homophobia that comes with that. It looks at how people struggled with their feelings because they thought being straight is how they were *supposed* to feel not how they actually felt. Luiz says ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality is the voice in my head that says I must really be het even when I’m in love with a woman.’
And this does not have to be all about love, it can be about who you are attracted to or want to have a sexual engagement with, no matter how deep and intense. Becausee are socialised to believe being straight is the default setting swerving from that even for a second could feel like this big thing, this deep tectonic shift that goes against everything that is holy and natural to human beings. Thus, even something as small as looking at another woman and being like ‘damn, I would love to spend one afternoon pressed against that body’ suddenly feeling like this HUGE diversion from ‘the norm’ and what is natural.
The idea of comphet is harmful, it isn’t hard to see why. By automatically thinking that everyone is cis het and straight then queer, trans and other bodies are erased and marginalised and automatically othered. You are automatically going against society, nature, the natural order of things and are there for ‘deviant’, and with deviancy comes discrimination and sometimes even violence.
Not only that but damn does it make dating *even* harder cause now we all outchea thinking everyone is trying to be heterosexual. And then how do you find someone to sit on your face on a Friday night?
One Cosmo article quotes the awesome co-hosts of Inner Hoe Uprising, Sam Riddle saying that ‘although compulsory heterosexuality can be overt—like a massage parlour using the term “couples massages” as meaning a massage for a man and a woman … it’s often more subtle and insidious.’
“Compulsory heterosexuality is the societal nudge that pushes folks into opting into heterosexual relationships regardless of whether or not they truly desire to do so,” Riddle says.
And it’s not just the queers, comphet has us all by the balls/labia being heterosexual comes with SO MANY rules. CompHet prescribes a whole bunch of things, even to the straights. The idea of compulsory heterosexuality is not simply for queer folx discovering their sexuality but for all folx to sit and truly unpack their identity. Download some programs and apps and not simply just use the default settings. What does your straightness look like?
An article by Maggie Zhou in Refinery29 says that ‘a part of figuring out who you are and what your sexuality is is taking steps to unlearn certain truths from your life.’
Sexuality is so broad and more and more people are beginning to see that although they may not be the lesbian waving a flag at Pride month they might not be completely straight either. With sexuality falling on a spectrum there are so many ways to create and come into, from being strictly dickly to sometimes being romantically attracted to people of the same sex or gender, to only wanting to sleep with a beautiful non-binary pansexual on Thursday nights.
We need to genuinely unpack our romantic and sexual attractions on the spectrum they lay on, sometimes they could match, sometimes they might not. It really is for the best to unpack the ideas we have around our sex and sexuality, not simply accept what we have around us, and this goes for queer and non-queer folx. How are you sitting in your sex, your love, your attraction and your engagements.
Don’t just accept the default settings, download the apps, filters, widgets and wallpapers that you want to make life lovely.
Articles:
So are You Straight or Nah?: Understanding Heteronormativity – HOLAAfrica
Are You Straight Or Is It Just ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality’? – Refinery29
Am I A Lesbian? The Lesbian Masterdoc Is a Popular Source of Answers To This Elusive Question – Autostraddle
Compulsory Heterosexuality: What to Know About the Term “Comphet” You’ve Seen on TikTok – Cosmopolitan
What Is Compulsory Heterosexuality? – ThoughtCo
Check out the Basically…Life Podcast (on all platforms) and our YouTube series We Are F**kin Here for other vibes that show how queers are living, lovin’ and f*ckin.
For more info about all things gender and sexuality download our Touch Manual which has a bunch of info about dating, sexuality, gender, sex and much more!
Also visit our Instagram page and Twitter account for even more great content!
Comment and share your thoughts! Your name and email won’t be published if you don’t want it to.
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okay okay WAIT I was going to pick these at random anyway but like........ “Do you agree that Jane Eyre should be considered a feminist novel?” ..........is it NOT considered a feminist novel?!? since WHEN???? that is just................. how
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Hey, I don’t know if you can help me out but I have a question about fashion history and maybe you know something about that? Recently I’ve seen some videos by two influencial fashion history youtubers claiming that corsets being oppressive is just a modern myth and that back in the day they didn’t negatively impair women’s lives and health. I know that tightlacing wasn’t universal and apparently was mostly worn by fashionable upper class women (as everyday style? Not sure on that one) and (1)
to big events (that’s apparently not bad enough already). They claim that normally-laced corsets for working class women were totally fine and not limiting or unhealthy as they had to work in them and that you could even excercise in them. (And that they’re even good for your posture.) But tbh it just doesn’t seem plausible to me. When I wore modern, non-laced, not-very-tight corsets I already felt very impaired and immobile, eating and sitting was hard and I think you also can’t really breathe into your stomach, which is harmful longterm? Also, consindering that the concept of female excercise has changed a lot over time (look at 50’s gymnastics and modern gymnastics for example) I’m really sceptical about their „you could excercise in them“ claim (you „can“ also run in highheels, yet there is a reason why we wear flat shoes). We still wear so much limiting clothing and make-up today, even an ill-fitted bra or sports bra can harm you, not to mention high heals. I justcan’t imagine that a) (working class) women back then were suddenly not subjected to any social factors that made them endure unpractical fashion just as we do today and b) that the structure of a corset with the purpose of shaping your body (even if not laced super tightly) doesn’t somehow limit you in movement, eating and breathing and could press on your rib-cage long-term, esp. If it’s not perfectly fitted (if we wear ill-fitting underwear then I’m sure that happened to our (poorer ancestors too). But that’s just what seems plausible to me. Maybe my perception is wrong nonetheless? Do you have any insight into that topic? Sorry for the very long message!! I don't have a tumblr blog so I really hope it's not too inconventient or annoying like this.
Hi anon!
I’m not a fashion historian, but I have done some research on corsets and your perception isn’t wrong at all. Corsets are not a good thing (to put it mildly). Personally I find it very disturbing that such a harmful practise done by and to female people in the past, has made a comeback in our time, but I think that the return of the corset is just one more way of making girls and women feel ugly and insecure about our bodies and it’s - of course - also a new way for companies and celebrities to get money out of us. Every few years there seems to be a new trend that capitalism comes up with to make sure they get our money: the no-make up make-up look followed by the trend of conturing followed by the advertising of detox and diet products and now it’s corsets.
For the history behind the corset, I can really recommend this segment from the documentary “The Deadly Fashion Of The Victorians” with the great Suzannah Lipscomb as moderator. The whole documentary is definitely worth a watch, but here is a link to just the “corset part”: link
From the documentary (paraphrasing): What corset a woman wore and how tight it was laced depended on her age and class, but right after we are also told that it was recommended that women wore a corset all the time and there was really no escaping it. Women were considered “loose women” if they didn’t wear a corset. It was mandatory not optional.
I could quote the whole documentary, because it’s so informative! Just watch it for yourself! Suzannah also puts on a corset herself and does some exercises (like walking up a flight of stairs a few times) and I was so worried that she would faint!
If you want to know more about the medical impact of wearing corsets, here is an article about it in the “Royal College Of Surgeons In England”: link
In short, corsets being oppressive is definitely not a modern myth and they greatly impaired women’s lives and health in a negative way. I guess one could argue that yes, corsets can definitely be worn without been restrictive, but that was not the point of a corset historically speaking and therefore there is no empowerment to gain from it. It’s just another dangerous beauty practice that female people (had to engage) engaged in to be seen as “fashionable” and the “right kind of woman”! The more freedom women gained (cue the Suffragette movement!), the more women spoke out about how restrictive and unhealthy corsets actually are. They rebelled against them and wanted them gone, so it’s really ironic that “feminists” in the 21st century are trying to bring it back.
I hope my answer helps you a bit, anon! And to everybody reading this: please correct me if I said something wrong (I’m no expert after all) and/or leave additional information!
Link to the full documentary I mentioned above, if anybody is interested: link
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A brief defence of Selyse Baratheon (kinda)
CW: sexism
Spoiler warning: All A Song of Ice and Fire books
Now, I’m the first one to admit that Selyse Baratheon née Florent is an extremely unpleasant, filled with racism and internalised misogyny (see for instance Jon XI in ADWD… or any ADWD chapter she’s in… or any chapter she’s in generally). But nevertheless, I want to offer a brief defence of her, mostly because I’m tired of seeing her joked about in particular ways (both in story and in the fandom), specifically regarding her looks. This essay will most likely be shorter and have slightly less depth than my usual work, but I just wanted to get my thoughts about this out there.
When we’re first presented to Selyse in the prologue of A Clash with Kings she’s described thusly:
Lady Selyse was as tall as her husband, thin of body and thin of face, with prominent ears, a sharp nose, and the faintest hint of a mustache on her upper lip. She plucked it daily and cursed it regularly, yet it never failed to return. Her eyes were pale, her mouth stern, her voice a whip.
So, the reader immediately gets a description of her that’s not exactly flattering. In Storm of Swords we get a similar description from Davos’ fifth chapter:
Queen Selyse, a pinched thin hard woman with large ears and a hairy upper lip.
By A Dance with Dragons this has evolved to rumours of her having “a great dark beard” according Val (in Jon XI). Jon assures her that it’s only a mustache, but later Val counters:
You lied about the beard. That one has more hair on her chin than I have between my legs.
So, it seems pretty established that most characters think Selyse is ugly and notice this mustache of hers. In the Clash prologue that I started quoting, we also get one of the many mentions of how bad Stannis’ and Selyse’s marriage is:
Stannis had always been uncomfortable around women, even his own wife. When he had gone to King's Landing to sit on Robert's council, he had left Selyse on Dragonstone with their daughter. His letters had been few, his visits fewer; he did his duty in the marriage bed once or twice a year, but took no joy in it, and the sons he had once hoped for had never come.
So, Selyse’s marriage isn’t great, and she hasn’t been able to give her husband the sons he had wished for. Later, in Tyrion III, Littlefinger talks of Stannis’ and Selyse’s marriage like this:
Lord Stannis has spent most of his marriage apart from his wife. Not that I fault him, I'd do the same were I married to Lady Selyse.
So, further confirmation of the unhappy marriage, and further insulting of Selyse (probably of her looks, though it’s not made entirely clear). Then in ASOS Davos IV:
The throne is mine, as Robert's heir. That is law. After me, it must pass to my daughter, unless Selyse should finally give me a son.
My point with all of these quotes is basically to prove two things:
1) Selyse is continually described as ugly, with prominent ears and a mustache.
2) It’s continually pointed out how she hasn’t been able to give Stannis the sons he wants (one could of course argue that this is hardly just her fault…)
This, I argue, essentially makes her a failure as a woman in Westeros (and to a certain degree in our world).
As I’ve written on numerous occasions before, the gender norms of Westeros are very restrictive, and those who break them are generally punished. Based on how much different characters comment on Selyse’s, and other character’s, looks, beauty ideals seem to be part of those gender norms. We can see that Selyse’s body, particularly her ears and mustache, makes her ugly in many people’s eyes. Her body and looks doesn’t confirm to the norm, even less so the ideal. Researcher Denise Malmberg describes how the normative body in contemporary Western society is defined what it is not, for instance too fat, too tall, too short etc. I’m pretty sure we could add hairy and having prominent ears to the list of things an attractive body should not have. As Malmberg points out, women who are not seen as attractive, who aren’t sexualised, is in some ways seen as less of a woman. They’re not womanly, not feminine, not a proper lady. I also find it interesting that Selyse’s mustache in particular is pointed out so often. To me, it immediately brings associations of so called “bearded ladies” who often figured in the “freak-shows” of the 19th century and have remained in the public imagination ever since. As for instance researcher Clare Sears have pointed out, such shows often included people who in some ways broke gendered (and racialised) norms of embodiment, and in that way policed the borders of gender norms (2008). By showing for instance bearded ladies as “freaks” it became apparent to the public that having such a body was unacceptable. I’m not saying that GRRM purposely drew on such history when describing Selyse’s mustache, but I think the description of her looks have a similar effect; that is to show what is unnormal.
When it comes having children, loads of feminists and feminist researcher have written about motherhood’s significance for womanhood, for instance this is something Denise Malmberg mentions as well. Malmberg writes that a “normal” woman is expected to become a mother, and a woman who doesn’t have children is therefore exempt from true womanhood (this is also something I explore in this essay about disability and gender in ASOIAF). Authors such as Jack/Judith Halberstam, Sara Ahmed, Anna Siverskog etc. have all also written about how having children are expected by the heterosexual life script that we’re all expected to follow (2005, 5; 2006, 85; 2016, 14). I did a quick search for scientific articles about childfree women and got an overwhelming amount of results, and to write a complete overview of the topic would take ages. But, for instance, a 2011 article about childfree women in Australia found that childless women were seen as “unnatural” and unwomanly” (Rich, Taket, Graham, Shelley 2011). So, I think that we can conclude, that in general in society, women are expected to have kids. To not have kids is unnatural and unwomanly. The fact then, that Selyse is seen as not capable of giving Stannis a son, contributes to her being a bit of a “failed” woman in the eyes of Westeros.
So, in conclusion, the way Selyse is described in story makes it clear that she fails to live up to the norms and ideals of womanhood. For that I feel sorry for her. That’s it, that’s the defence. As I pointed out in the beginning of this essay, that doesn’t make her less of a horrible person with her racism against Free Folk, and internalised misogyny. That part of her personality should be critiqued, and harshly so. However, her looks are not part of that. It should be possible to criticise her without making fun of her mustache or ears. Such jokes only contribute to already existing sexist views of how people of different genders should act and look.
References
Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke University Press: Durham
Halberstam, Judith. 2005. In a Queer Time and Place. New York: New York University Press.
Malmberg, Denise. 2012. “’To Be Cocky Is to Challenge the Norms’: The Impact of Bodynormativity on Bodily and Sexual Attraction in Relation to Being a Cripple.” lambda Nordica, 17:1-2, 194-216.
Martin, George RR. 2011. A Clash of Kings. Harper Voyager: London.
Martin, George RR. 2011. A Storm of Swords. Harper Voyager: London.
Martin, George RR. 2012. A Dance with Dragons. Harper Voyager: London.
Rich, Stephanie., Taket, Anne., Graham, Melissa. & Julia Shelley. 2011. “‘Unnatural’, ‘Unwomanly’, ‘Uncreditable’ and ‘Undervalued’: The Significance of Being a Childless Woman in Australian Society”. Gend. Issues, (2011)28:226–247.
Sears, Clare. 2008. “Electric Brilliancy: Cross-Dressing Law and Freak Show Displays in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco”, WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly, 36: 3-4, 170-187.
Siverskog, Anna. 2016. Queera livslopp. Att leva och åldras som lhbtq-person I en heteronormativ värld. Linköping: Linköpings universitet.
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@riz-gukgak asked: 7 + 3 + 21? for whatever ship you'd like - or, if you'd prefer a specific one, for fig/ayda!
bookstore!au + meet cute + “for the last time, please stop trying to airdrop me.”
Ayda shouldn’t really have her phone in her pocket while she’s on the clock but she’s also alone at the store, and her manager wouldn’t have cared if they knew, anyway. In reality, she only cares a little because technically she’s breaking store policy but it’s so harmless, and she wants to be able to check the time.
Her watch rests around her left wrist, covering the constellation that’s tattooed there, battery dead at 11:37am. Which. Is simply inconvenient, hence the phone in her back pocket.
She almost forgets it’s there as she stacks a cartfull of children’s books about strong women from history — (it’s a really nice book, hard covers and bright illustrations, and Ayda spends a few minutes thumbing through a copy before putting it on the shelf, wonders idly if she would’ve liked to have a book like that as a child. It’s an excellent concept, she would have probably learned a lot.) — and then her phone vibrates, twice, inappropriately loud and distracting in the near silence of this corner of the store.
“Oh, excuse me,” Ayda says to the perfectly empty aisle of children’s books.
Someone laughs in the other end of the store, where the music theory books and crates full of old vinyls are, and Ayda wonders what could possibly be funny about 10 Piano Pieces for Beginners. People laugh at the strangest things, though, and it’s a nice laugh. She’s glad the customer is having fun, even if she’d never understand why, exactly.
It’s another three copies of InSpyre: The Women Who Changed Spyre shelved before her phone vibrates again and this time, the curiosity which makes her hands itch wins and Ayda reaches into the back pocket of her pants to pull out her phone.
It’s an AirDrop notification which reads “Fig!!” would like to share a photo. Ayda frowns at it and presses Decline.
“You have the wrong person, I’d assume,” she calls out, turning to face the young adult section where a group of teenagers have huddled over the latest novel about magical pirates and have been gasping in hushed tones and reading passages to each other for the past twenty minutes. This is the kind of thing teenagers do, Ayda assumes. Airdropping… memes? Perhaps.
There’s another peel of laughter from the music section. And then, another buzz from the phone in Ayda’s pocket.
Holding one of the nice feminist history for children books to her chest, Ayda sighs and heads over to where the teenagers are, ready to scold them as politely as possible and ask them to please stop trying to involve her in the airdropping of memes, or whatever this is.
The bookstore might not be a library but it is a quiet place, and some order should be maintained.
As she rounds the corner, Ayda glances over to where the music books are, absently looking for whoever’s been laughing at her respectable collection of sheet music for string quartets. She looks up, and a girl with brilliantly purple hair is already looking at her, and grinning, and she’s… striking.
She’s wearing a faded denim jacket and equally worn shorts with combat boots and several rings on her fingers, just as many studs and hoops piercing through her ears.
“Oh, um. Hello,” Ayda hurries to say, realizing that the girl’s smile hasn’t wavered, like they’re in the middle of sharing a joke and Ayda just hasn’t caught up to it just yet. “Are you finding everything you need?”
“Just browsing,” the girl says, and she’s still smiling, and it’s such a nice smile. “You’re Ayda, right?”
Ayda blinks and glances down at her name tag, like she’s briefly forgotten her own name. It’s also the only way this stranger could now it. She nods.
“Can I help you?”
“No, I just assumed… if you’re Ayda, then Ayda’s Phone should be yours, right? Unless one of those girls is also an Ayda in which case I’ve been trying to message one of them and oh my god that would be absolutely embarrassing, this was probably not a great idea—“
“Have you been trying to airdrop me?” Ayda asks, and the disbelief in her voice is only half because this is the last sentence she’d expected to be saying today, or ever.
“Yes! It was supposed to be so smooth but you keep declining,” the girl — her phone had said Fig!! — says, miserably, as she stabs a finger at her phone. Her nails are short and almost the same purple as her hair, except darker, and Ayda doesn’t know why she’s staring as her phone vibrates again.
“There,” Fig!! says, face alight in a grin again as the sound goes off. “Can you accept that now? Please?”
“I’m not supposed to have my phone out on the floor,” Ayda argues, though her hand is tingly with curiosity again. She’s almost reaching for her back pocket.
“Hey, I’m a customer,” Fig argues. “Isn’t it poor customer service to decline my request?” Ayda frowns at her. It technically would be, except what Fig is asking for isn’t strictly work-related and she really doesn’t know how her manager would react to any of this. She’s also not too eager to find out.
“God, I was joking,” Fig adds, in a rush. “Can you imagine if I were that shitty? I swear I’m not a customer-is-always-right kinda person. I’m usually pretty chill, actually, except— look, can you look at your phone? I promise I won’t tell anyone!”
“Well, if you promise,” Ayda says, and only hesitates for another second before pulling out her phone. This time, she accepts the airdrop, and it’s… not memes.
It’s a screenshot of the area map, with a little star scribbled where the bookshop is, and a thick, imperfect circle around the coffee shop across the street, accompanied by three equally messy question marks. When Ayda looks back up, the girl across from her is flushed, a warm pink spreading from her cheeks all the way to the tips of her ears, and so charming in contrast with her dark makeup.
“This was supposed to be so smooth,” she repeats, in an almost-whisper as she gives Ayda a look that could be embarrassed or hopeful depending on how good you are at reading the tilt someone’s eyebrows. Ayda’s unsure.
“Fig, right?” she tries instead, and the girl nods. “Is this an invitation?”
“I… thought this would be cute,” Fig says, quietly, still blushing.
“It is very innovative,” Ayda assures her, which gets her another brilliant grin. “You want to have coffee with me.”
It’s barely a question this time but Fig nods again anyway. By innovative Ayda means this isn’t anything she’s ever done before. But Fig is maybe hopeful and maybe embarrassed and certainly fascinating, so she slips her phone back in her pocket, and says,
“My shift’s done in an hour.”
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The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
It has been at least 8 months since I finished reading this novel, and now I’m finally posting the last part of my review.
Part 3 – Margarita, Feminist Icon or Romantic Cliché?
Spoilers.
The Master, a thirty-something recluse male writer, first sees Margarita walking down the street. She has in her arms a bouquet of yellow flowers. The Master follows her, they exchange hellos and she asks him if he likes her flowers. He says no. She proceeds to throw the flowers in the gutter.
This is not a promising introduction to our heroine: a heroine who is quick to throw something away because a random man dislikes it. The situation doesn’t get any better after that; the two become infatuated with each other, and she becomes obsessed with his writing, with his “genius”, so much so that it is she who names him “The Master”. For me a clichéd classical heroine is characterized by two things: first she is young and pure, pure in spirit and body (i.e. meek and clueless). Secondly, she is hopelessly dedicated to her man, he is all she lives for. Now on the first point Margarita does not qualify, she’s a married woman having an affair with another man, not surprising considering Bulgakov’s taste for married women. But Margarita absolutely fulfils the second criteria: her main characteristic as a character is how unfailingly devoted she is to her lover.
The novel is split into two parts and if it weren’t for the events of the second then her character would be very dull indeed. In the first part most of the action is focused on the Devil���s appearance in Moscow and the chaos his companions inflict on the inhabitants of the city. We’re briefly introduced to the characters of the Master and his lover Margarita. We’re told of how she supported his writing, and how he fell into depression when his novel about Jesus Christ and Pontius Pilate was ostracized by the Russian literary scene. There’s a passage in the novel in which Bulgakov explains that Margarita married young, now years later she’s living in a nice house, she’s a woman of leisure, she has money and her husband is decent enough, so why is she so unhappy? Bulgakov argues that she clearly needs the Master, she needs to live with him in that hole in the wall apartment and share his sorrow and pour herself into his work. Well Bulgakov you missed the mark. Margarita is so insanely attached to the Master’s novel (he gets jealous that she cares more for it than for him) that it seems clear to me that what she really needs isn’t the Master but for herself to get a job as an editor. What she needs is a challenge.
The first part of the novel jumps from character to character in alternating short comedic scenes, it is only in part two that the novel starts to feel more like a novel, it is the first time that more than two chapters (five to be exact) are dedicated to the same storyline: Margarita.
In this second part, one of the Devil’s companions offers Margarita a way to be reunited with her precious lover, whom she hasn’t seen in a long time, ever since he, willingly, disappeared from her. She is given a cream and told to apply it at midnight, she does so and turns into a witch, she feels a sense of liberation, removes all her clothes, grabs a broom and flies out into the night. After a few incidents she then meets the Devil and makes a bargin with him: he offers to reunite her with the Master if she will be the hostess at his Ball for the dead tonight. She accepts and fulfils her part perfectly and in return the Devil delivers her the Master and wishes them a happy life.
I have to say the second part of the novel, which relates to Margarita’s story, is what I enjoyed reading the most, it was a thrill to follow her new freedom and sense of adventure and wonder, and frankly a relief to be following a linear narrative. Margarita is the only character in the novel who takes action, the only one to be brave enough to face the Devil, take on his challenges and gain what she wants in the end.
And yet Margarita became a witch and got involved in the Devil’s business, she’s a heroine but one who gets mixed up with unholy things, and even before that she was an adulterer. In this sense she is a new type of heroine. There is a key moment in the Devil’s Ball when Margarita has to greet the Devil’s guests who are all dead sinners. She greets a woman who is deranged and keeps going on about a handkerchief, when she was alive she worked in a café, the owner “pressed her to join him in the pantry once, and nine months later she gave birth to a boy: she carried him off to the wood and stuffed a handkerchief into his mouth and then buried the boy in the ground. At the trial she said she had nothing to feed the child with.” To this Margarita asks what about the café owner? And one of the Devil’s minions replies: “what ever has the owner got to do with it! After all, he didn’t smother the baby in the wood!”
Now in the afterlife this woman is everyday presented with a handkerchief with a blue border identical to the one she used to kill her child, every day she destroys it and every morning she is presented with it anew, she is being forever tormented by the handkerchief, by her crime. When Margarita finishes her service to the Devil she asks that the torment to this woman be stopped. This shows a higher, more complex level of compassion than we usually see in romantic heroines. It’s easy to show a heroine to be compassionate and charitable to those who are innocent and poor, but here is compassion and understanding of how a person can be driven to acts of evil, and how they can be forgiven. And an acknowledgment of the man’s part in a woman’s ruin.
So apart from the character Margarita, are there any other moments that could tell us what was Bulgakov’s attitude towards women? Well whenever there are public incidents in The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov specifies that there are women screeching and wailing, implying that women will always be the ones to loose composure first and be “hysterical”. A character, angry with himself, exclaims “An idiot, a foolish woman, a coward! Carrion’s what I am, not a man!”. When one of the Devil’s minions approaches Margarita for the first time, he exclaims “Difficult people, these women!” when she is confused by his cryptic messages, a few minutes later he warns her “No dramas, no dramas”.
And then there’s Nakedness, nakedness is an important theme, there are five instances of nakedness:
1. The Devil has a group of four minions, one of whom is a woman, and she is always naked. Her nakedness is used to enthral and surprise her male victims on a number of occasions, but she is also described as a maidservant, who later in the book kneels down and rubs the Devil’s feet.
2. At the Devil’s stage performance in a theatre, his goons offer the people money, which later disappears, and to the women new frocks and shoes, which they exchange their old dresses for and change into on stage behind a curtain. Later on as they are leaving the show the dresses disappear and they are left naked. Nakedness here is used to embarrass.
3. Margarita and her maid turn into witches and go naked, this seems to be about liberation, liberation from social restraints, an abandonment to freedom, to adventure, to mischief.
4. The new witches meet a drunk fat man by a lake. Nakedness here reflects this man’s idiocy.
5. Women and black servants at the Devil’s Ball are naked. All male guests are formally dressed, the female guests wear nothing except for fancy shoes and elaborate headdresses. Serving the party are “motionless naked negroes with silver bands on their heads”. Is it liberating that the women are naked? Or is it just an indulgence for the men to feast their eyes upon? And to make the male readers giddy? Later in the party, the women, (and only the women) take off their shoes and jump into a large pool filled with champagne and get drunk.
After hours and hours and hours of serving as hostess at the Devil’s Ball, Margarita and the Devil are about to part ways, she has fulfilled her part of the bargain and now it is the time for the Devil to fulfil his and return the Master to her. But the Devil says nothing and neither does Margarita. She has worked so hard and been through so much and is about to walk away without demanding what is right: the payment for her services. As she is just about to leave the Devil exclaims: “Correct! (…) That’s the way! (…) never ask for anything! Never anything, and especially of those who are more powerful than you. They’ll make the offer themselves and give everything themselves.” What bullshit. I don’t know how exactly but I grew up with this belief, never ask for anything, if you deserve it, it will be given. What utter bullshit. I read in a study that one contribution to men getting more promotions at work than women was simply because men had more confidence in asking for promotions, whilst women assume that if they do their work well then a promotion should naturally happen. To all women everywhere: if you want something, go for it, ask for it, fight for it.
Bulgakov was a man who wrote a lot of himself into his work, in part 2 of my review I talked about all the similarities between Bulgakov’s struggle with censorship and the Master’s plot, Bulgakov also frequently broke the fourth wall as narrator and commented on the action or wrote things like “Follow me, Reader!”. So it is no surprise that Margarita has some similarities with Bulgakov’s third and final wife, Yelena Shilovskaya, who was a married women when they first met, and during and after Bulgakov’s life fought to get his work published. It seems clear to me that Margarita is a tribute to her.
I can’t say that The Master and Margarita is a feminist text, there are subtle moments of machismo which I feel Bulgakov would not have enough self-awareness to spot, and Margarita’s character has a number of problems, such as having no personal goals or desires outside of simply worshiping the “Master”, but I can say that there is enough to make Margarita a step in the right direction, a step in between a cliché of male desire, and a feminist icon for us women.
Review by Book Hamster
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I’m A Real Wild One....
“Ooh yeah, I’m a wild one
Gotta break it loose
Gonna keep ‘em movin’ wild
Gonna keep a swingin’ baby
I’m a real wild child
The opening tune in Pretty Woman, staring the stunning Julia Roberts is the song that crept into my head when I first saw this photo of Meghan, only she’s no Julia Roberts, and this is not Pretty Woman.
Sigh. Nostalgia. Gets me every time.
Back to reality; Wow! What a week it has been for the Sussexs’! They’re still the Sussexes’s right? It’s hard to keep track of all their “declarations “ these days. They have to be exhausted! It must be tiring desperately trying to stay relevant in the press, though most people would argue that defaming & slandering the press isn’t exactly the best way to go about it.
It’s official; H & M are both suing separate media outlets for... I don’t even know what. First it was over a letter that the Mail on Sunday released, then it was phone hacking of Harry’s cell, and then it turned into phone hacking of Diana... 20 year ago. Sigh. I’m exhausted just trying to keep up with these twos’ antics. Below, an excerpt from NBC News:
Never mind that MM gave her friends express permission to cite the letter to her father in a People Magazine article, after the letter didn’t result in the intended response from her father. She wanted her father to lash out and go to the press with the letter. He didn’t. Months went by. Then, out of nowhere, MM’s 5 “anonymous “ friends went on-record for People, claiming all sorts of half-truths & outright lies. Only then did Thomas Markle decide to speak to the press, to set the record straight.
What a mess. And who is really behind these “palace” statements & Royal lawsuits? Is it Harry? Or is it his wife, under the guise of Harry? The statement wasn’t released on official royal websites. It was released on a sketchy private web address (SussexRoyal.uk), lacking the official monogram of the royals, and allegedly, palace aides knew nothing about it.
Some palace aides claim that H & M are using Shillings Law Firm for the lawsuit & guidance, and they claimed that Shillings advised the couple to release the news about the lawsuit when they did, at the very end of the South Africa tour. That it was not the palaces idea or advice to taint an already iffy tour with news of a legal bombshell. Palace representatives said that Shillings Law do not have an understanding on how palace correspondence or issuing official statements works. I tend to agree.
Shillings Lawfirm has represented celebrities such as Naomi Campbell in the past.
What is it with Smeagle choosing to align herself with people who have less than honorable reputations & have dealt with shady people (Weinstein, Cambell, Clinton’s, Obama’s) & business practices? Convoluted is how much thought she puts into these very important dealings. So, when read that Ellen DeGeneres “applauded” H & M for suing the press, I can assure you, my eyes were rolling.
I personally believe these claims made by H & M were nothing more than a personal attack on Piers Morgan. I believe he was their intended target. Given our current “Cancel Culture”, and how social justice dies it’s thing, H & M thought that Piers would be crucified, possibly even fired, over the claims alone. That is how cancel culture works. But the public is well aware of Meghan & Piers’ history. We know what M did to Piers, as she has done to every one of her family members’ & almost all of her friends. And Meghan is not exactly very well liked. Who’s really going to side with her on this one? Certainly not myself, the public, and certainly not Good Morning Britain or The Daily Mail.
We all know the real Meghan Markle. We see through her facade, her tricks & antics, and we don’t particularly like her. We see her for the social climbing, serial-ghosting, faux-feminist, social justice warrior, Charlatan duchess that she is. People keep asking them why they don’t just go live somewhere as private citizens? The answer is that that is the last thing M wants. Harry may consider it, but M would have none of it. She doesn’t want to be a private citizen. If she did, she would have never married into the royal family, accepted Frogmore Cottage, or her title. She lives for this.
I’m just waiting for one of the titles in circulation to become available, and to see the headlines that “Archie finally gets a title”!
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Alvareider + Pen telling Lydia and the kids about her and Schneider being in a relationship. Bonus: “You’re not good enough for her. I’m sorry, but you’re just not.”
this one was a fun challenge!! because my immediate response was resistance to the idea that anyone other than Victor would react this way, and then i thought i could make it work with Alex–but this fic already wrote that exact scenario really well. so i went in another direction…but i like it.
Penelope x Schneider & Lydia & Elena & Alex, One Day At A Time. Also on AO3.
Penelope knew that however they broke the news, they would have to tell her Mami first. If Lydia found out anyone knew before she did, that would become the entire story–she was already guaranteed to be annoyed that they had kept it a secret for two weeks.
Beyond that, she wasn’t sure what to expect. Her Mami had been trying to adopt Schneider for years now, so that might be a little weird…but while she knew Schneider was terrified of what Lydia would say, Penelope was more worried about the kids.
The divorce and being single again was one thing. Her dating Schneider was much more complicated.
She couldn’t blame Alex if it freaked him out. And Elena might whip out feminist statistics in support, or she could just as easily take offense over some turn of phrase–Penelope never knew what might be coming her way from her eldest anymore, but she usually ended up confused.
While part of her would have been happy to keep sneaking around, and avoid the drama entirely, Penelope was ready to face reality.
They had been on three official dates, plus the first one that only sort-of-counted in her book, since she hadn’t realized it was a date until Schneider kissed her goodnight.
But it wasn’t like she and Schneider had just met–though this stage of their relationship might be new, what they felt for each other wasn’t.
As soon as they’d broken the news to the family, Penelope was going to rip off the next Band-Aid and tell Schneider she was in love with him. She didn’t need more time to sort out her feelings, and it was dumb to worry about scaring him off. This was Schneider; he told her he loved her at least once a week, even before they started dating.
But first, this. She let Schneider in on Saturday morning and waited while her Mami poured his coffee.
He took a seat next to Penelope on the couch, and she raised her voice over the music in the kitchen. “Mami, can you bring your coffee out here? We have something to tell you.”
Lydia half-walked, half-salsaed her way to them without spilling a drop of her coffee, gracefully settling into the chair next to Schneider.
“What is it, Lupita?”
“Well.” She hesitated, and turned to him. He patted her leg reassuringly.
Lydia’s eyes darted between them, widening over the mug in her hands. “Oh…”
“Schneider and I, Mami, we’re-”
“Dating.” She nodded sagely, then aimed a finger at her daughter. “I knew it.”
“You did?”
“Si. I knew you were keeping a secret, Lupita. I just didn’t know what it was. And I did think maybe, when Schneider took you to see that Marvel America movie…I could see something was different.”
Penelope looked at Schneider, at a loss for words. They had seen Captain Marvel together more than a month ago–just as friends. But since they were dating now, arguing over the details didn’t seem worth the trouble.
She could let her Mami have this one. Schneider’s little head tilt told Penelope that he agreed.
After all, Lydia had a mother’s intuition. If she saw what was there before they had admitted it to themselves, it wouldn’t be so surprising.
“You got us, Mami. We didn’t want to tell you until we knew it was serious.”
“And is it–serious?”
Schneider jumped in to answer, sincerity filling his words.
“Yes. Penelope and I…we’re exclusive.”
****
Ideally, they would have told Elena and Alex at the same time, but Elena’s debate team meeting kept her at school past dinner that night.
She and Schneider were waiting when Alex walked in the door.
Even with his eyes glued to his phone–while walking, how did he do that without falling on his face?–her son was good at reading a room. He froze just inside the apartment as soon as he felt them watching him.
“Oh, god, what did I do? The school called you, didn’t they?”
“No.” Penelope frowned. “Should they have? What did you do?”
“Nothing!”
“Alex, you’re not in trouble. Not at the moment, anyway, but if I get a call from St. Bibiana’s you’re going to wish–”
Schneider bumped her shoulder with his, and she let out a slow breath. Right. Not today.
“We’re not here to talk about that. But we do have something to talk to you about.”
He sat in the chair closest to her, sparing Schneider a glance that was only mildly curious. Some days Penelope was certain that she could light her hair on fire and her newest teenager wouldn’t even blink.
“What’s up?”
“Well…I guess I don’t know how to say it except to just say it. But I want you to remember that I love you and I will always be here for you, no matter what. Nothing could change that. Okay?”
Alex tucked his phone into his pocket, finally meeting her gaze. “Am I dying?”
“What? No! Papito, why would you even–”
“I don’t know, all that stuff you were saying about being there for me was really weird. What’s going on?”
“Suddenly this feels anticlimatic.” Penelope rolled her eyes and caught Schneider grinning at her in her peripheral vision. She reached for his hand.
“I’ve been on a few dates lately, and I didn’t want to tell you and Elena about it until I knew I was going to keep seeing the guy. But I am, so. Schneider and I are dating.”
His gaze flew to their joined hands. “Oh.”
Penelope waited for what came next, comforted by the feeling of Schneider’s fingers laced through hers.
“Cool.” Alex pulled his phone back out of his pocket and prepared to check out of the conversation.
“You don’t have anything more to say?” Penelope asked after a moment.
Her son thought it over, then added, “Congratulations?”
After all her anxiety, it felt too easy.
“Alex, I meant…do you have any questions for us?”
“Oh! Yeah.”
“Great.” Penelope braced herself. “Go.”
He turned to Schneider. “Can I go use your Xbox?”
“Uh, sure, dude. You know the code.”
“Thanks!”
Alex saw Penelope gaping at him as left. “We’re done here, right, Mom? He has the giant TV.”
“Yeah, okay.” She gave up looking for trouble where apparently there was none. “Be back in time for dinner.”
As soon as the front door shut behind Alex, she sank back against Schneider’s chest, letting him wrap an arm around her.
She felt him press a kiss to the top of her head. “That was too easy, right? He’s probably not ready to deal with his feelings yet. He’s gonna end up in therapy when he’s thirty-five, talking about how I abandoned him during the most complicated years of his life to hook up with the guy upstairs and he won’t be taking my calls.”
“Breathe.” Schneider chuckled. “By the time Alex is thirty-five he won’t be taking any of our calls. Kids nowadays don’t use their phones for calls if they can text. Get with the program, Pen.”
“Right.” She tipped her head back to look at him. “You really think he’s okay?”
“I do. I think if he was upset, he would tell you.”
“Okay. Well. Great. Elena will be home after dinner–you’re staying, right?”
“Wouldn’t miss it.”
“Then we can wrap this all up with her.”
Her mom hadn’t been nearly as judgmental as Penelope had expected, deep down. And Alex had barely seemed surprised. She took a deep breath, and let it out slowly, feeling better about the day already.
Maybe she had been worried over nothing.
****
“You’re joking.” Elena looked between them that night, brow furrowed, searching for a punchline that didn’t exist.
Okay, not the most promising start. Penelope felt Schneider’s fingers twitch in hers and held on a little tighter.
“This–this is a joke, right? One of those jokes that isn’t funny?”
“No, Elena, this is not a joke. We’re together. I understand if this is a shock, that you may need time, but I’m completely serious right now. Schneider and I are a couple.”
“I don’t need time, Mom. Time won’t–this can’t be happening.”
There was a dull ringing in Penelope’s ears as she watched Elena turn away from her to address Schneider.
“You’re not good enough for her. I’m sorry, but you’re just not.”
Penelope flinched as though she’d been slapped. “Elena!”
“No.” She continued, apologetic but firm. “I love you. We all love you, Schneider, you know we do. You’re family. But…”
Elena sighed, switching her attention to Penelope. “Mom, you tried to keep us out of it, but I remember how it was, with Papi. The drinking, and the fighting. It was so hard. Schneider hasn’t even been sober for two years yet. You’ve already been through so much. You deserve the kind of love that’s easy.”
Schneider was gripping her hand more fiercely now, just shy of turning her knuckles white. She knew him well enough to know that it wasn’t because he disagreed with Elena. It was because he agreed, and he wasn’t going to argue with her daughter, and he didn’t want her to, either.
Schneider never wanted to be the cause of family conflict, no matter how much his silence cost him. That was who he was.
But she couldn’t sit there and let him absorb Elena’s words without standing up for him. That was who she was.
Penelope nodded, squeezing Schneider’s hand before speaking.
“You’re right, mija. I do deserve that. I deserve a love that isn’t a constant struggle, one that feels like roses on Valentine’s Day and breakfast in bed and winning the lottery. A love that makes me feel safe, and happy, and at home.”
“Yes. Exactly.”
Penelope turned and looked at Schneider, who wasn’t watching her while she spoke. His gaze was glued to the floor, resolutely fixed there, like even now he expected the worst.
He should know better than that, after all they’d been through together. After all they had become to each other. But could she really blame him, when she’d never used the words?
Penelope smiled at Schneider, waiting for him to look up. “And that’s exactly what I found.”
His eyes locked on hers, blinking owlishly like they had the first time he’d confided in her about his sobriety. She knew that Schneider wasn’t having trouble seeing her; this wasn’t about his glasses
No, he was having trouble believing what he was seeing. The dummy, Penelope added fondly in her head as he stared.
“I love him,” she told Elena.
But it was him she didn’t look away from. She didn’t want to miss the moment when it clicked. When he understood that she meant it.
“I love you too, Penelope,” Schneider said, and neither of them heard Elena’s little huff as she watched them both forget she was in the room.
He said it like he was in awe of her. Like he was grateful to be allowed to say it.
And she knew that was the real reason Elena huffed a second time, softer now, and got up out of her chair.
This wasn’t the end of it. Penelope wasn’t stupid enough to think that it was. Elena would have more to say, there would be long talks and probably some tears and she was pretty sure she’d have to learn about some of it secondhand because her daughter and Schneider had their own, separate relationship to manage now that hers with him had changed.
But not even Elena in battle mode could miss the way Schneider looked at Penelope. Or the way his voice caressed her name, different than it used to sound. It might not have been a surrender, when Elena stood and tucked her hair behind her ears, but it was at least a white flag.
“Well, since clearly neither of you are going to listen to a word I say after that, I’m going to my room. But Schneider?”
He cleared his throat and straightened up. “Yes.”
“I know that recovery is hard. I read all the literature I could find, when–you know.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m really glad you’re trying, though. I don’t want to see anybody…get hurt.”
“Elena, I promise you–the last thing I want to do is hurt your mom. Or you. Ever again. But you’re right, I don’t deserve her.”
“Hey!”
He shushed Penelope, in such an exaggerated way that even Elena cracked a smile.
“I don’t. And I wake up every day wondering how I got so lucky, that your mom loves me back. She’s the most amazing person I know. Y’know? She’s a hero.”
Elena nodded, serious again, taking in his words along with the emotion in them. “Yeah. She is.”
Penelope watched her daughter hug Schneider hard around his neck–a rare display of affection from her eldest, who had become so much more cautious since the divorce.
“Besides,” Elena added cheerfully before she left them alone, “if there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that if you do hurt her…Mom can kick your ass.”
Schneider gulped hard, and Elena headed to her room with a lighter heart.
“She was just teasing,” he told Penelope, voice tilting up at the end. “She-she was teasing. Right?”
“Schneider, of course she was teasing you!” She kissed him, then pressed her mouth into a firm line as she pulled back. She couldn’t resist. “Probably.”
“Penelope!”
“I just had to see you turn that color.” Her grin faded as she ran a soothing hand up the nape of his neck. “Keep being you, and you won’t have to find out.”
“Right.”
Schneider tipped his face down to rest his forehead against hers. “Hey, Pen.”
“What?”
“We did it. We told them. And we’re okay.”
“You’re right. We are.”
She drew out the last syllable happily, pulling away to look him in the eye.
“This calls for a celebration, don’t you think? Tomorrow morning, how about we all go out to breakfast?”
“Ooh, at a restaurant and everything? Classy. It’s a date–but only if it can be my treat.”
“For all of us? No. No way.”
“Pen, we talked about this.”
“Yes we did, and I did not agree that I was just going to sit back and let you throw your money around…”
Elena caught the end of their argument when she went to the kitchen for something to drink, pausing to watch them through the cutout.
They didn’t seem like they knew she was there, but they still sounded like…them.
If part of her had been not just worried for her mom, but worried for all of them–worried about what this was going to change–she could feel that part of her relaxing.
In her experience, change mostly sucked.
For Schneider and her mom, though, she was willing to hope that this time wouldn’t. Maybe this time, they’d be lucky.
Elena heard her mom laughing as she took water back to her room, and let herself believe, too.
Maybe this time they would all be even happier than before.
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Jealousy Rant
Hello you Rotten Folks,
Due to real life stuff I have been posting less frequently but in particular that long-form stuff. So have this big olde rant on jealousy in BL I may or may not edit more, and may or may not make into audio.
Triggers: for discussion on abusive behavior including physical violence, stalking, controlling behavior, and sexual assault.
Why jealousy is a bad trope:
1.) It’s toxic
2.) It’s non-conflict
3.) It doesn’t actually deal with the roots of jealousy
Are you a fan of Fap’s furious fujoshi fumes, but want a meta-analysis of the genre as a whole instead of specific titles?
Oh no it seems literally no one is asking for that…no one except Faps and FUCK YOU I DO WHAT I WANT HAHA!
So that brings me to “Trouble with Tropes” or heh heh TROUPLES!
Anybody who’s ANY fan of romance has had to stare into the unrelenting green eyes of this trouple. I speak of no other than Jealousy. While I think some of what I’m going to say will resonate with how jealousy is used in fiction on a whole, I’m going to focus on how it’s used in BL…which I feel is a very potent and distilled version of it. Also heaven forbid I read about anything beyond nasty gay tonguings.
What better place to start than What IS jealousy?
Jealousy can cover a variety of topics but in the case of romance here I will be talking specifically about romantic and sexual jealousy.
Dictionary.com states that - feeling or showing suspicion of someone's unfaithfulness in a relationship.
Seems to be the one best suited for a romance but I’d argue that the definition that suits BL’s brand of jealousy is more like
fiercely protective or vigilant of one's rights or possessions.
Why do I say this?
Well because sometimes they literally say their partner is a possession. And even if not outright stated, it is heavily implied in the script.
(examples: Cute Devil + lamb project + Radical blood monster + Others)
There’s also the fact that very rarely is infidelity even considered a legitimate thing that would occur. As I said, the jealousy in BL is very, very POTENT and therefore has escalated beyond a suspicion of COULD BE UNFAITHFUL to a PERSON IS MY PROPERTY AND MY PROPERTY IS NOT ALLOWED TO INTERACT WITH OTHER HUMANS!
Getting real
Before I start ripping through this topic like a repressed teenage boy rips through a heavily populated street in Grand theft Auto… allow me to say that jealousy is a valid emotion to experience. When I rip on this trope it is not my intention to invalidate people who do struggle with jealousy in their relationships. However if you experience an emotion it doesn’t give you carte blanche to behave in any way you please. It’s the same as regular old anger. It’s normal to be angry if a partner forgets to let the dog out so the dog pees on the rug. However beating the shit out of that partner is NOT the right way to handle the forgetfulness or your own anger. Same with jealousy, it’s not unusual to get jealous of someone close to their partner. However that person responding to that with physically removing them, and screaming threats at them is SUPER NOT OKAY! Yet that is not uncommon in BL.
One must also maintain an acceptable amount of jealousy in order to maintain a healthy relationship. It’s not wrong to feel really angry or sad when you’re jealous…but if you get these feelings ALL THE TIME and due to things that are not a threat to your relationship, then that’s something to manage rather than something to blame on your partner. Capice?
TOXIC
The main problem is that the jealousy that is common in BL is HELLA TOXIC! Jealousy is regularly tied to deeper issues of personal insecurity yet the fact there is any kind of insecurity is very rarely mentioned in the text or even subtext of the story. Instead of this becoming a problem that one has to deal with on a personal level, it becomes a problem of the other having to obtain unrealistic standards. Sometimes the source of the jealousy is not a feasible such as a TODDLER NEPHEW or the fact that strangers GLANCE AT THEM when in public and sometimes the source of the jealousy isn’t even human. I have seen characters throw jealousy tantrums over pets, work (school or career orientated), and even the vague concept of a SPORT! So if you’re trying to avoid jealousy in a BL make sure you don’t go to school, don’t have a job, don’t own pets, don’t have family, don’t go out in public, and DEAR GOD don’t have hobbies either! Woah faps those things aren’t humans so it’s not like romantic or sexual jealousy. That’s a fair point…but the thing is the romantic/sexual jealousy functions the exact same way in those non-sexual/romantic scenarios. HOW COULD THAT BE???? Well the jealousy that we see here is in part about being left out when a partner does other things but is in large part about dominance. You got no other man to posture against? Well then just posture at a child, a puppy, or at a basketball why not?
Not only does jealousy crop up to unreasonable situations, an unreasonable amount of time (I’d estimate it occurs in 80% of BL mangas) but the way it’s handled is usually problematic as well.
The most common response I’ve seen to jealousy is the seme grabbing the uke by the wrist, dragging him away from the source of jealousy, pinning him to a wall, explaining that the source of jealousy is bad for the uke or that the uke is behaving poorly/stupidly by simply interacting with the source of jealousy, and they a fit of forceful jealousy induced make-outs or sex occurs that range from consensual to downright very non-consensual. Sometimes the uke will protest this treatment or the characterization of the jealousy fodder but this is pointless because it doesn’t become a conversation. It is simply about the seme controlling the uke and asserting his dominance.
Stalking is also extremely common if there is suspected jealousy. Troubling jealousy behavior can range from as tame as going through someone’s phone without permission to drugging, kidnapping, and nearly killing a partner for one of these trespasses.
HEY HEY HEY NOW! You man-hater! Ukes can be super creepy jealous too! …but ukes are men too… THAT’S NOT THE POINT! You’re acting as if only dominant partners experience jealousy!
No, no, no, you’re right. Ukes get jealous too and sometimes to the same batty degree. Yet, as a whole, uke jealousy tends to be less common and less destructive than jealousy of the seme variety. The most common situation where an uke gets jealous of what a seme is doing is, the uke is pushed into a corner to admit he’s jealous. The seme will reassure the uke he’s misunderstood and they make up. On one hand you can argue that this is a much healthier way to settle a jealousy problem. On another hand you may view this as something of a double standard.
If the uke’s jealous…it’s the uke’s fault and it’s nothing to worry about. If the seme’s jealous...it’s the uke’s fault and it’s deadly serious.
This double standard even extends into how we view violent reactions for either side. If a seme hits an uke for a trespass it will usually be framed as serious and scary. If the uke hits the seme for a trespass it will usually be framed as a silly, and harmless outburst of tsundereness.
…Yes that’s right, the patriarchal set up of the seme/uke dynamic doesn’t just take a shit on ukes….though 9 times out of 10 it’s the ukes that do get the short end of the stick here.
Okay but let’s get the root of the problem…why is jealousy used?
If you’re a person who is not a bitter feminist killjoy who says aggravating SJW shit like, “TOXIC MONOGOMY CULTURE OPRRESSES MY GENDER NEUTRAL GENITLES” you may argue that jealousy is romantic. I personally don’t think it is, but you’re fully allowed to view jealousy, as a concept, as a touching display of vulnerability and investment in a relationship.
However if you’re a cynical over-thinking fujoshi brimming with resentment to the genre you’ve mistakeningly dedicated your free time to, you may say the frequent use of jealousy is simply because it’s EASY WRITING!
It’s handy throw-away drama you can use in an established relationship that won’t have deeper ramifications for the relationship even if it’s on-going. You can solve this pretty easily at any given point or decide to reintroduce it despite it previously being wrapped up. You can use this almost TOTALLY regardless of either of the characters’ personalities or back stories. It’s good for a quick antagonist, or to tantalize fans with a different flavor of sexual tension. This is usually dependent on the gender of the jealousy fodder.
Ugh I’ve heard you use the term ~jealousy fodder~ like a billion times. Why do you call it that?
Because these characters rarely have anything going for them besides the fact they’re the conflict du-jour. You’d be hard pressed to learn an interest of the fodder’s outside of “TRYING TO BANG PROTAG!” and they rarely do anything else in the story besides create this shallow drama. Sometimes the jealousy drama is totally auxiliary to the main conflict of the story to boot. If you’re lucky and ONLY if you’re lucky the fodder will be shuffled into another couple. Sometimes you won’t even see this jealousy used in a love triangle way. It’s usually pretty obvious from the beginning that the protag is going to choose even if the other option is an objectively better person and choice for them.
In my years of reading BL I have only encountered 2 instances of a character being jealous and the other character ACTUALLY cheats on him. (Zetsuai Bronze and Totally Captivated.) Now people have different standards of what “cheating” is. Some goes so far as to say that “Thinking about cheating” is CHEATING. Even by that (pretty ridged standard) I would still say only the above.
Despite this low, low number, I see jealousy used in manga 80% of the time. Are you picking up what I’m putting down here? A breach of actual trust is not actually going to happen…99.99% of the time. Oh but what if the jealousy is something a character has to work through to feel less anxious? Excellent idea! I’ve seen that approach FUCKING ONCE! (Café Latte Rhapsody) So if there is no actual threat of trust breaching and it’s not something either of them has to work through on a mental or emotional level….WHAT KIND OF CONFLICT IS THAT?
NON-FUCKING-CONFLICT IS WHAT!
I’d be much more entertained by staring into my own fucking bellybutton….but faps obviously you would since you navel-gaze as if you have a gemstone there. IF I BELIEVE HARD ENOUGH I’LL BECOME I CRYSTAL GEM OKAY!?!?!?!?
Eh-hem!
But you will see jealousy commonly used in one instance of actually plot important drama. And that is the ever, important, cementing of a couple’s relationship. I call the use of jealousy in this instance:
TOY TRUCK CONSUMATION
Da fuck is that? Toy truck consummation is a character will only realize he truly cares romantically for someone because he experiences jealousy. He didn’t want that toy truck until somebody else was going to play with it. Thankfully I don’t see this often outside of high school settings. A grown-ass man who is that fucking blind to his own feelings and childish enough to throw a tantrum out of it, can fuck RIGHT OFF! ….Though honestly teenagers behaving that way is still deeply shitty.
This is not an auspicious beginning to a loving relationship, if it’s formulated over single-mindedly hating a 3rd party, a 3rd party that is typically on good-terms with the target of affection. So, a relationship we’re supposed to root for is predicated on a dude swooping in and ripping a valued person away from them for entirely selfish reasons. I wouldn’t consider it dreamy if a seme threw an uke’s beloved play station 4 out the window because it holds the ukes attention sometimes. I consider it even less dreamy when it’s something even more valued like yanno a friend. (Though of course this can happen from the uke to the seme as well.) While sometimes, this individual is romantically interested in one of our leads…I’d say a good half the time if not more…they’re not at all.
“Why are you losing your mind over someone, you’re not dating, hanging out with their friend? Even if the friend very obviously has 0 romantic or sexual interest in them? Is it because you’re an anal fungus that causes people to shit their pants for no reason? It’s probably because you’re a parasitic ass mushroom that makes people poop uncontrollably”
This, also, is pretty damn lazy. Writing someone coming to grips with a difficult emotion is hard in itself. Writers will usually use 3rd parties to help bounce information back to a struggling individual to help give them insight. And that can be used in this case as well! Interacting with another couple, talking to someone who’s an out LGBTQ person, or even just a friend or relative that can relate! However all of that is harder to pull off as melodramatically as a petty fuck-lord gut-punching a jealousy fodder out of the blue. Hoo boy sonny! We should have a parade in his honor cause golly isn’t that the way to handle your problems!
But what if the jealousy fodder was really after them?
Then I would say the story may feature the trope….
Irrational jealousy magiced into rational jealousy!
What I mean is that there is a dominant that appears to be irrationally jealous. There is no indication in the text the jealousy fodder is not on the up and up and the dominant is not privy to classified documents that make him secretly suspicious. However turns out the harmless friend, acquaintance, co-worker, boss, mail man etc is actually a heartless rapist just trying to lower the submissive’s guard.
This trope makes me foam at the mouth because not only is it cheap, cliché, and annoying but it justifies abusive behavior. It states that No matter what crazy shit that lunatic boyfriend of yours spouts he’s fucking infallible. If he tells you that the atmosphere has become poisonous to you and the only breathable air is in his testicles, you better clamp down on that cocktail wiener like a pit-bull because any damn self-serving nonsense he spews must be followed to the fucking letter. Why? Because he is a mind-reader, a genius, and a clairvoyant with flawless judgment by nature of being born a DOMINANT MAN! TA-DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!!
May I just add this is not a trope specific to BL but a trope that makes me want to drink into a stupor each time I see it.
Well if you’re so fucking relationship savy, how would you handle jealousy in stories huh!?
…By actually tackling the causes of jealousy which are very rarely acknowledged in BL. As far as I can tell there are 3 major roots of jealousy.
1.) Insecurity – I am not a good enough partner so my significant other is going to drop me as soon as they find somebody better.
2.) Distrust – My partner does not respect our monogamous agreement and will sleep with other people if they can get away with it.
3.) Missing out - I feel left out if my partner is doing something without me.
I have seen all three roots play a role in fictional jealousy outbursts and they’re usually tied intimately together. However the 1st two are the keys here.
Mistrust is an interesting situation because 99% of the time the mistrust is not that the partner will sleep around given the chance. However the mistrust is shown as more of a, “I cannot trust my partner to avoid situations where they’ll be sexually assaulted.”
While this is framed as a jealousy issue at times, I don’t think it should. Why? If a character is sexually assaulted it is NOT the victims fault. But haha welcome to the 50 foot deep pit of backwards sexual politics that is BL. YOU’RE WELCOME!
Insecurity plays a large role in BL jealousy…but I have only seen it addressed directly as a failing of personal confidence once. (Café Latte Rhapsody)
Most of the time characters that are subtextualy highly insecure are portrayed as powerful and that their jealousy tantrums is just ~how strong men act~ rather than ~they obviously hate themselves and fear their partner would find someone better.~
I’ll be quite frank, a lot of the time…they’re correct the uke could do a lot better than the jerkass seme they’re saddled with. However, instead of changing their negative behavior for the better they just control the uke’s every movements which is yanno not doing the uke OR the seme any favors. Sometimes this functions realistically in a story like in Space Between where Riki is an unwilling sex slave and Iason keeps him under his thumb. However the majority of them treat this like a normal and healthy relationship…but
Wouldn’t it be better if one is not constantly wracked with fear over their partner leaving them?
Wouldn’t it be better if the other can have friends and leave the house?
I’m not saying the two can’t struggle with issues of jealousy…but I mean…can’t we treat jealousy like something they work on together instead of just,
“I can’t believe you talked to them! I DIDN’T MEAN TO!”
That sound clip? Just play it on loop
“WELP LET’S HAVE THIS SAME EXACT PISSING CONTEST FOR THE 90TH FUCKING TIME! IT’S NOT GOING TO BE DIFFERENT NEXT TIME BECAUSE WE’RE NOT GOING TO TREAT IT LIKE ADULTS WOULD!”
So the problem with jealousy as a trope in romance and BL fiction is thus:
1.) It’s toxic, doesn’t treat it as toxic, and sometimes justifies the toxicity.
2.) It’s pathetic, cliché, non-conflict
3.) It doesn’t really even understand what jealousy is.
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hello everyone! i am red and my life got a little crazy around acceptance and opening time, and i also lost my log in details, which is why i am so late to the party. i promise, i am normally more organised. anyway, here we go:
NOUR THABET is a TWENTY-TWO year old CRIMINOLOGY STUDENT AT MORRIGAN COLLEGE. she identifies as CISFEMALE and uses SHE/HER pronouns. she is the daughter of a TUNESIAN man and a SWEDISH woman. she is HOMOSEXUAL and HOMOROMANTIC, as well as SINGLE. she looks a lot like IMAN MESKINI.
LIKE THIS INTRO AND I WILL COME FLOATING IN YOUR DM’S. IT’S LIKE MAGIC.
TW: ARRANGED MARRIAGE (MENTIONED), INTERNALIZED HOMOPHOBIA (MENTIONED)
WHAT IS NOUR LIKE?
nour is not a happy person, though you wouldn’t say so if you saw her in your day to day life. she is always smiling, happy to help and seems pretty confident in herself, who she is and where she wants to go with her life. she is a feminist and while she doesn’t shout it from the rooftops, she won’t let sexism pass without commenting on it. she is very vocal about her faith, however and is very public about the fact that she is muslim, not only by wearing the hijab but also just by her whole being. she will thank God before eating, she will say the mandatory praise after mentioning allah or his prophets and is always happy to talk about islam. she also studies criminology and is planning to go on and get her master’s degree. she seems to be very comfortable with herself and seems to be thriving but to be honest, that is all a front.
she has parents who care for her, siblings who are really supportive… but she can’t live up to their standards. they don’t know that - because nour is very good at pretending to be the good daughter - but she feel trapped in between the expectations placed on a muslim girl and who she is, what she wants to do with her life.
nour is gay and she has known that since she was twelve. it’s a hard thing to come to terms with when being gay is one of the worst things one can be, at least in her home and her community. for ten years now, she has prayed to wake up and have her deviant thoughts and feelings be gone but that hasn’t worked. it is terrifying, especially because she overheard a conversation between her parents. they think that it’s time, now that she is almost done with her bachelor studies, that nour gets married and focusses on having a family. apparently, they know just the right man. they wouldn’t force her to marry him, she could refuse but they’d expect her to suggest someone. she knows that soon, she’ll have two options: marry a good, muslim man and know that she can never be attracted to him or have any romantic feelings towards him or come out and potentially lose her family and her faith community. she is caught between a rock and a hard place. she also wants to go on and get her master’s, not be a wife and a mother and especially not to a man.
that prospect of marriage and the fact that she wants to be herself, but also wished she could change at the same, the feeling that her desires are wrong, had led to inner turmoil and unrest. unrest that results in sleepless nights. it is then that she feels most trapped, in a house with people she loves but has to lie to, in a room that she finds too small and a stifling darkness that seems to press down on her chest. it is then that she needs to get out, and she goes wandering around the city. she loves the night and it doesn’t scare her. it calms her. it gives her the feeling that she could just leave, go do whatever she wanted and no one would even notice under the cloak of the darkness. she never does though. she always returns home, to her bed, to that stifling room.
WHAT ARE THEIR THOUGHTS ON REMI HEATH, AND HIS MURDER?
she doesn’t know him very well and certainly isn’t rejoicing at his death. in fact, she feels quite guilty. on one of her night strolls, she saw him arguing with someone but can’t for the life of her remember who it was or even what they looked like. she didn’t look for long, never really keen on getting into trouble and when people faught, she didn’t get in between that. she didn’t know how it was going to end and if her parents found out that she snuck out, they’d make all kinds of assumptions about boys and partying and all of that. she just hadn’t been in a position to really stick around, but still, now that she knows what happened after that moment, she wishes she’d done something or at least remembered whom he was fighting with.
THREE HEADCANONS
she has a sweet tooth that is out of this world. she will eat anything that has sugar and a lot of calories.
she loves to wear matching underwear and when her bra and underwear don’t match, she actually feels uncomfortable all day.
she is a registered democrat but is more of a supporter of bernie sanders and people who think along the lines of him. that is something that her parents would be very upset about if they knew, not because of his views but because of his religion which is something that nour absolutely despises.
she is twenty-two and almost done with her bachelor studies. the reason it took so long is because she started her studies when she was nineteen because she had to re-do the first grade, as she just wasn’t up to speed with the other kids.
WANTED CONNECTIONS
think that someone that she moraly has an issue with would be interesting because she doesn’t want to make anyone feel bad, but has a hard time not telling people that what they’re doing is potentially harmful or even offensive to her. i think that it could be interesting to see her be called out on being kind of judgemental sometimes and her dealing with that.
someone whom she has a reciprocal friendship with. maybe someone who makes her feel comfortable talking about her sexuality, as well as her other doubts and fears. maybe this could be someone she meets on the street, whom she doesn’t really know and just in the moment, tells her secret too. someone she just needed to say it to and then expected for them not to know who she was and never see them again. then, she sees them in the light of day and panics. they calm her down and from then on, they build a friendship where she helps them out too. maybe spiritually or just is someone who listens.
look, nour really doesn’t need to have a romantic arc but it would be so amazing to explore. so, someone she is crushing on would be amazing to have in the game. when she tells her she is risking quite a lot and then the aftermath could go in all different kinds of directions. either they feel the same, or it’s unrequited and awkward afterwards or they even use it against her. all of those options seem very interesting to explore.
i’d love for her to get involved with the search for the killer. maybe she goes to the nancy drew or the reporter to say what she saw and so, gets sucked into trying to find out who did it.
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Commie Puke-Faced Panty-Waisted Girly Man
by Don Hall
New comment from Ed Parker on They Learned it from the Wolverines:
It's hard to believe that one author can be so twisted, so wrong, and so proud of it in one article. "Soyboy" doesn't describe him well enough. Don Hall is what GenXers would call a MANGINA. But we Boomers used to call guys like this Commie Puke-Faced Panty-Waisted Girly Men. I suppose it would be pointless to argue that the frame-up on Kavanaugh had nothing to do with any reality outside of Whoopi Goldberg's psychosis, or that the obvious fraud of the recent election was nothing more than the installation of a Chinese puppet by a Chinese-owned Congress, or even that the remake of Red Dawn was censored by the Chinese, as it originally portrayed them as the invaders. Facts don't matter to thong-wearing pajama boys. As a spew, this article was a decent attempt to be obnoxious without being factual, but Donny's efforts were all in vain anyway, as his target audience doesn't read, can't think, and functions primarily on "feewings" manipulated so well in his Public Fool System edumakayshun. I'm sure he's very proud of himself, as any hocker that manages to crawl all the way up the side of a toilet bowl would be, but the intelligent reading public will just flush him down the swirly of irrelevance from whence he came, and where he should have stayed. All you've got is snark, Donny boy, and you're not even very good at that.
Dear Ed—
We at LiterateApe.com don't get too many comments on our articles despite our impressive (at least to us) average 98K unique reads per year, so yours stood out. It also stood out because, in terms of kind of brilliant takedowns, yours is quite the feat.
In 236 words, you manage to include some excellent Trumpian putdowns (soyboy, MANGINA, thong-wearing pajama boy, hocker that manages to crawl all the way up the side of a toilet bowl, and the classic Commie Puke-Faced Panty-Waisted Girly Man), you also adhere to some fantastic (but erroneous) GOP talking points like a champ! "Kavanaugh was framed." "Biden is an illegitimate president because Trump really won." "The Chinese are defrauding our elections (as opposed to the Russians)."
All unleashed due to my observation that guys like you have been pining away for your "Wolverine" moment since we all were in high school, desperately clinging to the possibility that we, too, could avenge Harry Dean Stanton while looking like a teen heartthrob.
I could simply ignore your comment. I could answer it in the comments section. But, no, Ed. You deserve better. You deserve more.
Throughout history, humans have not handled new technologies well. Gutenberg's printing press has been implicated in the Reformation, the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution, all of which had profound effects on their eras. The shift from an earth-centered to a sun-centered universe were unintended consequences in the printing press era. This influx of books, pamphlets, and ideas destroyed the existing paradigm and those in power at the time did not respond well. Excommunications, torture, executions followed the spread of information previously gated from the rabble.
436 years later, Bell received his patent for the telephone. Give or take fifty years or so and a large percentage of American households contained a phone. All of a sudden, when tempers flared and your neighbor needed to be insulted or wrangled, you no longer had to leave your home, walk to his house, and confront him face-to-face. Now, sans the brief time to diffuse the rage, you could pick up the phone, call him, and tell him what a MANGINA he was in an instant.
In the onslaught of the Information Age, we now have the internet. No longer even required to know the neighbor you get to insult, everyone is a neighbor by proximity to a computer screen and some broadband. Instantaneous outrage, immediate written bitchslapping.
This, like the fallout from every invention of new technology in communication indicates, is not the end of all things. It is us getting used to new ways to engage and, because we are humans, fucking it up for a while until the newness wears out.
In the nascent days of digital communication, I found some fun in trolling some people. I recall creating a fake character—Kaufman—and trolling the Chicago Improv Message Board. It was pointless, it was antagonistic, it was a series of namecalling and juvenile bullshit. On the other hand, I was in my twenties and, like all people in their twenties, a bit stupid.
I am, however, curious about grown people who continue to engage with online communication in the same manner.
Specific to your comment, Ed, I can say that the insults are like throwing a basketball at an armless kid. Just bounces off and I stare at you wondering what else you have for me. I've been called a Nazi and a racist by some on the Extreme Left ("The Woke") and that doesn't bother me because it isn't any different than calling me a Unicorn or a Bowl of Potatoes. I'm obviously not those things so why would it bother me?
I can't speak for being a "soyboy" as I'm not entirely certain what that means but I can say I dig meat. Not sure what a MANGINA is but I applaud the creation of the word. I might very well be a MANGINA.
I'm definitely not a Commie. I'm no more in favor of the "Oppressor/Oppressed" binary of Marxist thought than I am a racist. Binary is too simplistic in my opinion. I may be Puke-Faced (subjective), I wear boxer shorts so no panty-waist, and I'm thinking that you see "Girly Man" as a derogatory but I see it as being feminist (which I am).
Still, pretty creative stuff and you managed to evoke "libtard" without using it so my hat goes off to you.
You, by your choices of real info, present yourself as a member of the Alt-Right Tribe and so your insults are pointless and juvenile (like mine were when I was a 22-year old "Kaufman").
The meat of your comment centers on three issues we can disagree about but could use a bit of genuine conversation.
I understand how someone would see the Kavanaugh accusations as merely a "He Said/She Said" situation. The Whoopi Goldberg thing misses me but I can see how someone might disagree that Brett is a rapist. While I don't believe all women in these cases, I believe these women so we'll just have to leave it at that.
As for your contention that the presidential election was fraudulent ("that the obvious fraud of the recent election was nothing more than the installation of a Chinese puppet by a Chinese-owned Congress"), man, there's so much actual data available that disputes everything in that excerpt it's hard to take you seriously. You seem to be a True Believer and I've found that talking to you and your type is more like beating my forehead up against a building or giant rock than dialogue.
Keep in mind, the fact that your comment sort proves the point of my article doesn't mean I dismiss you entirely. I have friends and family who believe in the concept of Christianity and I don't relegate them to idiot status due to the fairy tale to which they ascribe.
As for the remake of Red Dawn I have no opinion on it either way so you may very well be correct that it was censored by the Chinese government. They tend to do that on the regular with Western film so it would not be a big surprise.
My curiosity comes back to why you would feel it necessary or worth your valuable time to write those 236 words?
I suppose one could also ask what pragmatic purpose I had in writing the article in question and my response would be for entertainment purposes in general. I found the idea of men my age being slowly indoctrinated by the pop culture of our youth fascinating. I remembered that the Milius version of Red Dawn was in line with the "Trust the Military/Distrust the Government" propaganda of the Reagan years. In terms of pragmatics, I suppose I thought this was interesting enough to pen and publish. I could be wrong.
What pragmatic purpose would you, Ed, say justifies your response in writing? You don't know me. I don't know you. You decided that the article was so enraging that you needed to respond, not on your own social platforms, but on mine so there must be a reason other than sheer spite?
The landscape of our current version of the same culture wars we Americans have been fighting since the founding of the country aren't that different from the days of incendiary pamphlets distributed by Patrick Henry. The difference, I think, comes into play in the immediacy of response (which eliminates the time to calm your "feewings" and focus your thoughts) and the vast reach the internet provides.
I can't make too many assumptions about you, Ed. I could assume that working IT at Sears for years (which, these days resembles working at a Blockbuster Video as a tech support guy) left you feeling cheated by life. I could assume you sat there in your Sears polo shirt imagining the coming Red Dawn and how you could be a Wolverine yourself—fighting for the freedoms of "real Americans" against the Commie Puke-Faced Panty Waisted Girly Men. I could assume your sad existence led you to open your own firearms school and wear t-shirts that declare your fealty to "Beer & Guns & Bacon & Freedom".
I could but I won't.
I find that kind of assuming makes an ass out of you. You might be a great guy. Or not. I can guarantee you are far more than your online vitriol. Most people are more than what we can see on the surface.
Ask yourself, Ed—why? Why even bother when you know how meaningless and empty your screed will be? Is it a sort of bragging for your friends to see and applaud? “You sure told that pussy what’s what, Ed!”
Is this the person you hoped you’d be when you became the age you’re at now? If not, what went wrong and is it too late to change course?
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My Reputation Story Guess
This could get messy, y’all, but I’m going to attempt to see if I can piece together a narrative if the right to left “15 Taylor’s” theory is true. I’m looking forward to looking back at this in November and seeing if I was totally off or not.
I stand by the idea that each of these songs are likely character perspectives, but I do think they will tell some sort of overarching story.
1. Ready For It
If this theory is correct, RFI would be the first Taylor on the right. It makes sense, as some have already noted because the lyrics play on many themes of jail. He can be my “jailer”, “knew he was a killer”, “knew I was a robber”.
The interesting thing about the song is that if we take the narrative in the video literally, she’s being trapped by the man in the song. Him being the “jailer” and her being locked up means she’s ready to, well, break out of there.
2. Snake Taylor breaks out
Once her character is defamed and she’s called a snake, she comes out to attack those who have wronged her. She’s ready to get revenge, hiss, bite and take back the narrative.
Snake Taylor makes sense here, as the second song on many albums are generally pretty up-tempo.
3. Shake it off Taylor tries and misses
I think it’s pretty telling that “Shake It Off” Taylor is right next to Snake Taylor because a lot of people expected her to “shake off” the Kimye situation or any of the other manufactured drama the press has created.
Shake It Off Taylor also has a nasty attitude in the music video, making me think she tried to move forward but didn’t. Which ultimately...
4. Killed her. She couldn’t handle it.
I don’t think it’s coincidental that OOTW is the 4th track of 1989 and the 4th Taylor from the right. I’m going to take this one step further than “she never made it out of the woods” though, I genuinely think she kinda killed her own reputation.
In her attempt to correct her mistakes and move forward, everything only blew up in her face and now she’s totally lost herself ( a contrast from her “finding herself” in OOTW). She got lost and dragged herself down in the process.
5. You Belong With...Friendship?
This is one of the most hopeful Taylor’s. In this song, She’s trying so hard to get a man but he won’t notice her. To me, it seems like friendship is an important theme, as the “Junior Jewels” shirt has all the names of her more modern friends.
Maybe she is relying on friends to help her find herself again. So she can become the Taylor we all know and love.
But, when that doesn’t work and some of her friends betray her...
6. Someone makes her do..er...something?
The interesting about LWYMMD is that Taylor doesn’t tell us who she’s talking about, which is both strange for Taylor and weird in general. Why keep a statement like this so open-ended?
Well, I think it’s a response to those she felt were on her side and really weren’t. Lashing out at the media, those who hurt her and the evil person people made her out to be. She’s had enough and she’s coming for blood. Reborn and ready to get revenge.
But like I’ve said in the past, this is almost certainly a character.
7. Glamorous Ditz
This really threw me for a loop, but I think the way she portrayed Met Gala Taylor in the music video is really telling.
She plays her as an overdramatic airhead. Which I think means she’s now acting innocent but knows exactly what she’s doing. She’s playing dumb but is ready to carry out her mission of getting back at people.
Although then we have...
8. Reflective VMA Taylor
A lot of the drama around Taylor Swift began with Kanye’s interruption of her. It seems pretty interesting to me that this comes right in the middle of the album and after LWYMMD Taylor. Could this be a song about how Taylor never wanted any of this, but she’s had to deal with it anyway?
In this narrative-arc (that I’ve completely guessed about), this seems like a good point of self-reflection upon the past. Maybe she is re-thinking how she handled things at VMA’s.
Or maybe, just maybe, she’s mad that she didn’t stand up for herself more. Because, as we know, her “I’d like to be excluded from this narrative” note on Twitter was one of the first times she’s had to publicly defend herself.
And this Taylor says that same line in the music video. Suspicious.
9. Gossip Girl Taylor
I say “gossip” because this Taylor is central to all of her feuds. It almost seems like this is the version of her people believe purposefully gets into these feuds for attention and album sales.
Story-wise, I’m not sure exactly what’s going on here, but I think it’s going to be a fascinating song.
10. Fearless again?
Ah-ha! Remember how innocent and fearless she was? This Taylor is emotional, happy and bubbly about everything. I’d expect to hear another country song here and maybe a reflection on a time where there was no drama in her life and she could be her happy, country-loving self.
What a time.
11. We Are Never Ever...Going back to our old selves?
I think it’s fascinating that “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” Taylor would be the last Taylor from any past Taylor look. Which says to me that tracks 12-15 are new Taylor personas. Parts of her persona that we haven’t quite had a good look at yet, but we’ll get to investigate further.
But first, she’s gotta say goodbye to her old selves.
12. Reputation Taylor, the one who comes out on top
It’s interesting, isn’t it, that Rep Taylor is the Queen of The Mountain? Did you ever play that game as a kid? Here it almost seems like she’s saying that she’s coming out on top of her past lives.
She is in control of her reputation because she let the others go. Rep Taylor seems a little nasty to me, but maybe she’s just headstrong and misunderstood.
13. “Blind For Love” Taylor can see perfectly well
I’ve written before about genuinely believing this will be a Kesha collab. Why? The tiger on her shirt looks exactly like Kesha’s tattoo on her old Instagram post.
I thought it was far too coincidental to see “roses” right above the Tiger on that shirt since Kesha’s last name is “rose”. That’s a huge coincidence if true.
And further, look at the font! That looks just like the reputation font.
As far as story, I’d guess after “Rep” Taylor made it out on top, she’s now having fun with her newfound power. She could also be single during this time, meaning she can say “Blind For Love” because it doesn’t hurt her anymore.
14. Stay with me here...Taylor goes full feminist bad*ass
I honestly stan Biker Taylor and I haven’t even heard the song. I love the look and the way she portrays aggressive sexuality with the slit in her dress. I’d also like to highlight what she says in the music video:
“There she goes, playing the victim again”
This is quite telling, as many people these days like to argue that she’s always playing the victim. This makes me think she’s not only on the offensive, she’s taken that victim identity and completely shoved it to the side. And once she’s dealt with that...
15. She shows us exactly who she is now.
Stronger, more powerful and confident in herself, this Taylor reminds me so much of a phoenix rising from the ashes from the short glimpse we’ve seen so far. She’s dressed in red (an important color in Swiftie-land) and the dress seems to have flowers or feathers all over her costume.
Taylor is well known for closing out albums with a sense of hope and positivity. Long Live, Change, Begin Again and Clean were all very forward thinking.
I expect this to fall along the lines of “Clean”, except this time she’s not cleansed of her exes. Now it’s all about moving on from the past.
And honestly, that’s probably why she’s not saying a word until the album comes out. She wants the story of Reputation to speak for itself. A story of losing yourself in the personas people portray of you only to realize you are so much more than that. You are a complex, beautiful human being.
Look no further than the 1989 “Clean speech”:
But, you know, this is all just a fun, educated guess!
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Paul’s Female Co-Workers
by Vicki Priest
Considering that there were no women that had any kind of leadership role in the religion of Israel at the time of Christ, it is truly radical that there are so many women mentioned in the New Testament who promoted the faith and who in fact had leadership roles. Jesus led the way for women to not only find salvation and comfort in him, but to realize what Galatians 3:28 says: “There is neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither slave nor free; there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” That the latter church chose, for the most part, to forget Jesus’ lifting up of women and change words in the translation of Paul’s writings – some are shown below – is unfortunate (to say the least) and makes arguing for the accuracy of many translations more difficult.
But who were Paul’s co-workers, and what level of leadership did they really have? For right now, let’s focus on three: Priscilla, Phoebe, and Junia. There is so much that could be covered that information on their roles is presented in a concise list format:
Priscilla -apparently well-educated, and thus from an influential Roman family.
Priscilla and Aquila, her husband, taught Apollos more about Christianity after they had heard him speak publicly (Act 18:26). Priscilla was the primary teacher, as evidenced by her name being given first. Of the six times she and her husband are mentioned in the NT, she is first four times. “The order of names in ancient times indicated priority of role and importance” (Schmidt 178). St. Chrysostom (AD 347-407) confirmed that Paul placed Priscilla first for good reason. Significantly, whether ahead of her husband or not, she taught a man.
She is acknowledged as being well known by the gentile churches (Romans 16:4). She would not have been well known unless she had leadership functions. Paul refers to her as synergos (Romans 16:3), the same word he used for Timothy and Titus, who preached and taught. She was a “fellow worker” (synergos) withPaul, not a silent and passive female.
One of the oldest and largest catacombs in Rome bears her name, as do several monuments.
No one really knows who wrote the Book of Hebrews, and the suggestion that Priscilla wrote it is not discounted even in the Archaeological Study Bible (Garrett); some suggest, too, that she “polished up” Paul’s letter to the Romans.
Phoebe -carrier of the Roman epistle to Rome from Corinth, a 400 mile journey.
In Romans 16:1-2, Phoebe is referred to as a diakonos, or deacon. “Deaconess” was not a word at that time and was first used in AD 375. The common word “deacon” is most often translated “minister” in the King James Version, though it is rendered “deacon” three times; however, when that word is used with Phoebe, the KJ translators used “servant” instead. Amazingly, the slightly earlier Miles Coverdale bible had kept the word “minister” for Phoebe, but recent translations still use “servant.”
Paul called himself a deacon (diakonos) in 1 Corinthians 3:5, and it is used for Timothy in Acts 19:22. Deacon is used with “co-worker” (synergos) and commonly meant someone who teaches and preaches; the person would have some authority in the church. Another thing to consider is that the term deacon was masculine and only males functioned as deacons in Greek culture. Paul very well knew what he was doing when he used that term for Phoebe.
Paul not only said Phoebe was a deacon, but a ‘prostatis’ (Romans 16:2) as well. Prostatis “meant ‘leading officer’ in the literature at the time the [NT] was written” (Schmidt 181). To us it would mean something like “superintendent.”
Origen (AD 185-254), who was not a feminist, wrote that based on Romans 16:1-2 Phoebe had apostolic authority.
Junia
Junia is found in Romans 16:7, where the name is still often mistranslated “Junias.” The name “Junias” was non-existent at that time. The Archeological Study Bible (Garret, p 1860) notes that “the more common” reading in Greek is “Junia.” She probably was the wife of Adronicus, the other person mentioned in that verse. For the greater part of church history—the first 1300 years—all acknowledged that the person was a female! Why did bible translators in the last several hundred years change Adronicus’ companions name? Because Paul referred to them both as apostles, and outstanding ones at that. St. Chrysostom, St. Jerome, and Peter Abelard all considered the person to be a woman.
Paul did not restrict the word “apostle” to the twelve only (he called James an apostle and interchanged it with the word diakonos), as is common today. Origen wrote that women had “apostolic authority” in the church based on Romans 16.
The note on Romans 16:7 in the Apologetics Study Bible (ASB) goes almost as far as what Origen wrote and thought, but why can’t our Christian culture acknowledge what Paul actually wrote? Interesting, isn’t it? I, the author of this paper, am female, yet I have a bit of a hard time personally accepting female church leaders. I believe my view is based on both personal and cultural factors, but knowing what Paul wrote and what Christ did, I would not argue that a congregation is wrong in having a female leader. This is the note from the ASB (Cabal, p 1704):
Many claim that Junia (or Junias), designating one of Paul’s relatives, could be either a man’s or a woman’s name. In fact, the masculine form, Junias (as a contraction of Junianus), has not been located elsewhere, whereas the feminine Junia is common. Of course, if this person was a woman, this would be an intriguing fact, particularly since Paul called Andronicus and Junia “apostles.” J.D. G. Dunn suggests they were husband and wife—a reasonable assumption. The precise status of all who are called apostles isn’t clear. Some were close associates of the apostles, such as Barnabas (Ac 14:14) and James (Gl 1:19), but also see the Greek term apostolos in 2 Co 8:23 and Php 2:25.
Source: https://withchristianeyes.net/2014/08/28/new-testament-views-of-women-pauls-co-workers/
Works Cited and Recommended Reading
Anonymous. “Women in Ancient Israel.” Bible History Online. n.d. http://www.bible-history.com/court-of-women/women.html(accessed June 2011).
Cabal, Ted, General Editor. The Apologetics Study Bible. Nashville: Holman Bible Publishers, 2007.
Cowles, C.S. A Woman’s Place? Leadership in the Church. Kansas City : Beacon Hill Press, 1993.
Dunn, James, General Editor. Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible.Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2003.
Faulkes, Irene Bonney. “Question of Veils in India.” Dr. Irene Faulkes Articles. 2011. http://revirene.org/Question%20Of%20Veils.htm(accessed June 2011).
Garrett, Duane A, General Editor. NIV Archaeological Study Bible.Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005.Schmidt, Alvin John. How Christianity Changed the World. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001.
—. Veiled and Silenced: How Culture Shaped Sexist Theology. Macon: Mercer University Press, 1989.Zondervan. “Interview with Alvin J. Schmidt.” Zondervan. n.d. http://www.zondervan.com/media/interviews/product/pdf/0310264499_authintrvw.pdf (accessed June 2011).
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Set In Darkness
Chapter: 49
Author name: ShannaraIsles
Rating: M
Warnings: Tooth rotting fluff
Summary: She’s a Modern Girl in Thedas, but it isn’t what she wanted. There’s a scary dose of reality as soon as she arrives. It isn’t her story. People get hurt here; people die here, and there’s no option to reload if you make a bad decision. So what’s stopping her from plunging head first into the Void at the drop of a hat?
Communicate
Loving comfort and easy quiet combined to fill the tower with the sort of gentle stillness only a close pairing can cultivate. Rory lay on her back, nestled against the sheets, her fingers stroking through Cullen's hair where his head rested against her breast. His eyes were watching the play of his fingers over the expanse of her waist where a tiny bulge was discernible - nowhere near big enough to be seen when she was standing, but as she lay on her back, just big enough to be noticed if you knew what you were looking for. Our baby.
"She will be loved," she heard him murmur against her skin, his head tilting to press a kiss just above her navel.
"She?" Rory asked in soft amusement. "Do you know something I don't?"
He smiled faintly, raising himself onto his elbow to lean over her. "With your permission, I intend to hope for a daughter," he informed her tenderly, dipping his head to brush his lips to hers even as he drew the blanket back over her bare skin, protecting her from the chill of the night.
She couldn't help smiling into that kiss. Cullen with a daughter was only too easy to imagine; a little girl would be the apple of his eye, and he would be totally wrapped around one small, pudgy finger from the first moment. But a small part of her rebelled a little, suggesting that it would also be nice to have a son. She didn't have a huge amount of faith in her own ability to raise a little girl in this society; she had a feeling feminist attitudes, however mild, would probably get both her and her daughter into a fair amount of trouble.
"Tell me the truth, sweeting," he murmured then, drawing back to look into her eyes with such solemn sincerity that her breath stuttered in her throat. "Are you truly happy with this news?"
Oh, you had to ask that, didn't you? Rory's smile faded just a little, knowing she couldn't lie to him about this. Even if he was panicking on the inside, they'd already proved that keeping things to themselves did no good at all. They might have to panic together.
"I don't know," she admitted softly, tangling her fingers with his absently, needing something to focus on other than his face. "I'm ... I think I'm more overwhelmed, right now. I don't know anything about pregnancy or babies, and now there's a little life inside me that will need so much help and support. For years. I, um ... I'm a little panicked, really. But in a good way, if that makes any sense."
Cullen's expression softened with understanding, his hidden smile sharing her concerns. "It would be nice to be able to say with absolute truth that I feel nothing but happiness," he agreed in a quiet tone, propping his head on his hand as he settled in beside her. "But I must confess that I, too, am ... uncertain of quite how to do this. My own father was a good man; he raised me and my siblings well, but the real shaping of who I became was done by my mentors in the Templar Order. I want to be a good father, but ... how do I do that? It seems a question that cannot be answered."
"Cullen ..." Lips curved in a tender smile, she raised her hand to stroke his cheek, drawing his eyes to hers. "You are a good man. That's all you need to be a good father."
"But there are darknesses in my past I have not told you," he said fretfully. "Things that would damage your good opinion of me, I am certain. How can I raise a child when I have committed such sins?"
One of these days, you're going to have to tell me about Kinloch and Kirkwall, love. But she couldn't say that aloud. He had to tell her freely, when he was ready, or she might easily damage the trust he had in her.
"For a start, you know that, whatever these sins were, they were wrong," she pointed out softly. "The man you are now would not act the way the man you were did. It's the man you are now who will raise our children. Not a shadow from your past."
"Yet those shadows are still with me." He sighed sadly, looking down at their tangled hands. "My nightmares, the lyrium cravings ... they will never fully cease. I may lose my mind as the time goes by. It pains me to think of a child having to witness such things from their father."
"There is nothing wrong with a child learning that even their parents have nightmares sometimes," she told him in a firm tone. "Nor is there anything wrong with a child knowing that their father is human, and has some weaknesses, like everyone else. And you will not lose your mind. You haven't had any hallucinations for months; today was the first severe headache you've had since we first talked about your withdrawal in Haven. It's improving, love. You are stronger now than you were when we met, and even if you occasionally relapse, you will come out of it more easily now. I'll help you."
A half-hearted smile touched his eyes, just barely tightening the scar that adorned his lip as he lifted his gaze to meet hers once more. "You have such faith in me," he murmured wonderingly. "I can't help but wonder why."
"Because I love you, you ridiculous man," she answered with an easy smile, glad to see his smile flicker fully into being at her fond insult. "Because I know you. Neither of us knows what to expect from being parents. We'll learn together, mistakes and all."
"And you do want this child?" he asked, circling back to his former question with tentative concern. "I have no wish to force motherhood on you, sweeting, if you do not feel ready for it."
Rory huffed a soft laugh, shaking her head. "I don't think anyone ever feels ready to have a baby," she admitted. "But yes, I do want our child. I get giggly when I think about you holding our baby; I feel excited about it. I might be scared of getting things wrong, and the whole ... birthing thing, but I am happy about it."
The relief on his face was mirrored in the way his shoulders relaxed, the way he inched just that little bit closer to her, lips dancing a tender foxtrot over the curve of her temple. "As am I," he agreed affectionately. "Afraid, but excited to meet the child born of our love."
"And if we manage to get married before the birth, no one will be able to make their life difficult because of an accident no one could really foresee," she pointed out with a rueful smile.
"About that ..." Cullen raised his head to look down at her once again, a contemplative look in his eyes. "Are you content to be wed by the Chantry's laws? You don't believe in the Maker."
"But you do," she reminded him. "Most of the world does. Our children will, most likely. I won't ever try to interfere with your faith, Cullen, or to willfully teach our children not to believe in Andraste and the Maker. I'd like them to have that faith; it's something I don't have, another layer of comfort that does more good than harm. But I won't force them to believe, either. I'd like us to be able to teach them, but let them make their own minds up when they're old enough to understand. Is ... is that something you can live with?"
He frowned thoughtfully. "I don't deny that I would like to share my faith with our children," he confessed in a pensive tone. "But unless the Chantry improves, I would not want them to slavishly follow the edicts of an institution that is poisoning the faithful with prejudice and ignorance. I ... I rather like your suggestion. To teach and let them learn, but instill good morals that will guide them when their faith fails."
Rory's nose crinkled as she smiled, her freckles seeming to dance in the candlelight. "I think we just made our first parenting compromise."
Cullen laughed, thumping down onto his back to pull her close, reaching to tuck the blankets warm about her shoulders. Snow was drifting in through the hole in the roof, glittering crystals frolicking in the light cast by the moons overhead to settle against the chilled boards. He frowned thoughtfully at the sight.
"This tower is not suitable for an expectant mother, much less a newborn babe," he mused, stroking his fingers through the copper fall of her unbound hair. "Nor is your daily routine. We will have to fix both."
"Your routine is hardly perfect either," she pointed out, nestled close against his chest in the crook beneath his arm. Her nose felt cold, but thanks to Cullen's internal heating system, the rest of her was toasty warm. Apart from her toes, but her toes were always cold when she settled into bed.
"I am not the one carrying an unborn child," he attempted to argue, grunting as she poked his diaphragm.
"No, you're just the father looking after the one carrying your unborn child," she informed him pointedly. "There's no point in smoothing my way, if you are going to collapse with overwork."
He frowned down at her, but eventually sighed. "A clearer routine, then," he agreed. "If you will make sure you do not over-extend yourself, then neither shall I."
Oh, that's cheating, Rory thought to herself, impressed. They were both a little self-destructive when it came to looking after themselves, but by putting it in those terms, he was making looking after herself all about looking after him.
"I'll have to enlist Evy to help me with that," she admitted prudently. "She has a better eye for what is too much in a single day than I do."
Cullen's eyes narrowed. Apparently he hadn't been expecting her to agree, or to suggest a workable solution to her problem with working too hard. "I'll have to promote a few people," he said finally. "Delegation means nothing if the ones taking the duties have no authority. Rylen and I shall have to create a few new captains."
She smiled to herself, quietly delighted that she'd managed to back him into taking at least some of the weight off his own shoulders. He was still going to obsessively oversee as much as he could, of course - there was no way to prevent that - but at least he'd be able to tell people to talk to someone else on occasion.
He let out a resigned sigh then, adjusting the wrap of his arms about her as he considered the hole in the roof once again. "We may have to go back to sleeping in a tent for a week or so," he said mildly. "That hole needs to be fixed, and a decent stairway created. I'm not having you traversing a ladder up and down twice a day when you're pregnant."
Rory snorted with laughter at his phrasing. "I, um ... may I make a suggestion?" she ventured, knowing that filling that hole was something he likely wasn't too happy with. She hadn't seen it much in the cabin, but he was claustrophobic on occasion, and this tower wasn't the wide space he really needed.
"That depends on the suggestion," Cullen murmured, sounding amused by her timidity.
"Is it possible to put another window in?" she asked softly. "A big one? Over there?" She pointed to the dense wall directly across from them.
"Big windows weaken the defensibility of a structure, Rory," he pointed out with a frown, lifting his head to consider the wall himself. She could see it was an attractive idea, though - there were two windows on the side walls, but they were small, not letting in much light. Once the roof was fixed, it would be dreadfully gloomy up here. "Would you be happy with two smaller windows?" he suggested. "They'll be fully shuttered in case of attack, but ... yes, a little more light in here wouldn't go amiss."
She grinned happily, inching up to kiss his jaw. "That would be lovely," she assured him, glad she'd been able to give him an excuse to open up their space without having to admit to his own discomfort at being enclosed.
"Windows need glass," he muttered, working it through in his mind. "We will have to speak with Josephine about having an artisan come to deal with it."
"Doesn't she have someone already on their way to fix and set the stained glass windows in the hall and the Inquisitor's tower?" Rory asked curiously.
Cullen blinked, his expression clearing. "You're right, she does," he agreed. "I will see if he can be prevailed upon to do a little more work for a generous fee."
"Thank you." She hugged her arm about his chest, burrowing back into the warm nest of blankets and his embrace, ridiculously pleased with herself for managing to get the structural necessities agreed on with the minimum of fuss.
She felt him smile against her hair as he settled back himself, breathing in the scent of the applewood oil she used to keep it tamed. "Sweeting ... may I ask you something?"
Rory opened her eyes, forcing herself back from the brink of sleep. "Anything, love."
His chest expanded and contracted beneath her cheek as he took a slow breath. "My ... initial proposal," he said carefully, as though afraid to broach the subject at all in case she blew up at him again. "I think I know what I said to upset you, but ... I should like to hear it from you. Dorian simply stood there and made me repeat word for word everything that was said. He didn't even tell me if I was right when I worked it out."
A faint quirk of a smile tilted the corner of her mouth. It was rather sweet to hear that; to know that Cullen hadn't had the mistake pointed out to him, but had discovered it with just a little guidance. "It wasn't so much what you said," she admitted softly. "It was what you didn't say. We hadn't even mentioned marriage before I told you about the baby, and suddenly you assumed we would be getting married. It hurt, to think that the only reason anyone would want to marry me is because I was pregnant with their child. As though I have nothing to offer anyone except my ability to have children."
She felt him wince, felt his arms wrap tighter about her. "Why didn't you say that? I knew I had said something wrong, but you left so quickly ... I felt sure you would never forgive me for whatever it was I'd said."
She grimaced, shaking her head against his chest. "I didn't want to shout at you, or say anything I would regret," she said quietly. "I'm not very good at conflict, and when I'm upset, I resort to name-calling and insults, and I didn't want to do that to you. I-I thought it was better to be away from you until I calmed down."
"Don't do that again." His mouth pressed a warm kiss to her hair. "Shout at me, insult me. Don't run away from me and leave me thinking I've broken everything with one careless word. Don't cry in corners thinking I don't love you."
"How did you know -"
"Bull," he answered simply. Of course. No wonder he frogmarched me up here. "I would rather we scream at one another and say everything wrong, than abandon one another to dark thoughts that have no purpose but to cause pain."
Rory hesitated. She'd never fully engaged in a true argument all her life; even with her parents, she had always run away before things got truly heated. But avoiding the conflict didn't solve anything. He was right. Far better to have it all out at once, even if it ripped them raw, and be there for each other in the aftermath.
"I'll try," she promised softly. "Running away is what I naturally do, but ... I will try to stay when we fight."
"And I will endeavor to think things through before I open my mouth," he offered in answer. "I was careless, and you were hurt. I do not want to hurt you again."
"To be fair, I had been sitting on this news for a day and half," she pointed out in a quiet voice. "I'd built it up to ludicrous proportions. I was anxious and upset and not thinking clearly, and I threw all of that at you with very little reason. That was an overreaction to something that really didn't deserve it."
"Sweeting ... I don't blame you for your anger," he murmured. "I do blame you for the fact that Dorian locked me in this tower with him for the remainder of the day, filling my attempts to work out a solution with terrible innuendos about my ability to father a red-headed child."
She snorted, the sound dissolving into soft giggles as she imagined that. At least she had been left alone to work through her emotions. She should consider herself lucky that Dorian hadn't come after her, too. "I'm happy to take responsibility for that," she assured Cullen in answer. "I'm just ... happy. You know?"
She felt his chuckle as he replied. "I know," he agreed tenderly. "I have never had a future before. Thank the Maker you found me."
If the Maker truly did exist, there was only one wish in her heart as she nestled into Cullen's arms, the upsets and comforts of the day lulling her into soft sleep. Please, if you really are there ... don't take this away from him. Let me stay.
The boring chapter title is a lot less boring if you say it like a Dalek. Just throwing that out there. :)
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The Flower & the Serpent: The Violent Women of Game of Thrones
“Here's the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Oh, oh, oh!”
-Lady Macbeth, Macbeth, Act V, Scene I
DC’s Wonder Woman opened this summer to critical acclaim. Pop culture outlets made much of its empowered protagonist and progressive themes, lauding everything from its feminist fight scenes to Wonder Woman’s thigh jiggle. In approaching the first superhero flick of the modern big-budget tentpole era both helmed by and starring a woman with such intense and specific scrutiny, much is overlooked and more repurposed to suit a flexible, almost reactive set of ideals held by fans and critics alike. If a woman does something in art that shows her to be powerful, it is interpreted as inherently feminist no matter its context in the work of art or the world beyond.
Perhaps in a world where women, homosexuals, and transsexuals lobby vigorously for the right to serve in active combat zones a conflation of ability to do violence and the possession of feminist power is understandable. Surely there are many women who, for reasons understandable or awful, crave invincible bodies and the power and grace to crush the people who hurt them. Many more are happy to acclaim any media in which a woman emerges victorious as another mile marker driven into the roadside on the highway of equality. Especially beloved are movies, shows, comics, and novels in which such victories are portrayed as straightforwardly virtuous and good.
Think of Sansa Stark condemning her rapist and tormentor, Ramsay Bolton, to a grisly death at the jaws of his own hounds. How many fans and critics expressed unbridled joy at that, as though Sansa had won some kind of symbolic victory for all women? Her sister Arya’s rampage, which has taken her across the Narrow Sea and back again and claimed the lives of dozens, has likewise been applauded as a meaningful triumph in the way we tell women’s stories. For the record, I think both of these plots are intensely compelling and reveal volumes both about the characters themselves and the world they inhabit. Game of Thrones is a show nearly singular in its refusal to make violence joyous or cathartic, no matter the whoops and cheers of many of its fans.
Still, no matter how many times the show delivers searing anti-war images or explores the corrosive influence of violence on those who commit it, viewers remain hungry for the spectacle of women overpowering their enemies and turning back on them the weapons of their own oppression. In a culture where Redpill misogynists hold elected office and our president is a serial rapist, a desire to see women take power with a dash of fire and blood feels all too understandable, but celebrating the destruction of their personalities and lives is a reductive way to understand their stories.
In order to understand what Game of Thrones has to say about violent women, it’s necessary to set aside the thrill that seeing them materially ascendant brings and focus on the images, words, and larger context of the show’s particular examples. Where films like Wonder Woman thrive by repurposing a complex and horrifying conflict (World War I in the first film, the Cold War in the upcoming second) into a heroic battle between good and evil, Game of Thrones, rooted in a genre where conflict is often artificially cleansed of moral ambiguity through devices like entire species of evil-doers, makes no attempt to sand the edges off of its depictions of war or violence.
Nearly every woman on the show, with the possible exceptions of Gilly and Myrcella, are directly involved in war, torture, and many other forms of brutality. From Catelyn and Lysa’s ugly mess of a trial for Tyrion, an act they surely must have known would cost many smallfolk their lives once Tywin Lannister caught wind of it, to Ygritte fighting to save her people by sticking the innocent farmers in the shadow of the Wall full of arrows, the actions of women with power both physical and political are shown to bear fruit just as ugly as any their husbands, sons, and brothers can cultivate. There’s an uncomfortable truth lurking there, an admission that some modes of action and ways of being may not intersect meaningfully with many of modern feminism’s tenets.
In this essay I will dissect scenes and story to illustrate the show’s deeply antipathetic stance on violence and the ways in which it is misunderstood both by those who enjoy the show and by those who detest it or object to it.
I. ARYA
If a man is getting his eyes stabbed out by a child he intended to beat and rape, does the child’s gender matter when determining what the scene is meant to convey? Is it somehow triumphant for a girl to do that to another living person, no matter how repugnant he might be? Isn’t it possible that what the scene communicates is not that Arya’s slow transformation into a butcher with scant regard for human life is something we ought to cheer for but that the fact she couldn’t survive in Westeros or Essos as anything else, much less as a little girl, is deeply sad?
Arya’s crimes nearly always echo those of her tormentors. Think of the first person she kills, a stable boy, not so different in age or appearance from her erstwhile playmate, Mycah, who was slaughtered by the Hound a bare few months before. Or else consider Polliver, the Lannister soldier who murdered her friend Lommy and whose own mocking words she spits back at him as she plunges her sword up through his jaw. More recently, her wholesale slaughter of House Frey recalls with a visual exactitude which can be nothing but intentional the massacre of her own family and their allies at the Red Wedding. In this last instance she literally dons their murderer’s skin in order to exact her revenge, pressing Walder Frey’s face against her own in an act that feels uncomfortably more like embodiment than disguise.
Arya’s long journey through peril and terror has hardened her, but there’s little reason to rejoice in her hard-won powers of stealth and bloodletting. Who, after all, does she resemble with her obsession over old scores and her penchant for cruelly ironic punishments if not the subject of this essay’s next section.
II. CERSEI
Cersei Lannister, is distinguished from a hundred other interchangeable evil queens by the attention devoted to her own suffering. Sold by her father to a man who beat and raped her, denied the glory heaped on her twin by sole dint of her gender, humiliated and terrorized by the despicable son whose monstrosity she nurtured, and finally stripped, shaven, and marched barefoot through jeering crowds after being tortured for weeks or months in the dungeons of the church she armed and enabled, Cersei’s brutality serves only to deepen her misery and isolation.
The aforementioned tyranny of the High Sparrow she put in power, the murder of her monstrous son by her political rivals after she groomed him to be the beast he was, her conflicted and good-hearted younger son’s suicide after his mother’s revenge on the High Sparrow and the Tyrells broke his spirit; Cersei’s litany of victories reads a lot like a list of agonizing losses when you look at it sidelong. Certainly her grasping, vindictive reign has brought her no joy. It’s true that audiences are expected to see Cersei as a horrible human being, which she is, but the time the show spends on giving viewers a chance to empathize with this badly damaged person trying to throttle happiness and security out of a recalcitrant world argues for a more complex interpretation of her character. Watching her need to dominate rip her family and sanity apart, ushering all three of her children into early graves, transforms her from a straightforward villain to a troubled and tragic figure.
III. DAENERYS
Sold into slavery after a life on the run with her unstable and abusive brother and raped on her wedding night by a foreign warlord, Daenerys’s relationship to violence after her ascent to power is complex and heavily ideological. Her crusade to end slavery, motivated as much or more by strength of character and an innate sense of justice than it is by personal suffering and an impulse toward vengeance, has engendered sweeping changes throughout Essos, but at times it has taken on shades of the ostentatiously symbolic punishments for which her family name is famous. The crucifixion of the Masters is a particularly gratuitous example as Daenerys allows her desire to change the world and her need to feel good about the justice she doles out combine to produce a dreadful and inhumane outcome.
This act of performative brutality finds its echo in the rogue execution of a Son of the Harpy, imprisoned and awaiting trial, by Daenerys’s fervent supporter Mossador. Dany may claim that she is not above the law when Mossador confronts her, but when butchery without trial suited her she was quick to embrace it. Her case is uniquely complicated by her enemy: the slavers. Nothing excuses violence like a civilization of rapists and flesh-peddlers beating and maiming their human chattel onscreen, and there is powerful catharsis in seeing their corrupt works shredded and their hateful and exploitative lives snuffed out, but in making them suffer and in choosing the easy way out through orgiastic episodes of violence, Dany betrays her own unwillingness to do the hard work of reform. In many ways, her long stay in Meereen functions as the tragic story of her decision to embrace the grandiose violence her ancestors partook of so freely. We may feel good watching her triumph over evil, but we’re reminded frequently of the horrors and miseries of her reign.
IV. BRIENNE
Brienne’s pursuit of knighthood and adherence to its practices and code is no warrior-girl fantasy about a scabby-kneed tomboy learning to swordfight. Trapped in a body unsuited to courtly life, mocked by suitors and competitors alike, and yearning for the right to live by the sword as men do, Brienne finds challenging refuge in a way of life intimately associated with violent acts. From her butchery of the guards in Renly’s tent to her honor-bound execution of her one-time king’s brother in a snowy forest, Brienne’s path has frequently led her into mortal conflict.
At the climax of Wonder Woman, Diana kills a super-powered caricature of historical figure General Erich Ludendorff, a character who seems to exist solely to uncomplicate the moral landscape of World War I. A few minutes later she kills the man behind the man, her divine uncle Ares, and breaks his grasp on the people of war-torn Europe. The presentation of the act of killing as a triumph for human morality strips away much of what violent media can offer. Contrast Brienne’s desperate fight with three Stark soldiers as she attempts to spirit Jaime Lannister to safety on Catelyn’s orders. Screaming with every blow and leaving her opponents hacked to pieces, Brienne succeeds in her mission at an obvious human cost. Men, despicable men but men nonetheless, are dead. She and Catelyn are now in open rebellion against Robb’s authority.
To kill is to sever a life and give birth to a living, growing tree of consequences. To explore it instead as a tidy way to resolve problems and make the world a better place is to misrepresent its essential nature. You can’t improve the world through butchery. You can’t heal by harming. What violence in media is meant to teach us is a capacity for empathy, a reflexive understanding that all people are as fully and completely human as ourselves. Loathsome or virtuous, kind or cruel, no human suffering should be a comfortable or affirming thing to witness. (The Republican Party’s elected officials and pundit corps certainly makes a strong case for an exception to this rule).
One might charitably assume that lionization of violent women and their specific acts of violence stems from a place of vulnerability, a desire to balance the scales and erase the danger and aggression with which almost all women must live on a daily basis. I would argue that while this may hold true in part, a deeper truth is that many people have not been taught to feel pain for others in a way that allows for true emotional vulnerability or complex feelings about morally ugly and confusing actions. It’s easier to cheer when the guy we hate gets his than it is feel sorrow for the former innocent who dished out justice, or empathy for the deceased whose life must surely have held its own miseries and secret hurts.
Audiences would be well-served by taking a moment to step back from their reactions to violence in media and attempting to interpret what message the art is trying to convey. Is the violence slickly produced and bloodless, a parade of cool moments and heroic victories? Or is it focused on the humanity of victims and perpetrators and the cost of their actions? What is the camera telling us? The colors? The editing? Are we meant to agree with King Theoden’s speech about the glories of war in Return of the King when the very next cut brings us into the hellish, pointless confusion of the taking of Osgiliath? Are we meant to be happy when Sansa smiles at Ramsay’s death when the very last thing he told her was that she would carry him, his essence, with her forever?
The most transcendent joy art brings is the opportunity to reach out of your own beliefs and feelings and into someone else’s dreaming mind, to parse the language of symbols and ideas with which they have addressed the world and make in the negative space between your consciousness and theirs a new understanding. Learn to relish the complex and sometimes hideous nature of humanity over the easy thrills and cheap moral lessons of crowd-pleasers made by billionaires. Understand that art that makes you uncomfortable could be helping you grow.
A woman’s actions are not laudable just because she’s a woman, or just because she’s been wronged. In our rush to associate the violent triumph of women over the men who’ve hurt them with personal strength, healing, justice, and praiseworthiness we ignore what shows like Game of Thrones are saying in favor of what we want to hear. Violence should never be easy, and violence that assures us, or that we think assures us we’re good and rooting for the right people should always be suspect.
In labeling anything that pleases us, that satisfies our own hunger for justice and supremacy “feminist,” we forget that feminism is first and foremost an attempt to remake the world. The structure of things as they are is brutish and oppressive, and to cry tears of joy as women, even fictional women, fall prey to the allure of those same structures is to fundamentally misunderstand the point of a life-or-death struggle in which at this moment in history we are perilously engaged. As assaults on our tattered reproductive rights continue, as women struggling with addiction, illness, and homelessness are thrown into prison en masse, as our political leaders openly contemplate sentencing the most vulnerable among us to death in order to pay off the corporate elite and the Left (justifiably, in my opinion) contemplates and utilizes resistance through force on a scale unheard of in this millennium in our country’s history, learning to see violence for what it is has become more imperative than ever before.
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Press: Why the Women of Top of the Lake Are Laughing in the Face of Male Complaints
“They’re asking for too much, these dudes.”
VANITY FAIR – A brief cloud crosses actress Gwendoline Christie’s face when I asked her if she thinks her Top of the Lake: China Girl character—the hopeful, open-hearted officer Miranda Hilmarson—bears a close resemblance to her real-life persona. Anyone who has watched Christie in interviews or on a red carpet knows that the six-foot-three blonde—who made a name for herself playing severe, lethal characters like Brienne of Tarth on Game of Thrones, Commander Lyme in The Hunger Games, and Captain Phasma in the latest Star Wars trilogy—is, in actuality, one of the friendliest and easy-to-smile actresses in the business.
That goofy side is on display for the first time in Christie’s decade-long career in a role that Top of the Lake creator Jane Campion wrote specifically for her. Hilmarson will stoop to make friends with a dog, and does her best to crack the hard nut that is Elisabeth Moss’s Robin Griffin. But Christie is still right to distance herself a bit from Hilmarson—because, like everything in Campion’s work, this bright and cheery constable has a darker side.
Moss herself is fond of repeating Campion’s thesis statement for creating Top of the Lake, an ongoing dark feminist drama disguised as a crime story which follows Detective Griffin from a small New Zealand town in Season 1 to the faster-paced dangers of Sydney, Australia, in Season 2. “The placid lake of Season 1,” Moss says, paraphrasing Campion, “hides the danger underneath. But while Season 1 dealt with the wildness without, this year we’re tackling the wildness within.” And indeed, the second season of the critically acclaimed drama—which airs six new episodes on three consecutive nights starting Sunday, September 10, on Sundance—brilliantly juxtaposes the gray, ordered facade of a city like Sydney with the messy, violent passions of the people who inhabit it.
Still licking her wounds from the trauma of Season 1 (the loose ends of which are brilliantly tied up via heartbreaking flashback and a harrowing guest appearance in Season 2), Robin once again serves as avenging angel—this time for a young Asian sex worker who washes up on a Sydney beach inside a suitcase. “Hello, darling,” she murmurs to the mutilated corpse. “Do you want to tell me what you saw?” But while Griffin has always had an easier time tenderly connecting with the dead, the second installment of the series pushes her, hard, out of her comfort zone when she is reunited with Mary, the long-lost teenaged daughter whom she gave up for adoption (played by Campion’s real-life daughter Alice Englert) and Mary’s parents (played by Nicole Kidman and Ewen Leslie).
In Mary, a role also specifically written for the actress who plays her, Campion has outdone herself in her ongoing exploration of duality, darkness, and femininity. A smart, damaged, vulnerable, hard-to-love teen, Mary finds herself wrapped up in the case of Robin’s dead girl and dares the audience to sort her into either the hero or villain category. She defies definition, which ultimately is Campion’s finest gift for all of the women in Top of the Lake. “When I took on the role,” Englert says of that at-times monstrous, at-times vulnerable Mary, “I felt like that was my challenge—to root for her. And I didn’t know if anyone else would, to be honest.”
Once I had seen the full season of Top of the Lake: China Girl (Sundance initially only set three episodes), I understood Christie’s reluctance to identify too closely with Constable Hilmarson. “I enjoy playing humor very much,” she admits, “but I would hope that I’m not as dark and sad as Miranda is, or struggling with life as much as she is. But she is a character with an open heart, and that is a joy to watch and a joy to play.” Moss also rejoices in getting to play Detective Griffin once more—a role that did a lot to change audiences expectations of what a petite and wide-eyed actress like her can bring to a part like this. TV lovers are quite accustomed, now, to Moss’s steelier edge, having watched her grimly stare down the camera for 10 episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale. But way back in 2013, Campion was the first filmmaker to really tap into the dark, messy potential of an actress then best known for playing good girls like the president’s daughter on The West Wing or Don Draper’s protégé (with, O.K., a slight edge) in Mad Men.
How does Jane Campion write such messy, complicated, hard-to-define women? Easy, Moss says. “Every character is an avatar of Jane. Every single one.” When I run this theory by Englert, she laughs in delight. “Yeah—now that you say, what I love about my mom is that sometimes she reminds me of that special energy and passion that you have. That fight in you at like, 12. Hormones haven’t hijacked you and manipulated all of your energy into ridiculous pursuit of procreation. You can see the adult world, but you’re not part of that yet. My mom reminds me of that.”
But for all the room Campion gives her female characters—space to be disasters capable of tight control, or monsters capable of tender heroism—she doesn’t quite afford the male characters of Top of the Lake: China Girl the same dimensionality. Almost every single male character, from customers in the brothel to Mary’s piggish, too-old boyfriend, Robin’s sexist colleagues, her somewhat selfish brother, and her wrapped-up-in-the-murder boss, is either an outright villain, an exploration of frustrated male sexuality, or someone caught in arrested development. There are scant men, other than Mary’s dad, Pyke, worth rooting for. And most of the compelling relationships in Top of the Lake: China Girl are between two women—either mother and daughter or female colleagues. In other words, as Englert puts it, the female issues that are usually the “side salad” of most films and TV (especially in the crime genre) are the “main course” of Top of the Lake.
Rather than reject this critique of the men in Top of the Lake—initially brought to my attention by a male TV critic—Moss and Christie gleefully embrace it. “Another man pointed it out to me,” Moss responds, laughing. “I didn’t notice it either.” Pointing out that it’s usually women who fill the two-dimensional roles while men have the meatier parts to chew on, Moss teases that Top of the Lake was a “taste of your own medicine. How’s that?” Christie also had to have this phenomenon pointed out to her. “I hadn’t noticed at all. A good friend of mine actually said: ‘There is not one likable male character in this.’” Grinning devilishly, she continues: “That’s unlikely, isn’t it? We don’t normally see that in our TV dramas, do we?”
Only Englert is willing to stick up for at least one of her male co-stars. “Pyke is a lovely man! He’s a beautiful character,” she says, heaping praise on her TV dad. He’s played with passive, bearded charm by Ewen Leslie, though some might argue that Pyke is neutered by the fact that his wife (Kidman’s brusque and insecure Julia) has left him for another woman. He’s also constantly capitulating to his willful daughter. And Englert also concedes that there are no unalloyed heroes (of either gender) to be found in Top of the Lake. “I find it really interesting that men want to be so liked. They have to be perfect to be a likable character. It’s like, get used to it. You can be imperfect and still be interesting. They’re asking for too much, these dudes.”
It’s the art of imperfection that Campion has truly perfected in Top of the Lake’s shaggy second season. The mystery of the girl in the suitcase resolves itself, improbably, much the way the first season mystery did, via coincidence and too many connections to Robin’s personal life. But that’s because Campion isn’t as interested in the mystery as she is in the striving, failing, complicated women caught in its orbit. Top of the Lake goes well over the top at times to highlight cartoonish male villainy, and has zero qualms about leaving certain threads dangling. But at its beating heart, this is a story of a girl caught between two mothers—which Campion can’t help but make intensely personal by casting her own daughter at the center of this unconventional love triangle, and drafting two of the finest working actresses to play different versions of herself. “What great auteurs do, in my opinion, is show you their vision about what it is to be human,” Christie concludes. In other words, this is just Jane’s world—and we’re all lucky to be in it.
Press: Why the Women of Top of the Lake Are Laughing in the Face of Male Complaints was originally published on Glorious Gwendoline
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