#And the discourse is absurd and harmless and ridiculous

[vro0m]

Anyway I non ironically can't wait for episode 2 electric boogaloo of this discourse once MBS answers

[max1461]

Let me start a new post, regarding some discourse, so that we can avoid bothering OP and furthermore so that we can properly abstract away from (whatever turn out to be) the irrelevant points of the initial seed of discussion.

A woman flashed her boobs to some strangers in New York. Someone on twitter said this was sexual assault. I and other commenters contended it was no big deal. However, I added:

I do think there's a relevant distinction between simply being nude/topless/whatever in public, which I think should be regarded as perfectly socially acceptable, and flashing someone, which is kind of an inherently somewhat sexual performative act. I don't think that flashing in a context like this should probably be regarded as sexual assault, that seems a bit much. In general I think that people are (for the most part) sexual creatures, and so any free society is going to feature some amount of public display of sexuality, whatever form that takes, and there's nothing really wrong with that. It doesn't seem like any big deal to me that this girl flashed these people. But there definitely exist contexts where I think it's reasonable to consider flashing alone to be sexual assault or sexual harassment, and I don't think that should be elided. And I don't think it should be determined on crude grounds of gender or sex either; it's important to have some thoughtful and conceptually robust sense of when sexual acts, e.g. flashing people, are playful and harmless, and when they are in fact potentially threatening or boundary-violating.

Here the discussion split. In one thread, @sivavakkiyar said:

I agree with the nuance of total determination, but the applicability only makes sense now. There’s very good reason to suppose a man who took off his shirt on camera would not be considered ‘flashing’, even if he was flexing his pecs or whatever: the assumed sexual component, regardless of the intent of the woman involved, has to do with the inherent sexualization of…uh…female…presenting…nipples. We’re on the same page of ‘assault’ being ridiculous in this context, but even if you were to ask this woman ‘when you took off your shirt, you knew it was sexually suggestive, yes?’ and she said ‘yeah’, it wouldn’t really change the fundamental question—-I mean that’s obvious as a part of her joke, but—-the guy with pecs might equally be ‘yeah, I’m hot.’ You know?

And I replied:

Well yeah that's part of my point. There is totally a context in which a guy flexing his pecs at you, in some sufficiently aggressive or unwanted way, could be sexual harassment. But that doesn't mean that all men flexing in public is bad, or even all men flexing at someone in public is bad. The standards one takes up for this, whatever they are, should be gender neutral—which would unambiguously mean that women showing their bare chest in public would get vastly more accepted, not less.

In another thread, @wildgifthorses said:

It seems like this is just an area where it makes sense to have sex-asymmetric norms. Trying to make a workable sex-symmetric norm about this just leads to absurdity no matter what you do.

And added the following in the tags:

Here I would like to make my reply to wildgifthorses.

I think you have implicitly invoked, here, precisely the gender-neutral distinction which is relevant: reasonable knowledge that you are violating someone's boundaries and disregard for those boundaries in spite of the knowledge. Most men can be said to have a reasonable expectation that the average woman will be bothered by him flashing her his junk, and consider it a boundary violation. Most young women can reasonably expect that a crowd of passers-by will not feel violated by her flashing them her boobs. While there are sex- or gender-asymmetric facts about society being invoked in this sort of moral calculation, the underlying principle is fundamentally sex- and gender-symmetric. And why should it not be? I can think of plenty of contexts in which a man might be made very uncomfortable by a woman aggressively showing him her boobs, however common or not that happens to be, and in those scenarios I think it is very reasonable to say the woman is in the wrong.

We get absolutely nowhere good by making needlessly gendered distinctions in our abstract principles, as (in different ways) the last 10 years and the previous 5000 before that should make evident. I think until certain follies heretofore characteristic of human society are well behind us, we should probably err very far in the direction of absolute sex- and gender-insensitivity in our most abstract ethical principles, even if it runs us into trouble sometimes.

[causesciencethatswhy]

https://www.tumblr.com/causesciencethatswhy/742925680934862848/nothing-more-annoying-than-supposed-neutral-fans

this might be a bit late but it’s just so perplexing and interesting to me how tkers a) have an absurd level of influence on the entire fandom and b) are legitimately much more insane than most delusional shippers even larries

as someone who was a tween when shipping really started to become a thing on the internet its fascinating (and disturbing) to see how it has gone from a casual and harmless “wow they look good together and have chemistry i want to see more of that” to “here is an entire dissertation’s worth of bogus theory about a same-sex pairing despite me being ragingly homophobic and probably mysoginistic.”

how it went from an admiration of chemistry and attraction to actual clinical delusion in a matter of years needs to be studied.

anyhow, i was thinking about all of the discourse surrounding jimin, jk, and the buddy system and am shocked by a couple of things. first, the complete undermining of their friendship despite them being ridiculously close for years. whether you like their dynamic or not it’s literally impossible to deny that jk and jimin have been thick as thieves for (at least) the past 5 or 6 years. I became an army in 2019 so it has always been obvious to me that they are extremely close. sure, you can make the argument that they didn’t “hang out” as much during 2023 but there’s still a considerable amount of interactions between them, much more than most of the other members who no army second guesses how close they are (the biggest example being jimin and taehyung who we literally only saw interact towards the end of the year).

second is how people literally pretend taennie never happened. hell, i think more people believe the blurry jk apartment video than they believe th and jn we’re in a real relationship for almost 2 years. there’s actual pictures of him on her BED with her kitty (a literal one) and you’ll still see majority of armys act like it never happened. yes, their privacy was horribly invaded but everyone knows damn well that is not the reason why most armys choose to ignore that relationship and then go and gush about him and IU.

though these two things might seem unrelated, i think both of these narratives that have always been pushed by tkers and have successfully crossed over to supposedly non-shipper armys and demonstrate just how influential tker theory is on the fandom.

this is exactly why i won’t really sweat over whatever a tkker says. if taehyung was in a long-term relationship for years that is confirmed by DOZENS of personal pictures through different dates, months, and locations but they still want to deny it… there’s simply nothing to reason with there. its just a waste of time and space. there’s a chance jikook have not been or are not more than close friends but there’s no chance th was with anyone other than jennie for the past 2 years in what is looked like the most serious relationship he’s ever had.

i feel bad for him too even if i feel he sometimes stokes the flames of shippers. imagine breaking up w your most serious partner ever, grieving that relationship AND your normal life since you’ll soon be part of the military for 2 years and all the while your “fans” are picking apart and making up insane theories about you and your friend.

I agree with most of what you say anon.

Of course we can't know for sure what the nature of jkks relationship last year was but I'm way more inclined to believe that their bond is still going as strong as it was before not just because of the buddy system news but purely because the ease and doting nature of the interactions we saw last year has remained the same.

And you're right, nothing will ever convince tkkrs to really just see the truth for what it is. There's always an alternative explanation, an alternative enemy to set your eyes on, an alternative ploy by the company to break the tkkr spirit. It's quite ridiculous. I think the worst thing with the taennie situation was that the whole 'It's an edit!! It's an impersonator!! It's a PR move by Jen/nie!!" Was that it wasn't just tkkrs buying into this. It was a majority of armys. The general fandom now looks back on taennie as 'a conspiracy to defame tae (except armys and blinks were the only ones who thought that these two adult humans possibly dating would be defamatory to either of them).

I legit had a very close irl army friend, whose not a shipper but still a pretty dedicated fan get into an argument with me because I told her that ppls reaction to tae dating was ridiculous. She word to word reiterated all the bs tkkr theories I had seen floating around and was unwilling to consider the possibility of them being made up conspiracies. I was genuinely surprised because she is generally very chill about these discourses but I guess the need to believe he wasn't dating a BP member took precedent over what the reality really was ??

Either way, it'll be interesting to see how they behave post 2025. I doubt they're going to calm down anytime soon with the jikook travel show on it's way. It's going to feed their theories as much as it's going to entertain the rest of us I'm afraid.

[fandom-blahs]

The "anti-booktok" discourse, for a lack of better term, has evovlved into a disgusting monstrosity.

On one hand yes the stories are lame and cringe and objectively bad but on the other hand these trashy stories have always existed you know this! Why are people pretending like it hasn't existed?

Yes it's cringe to see fanfics get published into novels, the separation between "lowbrow" and "highbrow", in the most reductionist way, eroding must be frustrating for people to see. I imagine it's the same feelings people had towards 50 shades of grey (a twilight fanfic) getting published and then made into a movie or that South Park mlm fanfic getting published. It's easy to mock, almost harmless to do so. The premise is ridiculous yes I agree. We all laughed at the absurd horny horse romance book covers (which predate this whole booktok discourse)

I get that completely but for the discussion to just demonise the hell out of women so quickly especially in female dominates spaces is disheartening. People want this issue, if it can even be considered one, to be taken so seriously that they honest to god think it's comparable to porn????

You think reading shitty kink books is the same as watching or creating porn?

[97-liners]

"Yall hate minority groups when they voice their concerns" okay but when that minority group says they ARENT offendes we shouldnt listen to them? This wholw thing is absurd! We should listen to everyones takes on this, and quite frankly i dont want anyone's opinion that isn't the minority affected ie; skinnier people/in shape people ie; a lot of you people here right now. You should have gone to the author for this, I don't know them very well but from what I do know, they wrote that fic based on their own experiences and they are a very nice person, Im sure if someone had just simply brought this to their attention they wouldve changed it but no, everyone has to hop on this whole hate train, I even saw people dragging the person defending their friend! Maybe instead of being a prick we should have educated conversations about this, but instead im seeing hate left and right. Its okay to be offended and hurt by the fic, but instead of bashing someone, especially for something so personal to their own experiences with weight, maybe stop and think for a second. Also listen to people !!!!! Listen to the people who say they are hurt but also listen to the people who say they are fine

I dont think any of this discourse should have been brought to your blog so im sorry that you are getting all of these anons but by consequence, from what ive seen i dont think this is your issue to speak on anyway, and there should have been direct communication with the author

yeah ok so people say they are hurt and a simple reading comprehension check shows that the content is fatphobic. so just because that person’s friend says they’re not hurt, then the content itself is just fine? like do you hear yourself. “we should listen everyone’s takes on this”. are you a “both sides” democrat too? oh so if someone in japan says that they think it’s cool when white ppl wear kimono, all white ppl can just steal whatever they want?

i didn’t even bring this up with the original author bc i was fine just blocking and ignoring but y’all are here saying that it’s not fatphobia (again, reading comprehension)

also everybody is dragging jenna userwoosan because they explicitly said that the content in that fic isn’t actually harmful. did you read the fic???????? did you read their ask????? here’s verbatim what they said: “Slandering people for fics that you personally dislike as opposed to it being ACTUALLY harmful is crossing a pretty big line and this is ridiculous”

you think saying that you have to lose weight and be thin to be fit, attractive, and successful is…. harmless? do you wholeheartedly believe that, anon?

[cadyrocks]

nah, sorry. transfems and transmascs Should be sucking and fucking instead. this entire trans infighting discourse is maddening nonsense and you should go outside and stop holding such casual disdain for our trans siblings. sorry. its not misogynistic to phrase "we have more in common than we do apart, quit baring fang and be normal" in a silly and lighthearted and sexually charged way. aka in a tumblr speech way. its so deeply not transmisogynist i struggle to believe you even believe that. youre stepping outside your door with a megaphone and shouting "what if the world IS made of pudding!?" as if youre being profound. go talk to a trans dude and lower your hackles.

I dunno, I'm not spotting the bitter misogyny here. I'm not seeing "shut up and be sexually available". I'm not seeing "women don't need to hate men cuz we can fuck em real good". I see... well, exactly what they're saying, in exactly those words: "we have more in common than we do apart, quit baring fang and be normal". Because they made it explicitly clear what they were saying.

Like, to be clear, this is what Baeddling is talking about, but Baeddling is, y'know, wrong and kind of an asshole. I'm not particularly interested in examples of mundane, harmless "let's all get along" posts that have some vaguely sexual innuendo. That's nothing special, and treating it like some horrible oppression is absurd. It takes an act of phenomenal bad faith to point at this and act like it's some horrible act of transmisogyny, and It's this degree of bad faith that really bothers me here. We are not enemies! The trans community doesn't need this kind of bad-faith infighting.

Really, let's take a step back here. What's being posited is that there's a growing pattern of transmisogyny coming from trans men specifically that pattern-matches onto existing patterns of patriarchal misogyny and lesbophobia. If you think this is an example of that, you are wrong, and need to, as @dare0451 said, touch grass.

If this bothers you, personally... Okay, I'm sorry to hear that, but that might just be a you problem. The people comparing this to catcalling are just being ridiculous.

Glad we're finally addressing the bare-faced misogyny of all those "transfems and transmascs should be sucking and fucking instead" posts bc they're absolutely vile

[evilsoup]

The problem with statements like "not all men" etc is that they're often used in bad faith by people who want to downplay the reality of misogynist violence. But the actual statement is, you know, true. Most men aren't rapists, abusers, etc (though a disturbingly high number of them are). And the reaction in online feminist discourse against the misogynist misuse of the phrase "not all men" seems to have really fucked with a lot of people's ability to engage with that actual reality.

This is not at all unique to feminist discourse, but seems to be a common failure of online discussion. People get stuck arguing against bad faith misuses of arguments to the extent that they lose sight of the underlying reality they're supposed to care about. It's one of the ways social media directs outrage against real oppression into harmless-to-real-power side-channels.

Other examples are anti-racists getting goaded into "anti-white" statements by the infuriating bullshit of racist trolls (whenever I've tracked back from a screenshot of some ridiculous "homeless white people have privilege so you shouldn't give them money" kind of take, that person's account was always swarmed by scum with usernames like cecilrhodes1488 for months beforehand), and Online kids with socialist ideas coming up against pervasive anti-socialist propaganda and adopting absurd high stalinist positions out of spite.

Social media is bad for you.

[june2734]

So I've been seeing a lot of the “Blazing Saddles could never be made today because of the PC police” Discourse today. Okay, fine. Let’s go ahead and dignify this with a ~ * ~ thread ~ * ~ Could BLAZING SADDLES or something similar be made today? NO. Here's why. Rather, it’s not that BLAZING SADDLES could not be made today - you could make it, it would just land with a deafening thud. Because the observations are tired and the execution is gratuitous and crass - but importantly, it is gratuitous and crass in a way it was not in 1974. As we have discussed before, comedy is a tricky genre because it is the quickest to age and the most likely to age poorly. A comedy’s success depends just as much on when it hits as the quality of the writing. The same applies to genre - Westerns were in their Twilight in 1974, and one of the most pervasive genres in all of film. So the film is just as much a sendup of the dying Western as it is commentary about race. Also, people seem to forget that BLAZING SADDLES was released LESS THAN A DECADE after the Voting Rights Act was passed. The United States had just gone through a very rapid shift with its relationship to race. Moreover, Hollywood did not really know how to approach portrayals of racial hostility in film, even though it was topical af. This very rapid shift in social mores lead to a broad sort of discomfort in Hollywood, which happened to coincide with the collapse of the studio system.   That collapse and the failure of multiple big budget projects (looking at you, DOCTOR DOOLITTLE) was a major reason why you didn't see movies like SADDLES before the mid-1960's - experimentation in film transgression was only allowed after the "mainstream" began to fail. The highest profile example of a high profile "let's talk about race" film before BLAZING SADDLES that actually FEATURED a Black protagonist (we’re ignoring TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD for several reasons) was IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT. IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT… it’s like, you know, it’s fine. But it’s a very, straightforward, borderline “racists and Blacks learn to get along” narrative in the vein of GREEN BOOK. It is a Drama that has Serious Things to Say About Race. (also BONNIE AND CLYDE was robbed). So reason #1 BLAZING SADDLES would fail today: comedy about race was only just hitting the mainstream. As we observed in the video about Mel Brooks and THE PRODUCERS, farceur is sometimes necessary to really cut to the bone of difficult issues-that is BLAZING SADDLES’ innovation. And it is never portrayed as a harmless kind of absurd, but just fundamentally illogical, stratified, and shameless in its exploitative nature. Like the goofy Nazis in “Springtime for Hitler”, racism in SADDLES is neither cool nor aspirational. (And because I have to tediously acknowledge this every time I talk about BLAZING SADDLES, yes I KNOW it is extremely tone deaf with regard to women and gay people. Stop "educating" me that every time I talk about this movie. I'm talking about its portrayal of race chrissake) The joke in this scene is that the “simple” white folks of Rock Ridge are willing to accept Sheriff Bart, but only after he eliminates a major threat, and only if no one else sees them doing it. (CW: this clip has racial slurs). This is just one example of the sort of “Truth to power” humor in SADDLES - the joke is at the expense of the white audience, not only pointing out the woman's hypocrisy but making a joke out of it. 

That was a fresh take in 1974 - not so fresh today. So Brooks is correct in that good comedy speaks truth to power, but the power in this case is white hegemony. This film DOES state an uncomfortable truth, very explicitly, in a way that drama cannot - and that transgression made the film more honest.  In this scene, Taggart’s explicit statement of genocide against all non-whites is the JOKE, but not one at the expense of the people being killed. That it is comedy allows it to be blunt in a way that dramas couldn't be. (CW: this clip has several racial slurs). The observation that “Blazing Saddles couldn’t be made today” is the most tired, unoriginal thing and I’ve been hearing it ad nauseam since the 90’s. It is the sort of thing espoused by people who believe the real problem is the PC police, not the structure of white supremacy. It ignores the many complex contexts and trends the film came in the midst of that made it feel fresh at the time. Yes, I am aware that Brooks himself has oft repeated this line. And I do think he doesn’t realize he’s contradicting himself. In the most recent regurgitation of this line in 2017, he calls the culture “stupidly politically correct,” but then immediately contradicts himself by making a list of topics that he thinks are not funny and never will be and he will never joke about. Even in the example of BLAZING SADDLES, he's made it clear in multiple interviews that the image of a black man being lynched was a line he would never cross. Even something as subtle as the “Bart almost gets lynched” scene - note that every man in line behind him is white. So the idea that “oh, no, now there are tribes we will no longer offend!” while immediately going on to list lines he would never cross is contradictory and, yes, hypocritical. @PFTompkins outlines why on a thread embedded in the Variety article.  

 So the mindless regurgitation of the line about how “The PC Police say we can’t do movies like BLAZING SADDLES anymore” is so disheartening because it shows that the only lesson these people took from the film is “white people yelling the N-word is funny.” Spike Lee has criticized the film for that - less the intent or even the execution, but what audiences (especially white audiences) take from it. That audiences take it not as a critique of white hegemony but as a free pass to say the N-word and laugh about it. Because, let's be real, when people like Rob Lowe bemoan that we would NEVER see a movie like Blazing Saddles today, what they mean is "boy I do miss the days when you could cram your movie full of the N-word with reckless abandon for literally any reason".  But that era of film never existed. The vast majority of the history of race in film before BLAZING SADDLES centers white characters, and betrays extreme discomfort with white culpability. Noteworthy also that BLAZING SADDLES did not start a trend, because it couldn't.  And I never wanted to admit it before but honestly? Spike Lee was right. Clearly, way too many people didn't "get" the object of ridicule in SADDLES, and just use it as yet another cudgel of oppression. But don't worry, it's just a joke. Anyway, BLAZING SADDLES has always been and will always be one of my favorite movies, but it does get really tedious that it's been twenty years of people boo-hooing that we can't make the film today like it's some kind of fresh take. Good lord, it is not.

— Lindsay Ellis Twitter Thread on why people misunderstand why Mel Brooks couldn’t be made today in essay form. Link 

— Mel Brooks, The Producers and the Ethics of Satire about N@zis:

[spongehole]

We need to stop seeing a bold or nonchalant persona as a signifier of strength and fearlessness, and start allowing ourselves to see it as the signs of a person struggling to prevent weakness hitting the surface, someone who is trying their hardest to hold it together.

When we see someone who is targeted and fought with everyday, we should consider bringing support or comfort to that person, even if they are making jokes,laughing at the situation, or because the topic may be an absurd one like if a cartoon character could be lesbian or whether its ableist or not to wash your ass or promote drinking water. Nobody can handle that day in and day out without a cushion of gratitude and tenderness from others. We must end the thoughtless consumption of people involved in "discourse" when it was never supposed to become that in the first place, when people lurk that users blog, when it becomes inescapable for the user,when they intended on just speaking on what's in their mind or just living their life, or just had a harmless interpretation about a piece of media. No matter how ridiculous the drama coming at that user might seem, it still weighs down especially when it never ends.

I would even say we look at some of these users as sentient memes, removing their personhood because we see them being tangled up in the most ridiculous dramas. But those dramas aren't just bot generated interactions, there are people affected by this. And when it involves a person defending or speaking on their own identities, their own experiences or traumas, the lack of compassion or support will be crushing.

This is why so many bloggers with this sort of atmosphere many followers end up feeling alone and with invisible feelings, because we see their cries of help, struggles for stability and for their pain to be seen, and their obvious need for being allowed to just exist as little more than funny posts to consume and reblog. We need to do better.

[discoursecatharsis]

The default desktop theme was getting on my nerves, so I changed it to something else. While I was at it, I also added a couple pages with more information and blog navigation~ 

About Tags Clarification of Otayuri's ages/age gap

Maybe if an ant/ stumbles across this blog, they’ll take the time to read the Otayuri page and educate themselves. Wishful thinking, I know.

Information from the links for mobile below...

About

I needed a blog to express my annoyance with anti shippers, who need to get over themselves. If you think a ship is “problematic,” just ignore it or blacklist it or block, it’s so easy. I usually prefer to stay out of drama, but sometimes the discourse is just too ridiculous, the annoyance in me builds up, and I need to let it out. Which is why I made this blog. I feel much better when I can express how frankly ridiculous anti “arguments” are. I started this blog as a personal place to rant separate from my main, then like-minded people started sending me asks, so please use my inbox if you need to rant as well.

The specific discourse that compelled me to make this blog… is anti-Otayuri. Calling Otayuri pedophilia is just wrong in so many was. It’s stupid and just plain absurd. People date with Otayuri’s age gap all the time. I can’t believe it’s even an issue. And I really think anti-Otayuris need to go outside and/or speak to a therapist.

So yeah, Yuri on Ice discourse is my forte. But please feel free to rant at me about other fandoms as well, like Voltron (in which I started shipping Sheith out of spite and then actually fell in love with the ship after watching the show myself) or Killing Stalking (which I do not read, but I don’t care if others do) or internet fandom culture in general or anything!

Why do I have an issue with antis, you ask?

I have an issue with antis because they spread misinformation, have very misconstrued views of ships, and harass shippers over harmless things in fandom. Antis make a fandom hateful and toxic, when fandom is suppose to be fun.

If you don’t like a ship yet you do not do any of the above: you are not an anti and I have no problem with you. You have a NOTP and that’s cool, I respect that. That’s what fandom needs to go back to, ye old days of having a NOTP and respecting others’ ships.

Tag List

General tags

Official yoi stuff

Art

Testimonials: posts from survivors on how antis do not help

Reblogged posts

Answered asks

My rants | rambling

Off-topic stuff

Fandom tags:

Yuri on Ice

Voltron

Killing Stalking

What is Otayuri’s age gap?

Otayuri has an age gap of 2 years and 4 months. The characters are being aged in real time. Currently, Otabek is 18 and Yurio is 16.

Yurio’s birthday is on March 1st.

Otabek’s birthday is on October 31st.

—-

Common misconceptions in italics

And I will debunk them below.

Otabek is 19 and Yurio is 15.

Wrong. When they meet in December at the GPF, Otabek is 18, and yes, Yurio is 15.

But… Celestino said Otabek was 19!!

Otabek is not 19. That was a mistake. Again, Otabek’s birthday is in October. The GPF takes place in December. In episode 10, with Victor narrating, Victor calls him an 18 year old. He’s referred to an 18 year old multiple times. Later in episode 11 or 12, Celestino calls him a 19 year old. He obviously did not have a birthday in a day in December. Celestino's line was clearly a mistake. Otabek is 18.

Okay then, but Yuri’s still 15 in canon

Yuri is 15 for the majority of the show, yes. However, consider that the very last scene of episode 12 takes place some time later (as Yuuri K’s hair has grown longer). It is possibly already March then, meaning Yurio’s birthday has passed and he is 16 in that scene, technically making him 16 in canon.

Either way, the characters are currently being aged in real time. Since Yurio’s birthday passed in March, he is now 16.

The official guide book that came out in June lists Yurio’s age as 16 and Otabek’s age as 18. Every other character who had a birthday between December and June had aged a year too (for example, Phichit was 20 in the show, and is now 21 because his birthday was in April).

Here’s more proof of their ages:

Proof the age gap is only 2.5 years: here | here

Proof of Otabek being 18: here | here

Proof of Yurio now being 16: here |  here

Yurio and all the characters are being aged in real time: here | here | here | here

And a video that shows that the characters are aging in real time: https://youtu.be/GxTkZiQEQe4

Lastly: Otayuri is NOT pedophilia. By calling it pedophilia, antis are trivializing actual pedophilia. And they need to stop.

Here are sources that prove Otayuri (or Shaladin and many other ships antis call pedophilia) is NOT pedophilia: link 1 | link 2

[theconservativebrief]

When a third woman accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct this week, Kavanaugh supporters immediately stepped forward with a familiar defense: It couldn’t have happened, because surely if it had, someone would have said something at the time.

In a sworn declaration delivered through her lawyer Michael Avenatti, Julie Swetnick avowed that she witnessed Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh drug girls at high school house parties where the girls were later “gang raped.” Swetnick further says that Kavanaugh was present at a party where she herself was drugged and raped, although she does not directly say that he participated in her rape.

In a statement released by the White House, Kavanaugh (who has denied all three allegations against him) called Swetnick’s statement “ridiculous” and “from the Twilight Zone.” His denial was widely echoed by supporters to whom the idea that such terrible things could happen on a routine basis, and that no one would do anything to stop them or even avoid the parties, seems absurd.

If a crime happened, this argument presumes, surely everyone involved would have recognized that it was terribly wrong and someone would have spoken up at the time.

But if there’s one thing we can take away from the popular culture of the 1980s, when the alleged events took place, it’s that a sexual assault at that time might not have been immediately clear as what it was, for participants and observers alike. Some of the most popular comedies of the ’80s are filled with allegedly hilarious sequences that portray what in 2018 would be unambiguously considered date rape.

As long as everybody involved is acquainted with each other, these movies tend to treat those rapes as harmless hijinks. They don’t really count. They’re funny — even in movies as sweet and romantic as Sixteen Candles.

“I have a difficult time believing any person would continue to go to – according to the affidavit – ten parties over a two-year period where women were routinely gang raped and not report it,” tweeted Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) after Swetnick came forward with her story.

“One obvious question about this account: Why would she constantly attend parties where she believed girls were being gang-raped?” asked National Review editor Rich Lowry.

“Please someone help me with this,” wrote conservative writer David French. “Georgetown Prep boys frequently committed gang rape. Lots of people knew they were committing gang rape. And despite this common knowledge no one has talked publicly for three decades, until the day before a crucial Senate hearing. What?”

This argument has been a common response to accusations of sexual misconduct over the past year of #MeToo discourse: It couldn’t have happened, because if it had, someone would have said so at the time. But as German Lopez has written for Vox, there are plenty of issues in our criminal justice system that prevent survivors of sexual violence from reporting.

Survivors who come forward are likely to be harassed and blamed for not keeping their mouths shut, they are likely to face a hostile response from police officers, the process of investigating the crime can be so traumatic for the survivor that it’s sometimes called “the second rape” — and after all that, odds are low that the attacker is ever likely to face legal consequences for their actions.

It’s worth noting another reason that Kavanaugh’s accusers in particular wouldn’t have been comfortable coming forward about what happened to them in the early 1980s. The way our culture thought about rape at the time was fundamentally different than it is now.

In the 1980s, “rape” meant an attack from a stranger in a dark alley, not something that acquaintances did to each other at house parties where everyone knows each other. In 1982, it would have been difficult for women like Swetnick and Christine Blasey Ford to find the language to describe what had happened to them.

“I completely reject that notion,” said French on Twitter, when presented with the argument that the way our culture talked about rape in the 1980s was different than it is today. “I was in high school in the 1980s. Gang rape was viewed as a horrible crime then, too.”

It’s true that gang rape was considered a horrible crime in the 1980s — but in the abstract, when thought of as a crime perpetrated by a group of strangers on an innocent, sober, virginal good girl victim in a dark alley. But it’s simply not the case that the mainstream culture at large in the ’80s had the same ideas we do today about sexual assault — especially when it’s perpetrated by people who know each other, at parties, around alcohol.

We can tell that it’s not the case, because there are many beloved, iconic movies made in the 1980s that built entire comedic subplots over what we can better recognize today as rape scenes. And in those movies, rape wasn’t a horrible crime. It was supposed to be funny.

The ’80s were a decade of film comedy hugely informed by the recent success of 1978’s Animal House, which features a rape fantasy scene filmed in what critic Emily Nussbaum describes as “the perviest possible way.”

It was the decade that gave us Revenge of the Nerds, which, as Noah Brand put it at the Good Men Project, “has so much rape culture, you could use it to make rape yogurt”; it gave us Police Academy and its “nonconsensual blowjobs are a fun and light-hearted prank” ethos. And perhaps most disturbingly, it gave us the comedic rape subplot in Sixteen Candles, John Hughes’s much beloved and iconic 1984 teen romance.

Sixteen Candles isn’t a college sex romp like Revenge of the Nerds or Animal House. It’s a high school love story. It’s been celebrated for 34 years for its sweet, romantic heart. Yet it is entirely willing to feature a lengthy, allegedly hilarious subplot in which a drunk and unconscious girl is passed from one boy to another and then raped.

The drunk girl in question is Caroline (Haviland Morris), the girlfriend to romantic hero Jake Ryan, and if you know one thing about Sixteen Candles, it’s that Jake Ryan (Michael Schoeffling) is perfect. He is the impossibly cool, impossibly beautiful senior guy who is dating the impossibly beautiful senior girl — and yet, as soon as Jake Ryan hears that gawky, awkward sophomore Samantha (Molly Ringwald) has a crush on him, he immediately begins to like her back, defying all the laws of god, man, and high school popularity.

Jake Ryan is the embodiment of a fantasy so compelling it instantly made Sixteen Candles iconic: What if the object of all your romantic high school dreams decided to pursue you without you having to expend any effort whatsoever, just because they could see that you were, like, deeper and more special than the rest of the school? What if they somehow saw that without you ever having to have a conversation or interact with them in any way?

“Jake stands the test of time,” wrote Hank Stuever in the Washington Post in 2004. He quotes a 34-year-old woman who grew up on Jake Ryan: “Oh, gosh, Jake Ryan. Just thinking about it now, I get … kind of … It’s all just too good to be true.”

Jake Ryan’s reputation as the ideal dream boy of every teenage girl’s deepest fantasies has lasted for decades. Jake, writes Stuever, “is Christ, redeeming the evil sins of high school. Jake as the ideal. Jake as the eternal belief in something better.”

Yet Jake Ryan cold-bloodedly hands a drunk and unconscious Caroline over to another guy and says, “Have fun.”

In 1984, you could be a perfect dream boy and also be an accessory to date rape. They were not mutually exclusive ideas. In fact, they reinforced each other.

In the moral universe of Sixteen Candles, Jake is allowed to be callous to Caroline without losing his dream boy status because, Sixteen Candles briskly assures us, Caroline is not the right kind of girl. She has breasts, and she drinks. She’s potentially a little bit slutty. “She doesn’t know shit about love,” Jake explains. “The only thing she cares about is partying.”

The fact that Jake casually despises his longtime girlfriend doesn’t reflect poorly on him, because it doesn’t affect the fantasy at the heart of Sixteen Candles. What Sixteen Candles is selling is the dream of the unattainable guy falling in love with the everygirl. So for the fantasy to work, Jake must prove his deep and abiding love for Sam. Ignoring and degrading Caroline is an easy shortcut to that goal, because in the moral universe of Sixteen Candles, the more you degrade one girl — the whore — the more you can exalt the virgin.

So Caroline gets drunk at a party and passes out in her boyfriend’s room, where presumably she believes she will be safe. Jake, disgusted, comments that “I could violate her 10 different ways if I wanted to,” but now that the pure and virginal charms of Sam are in his sights, “I’m just not interested anymore.”

Instead, he passes her over to Ted (Anthony Michael Hall) — who is listed in the credits only as “the Geek” — reasoning, “She’s so blitzed she won’t know the difference.” The poor Geek has had no luck with girls, so Jake illustrates his generous magnanimity by installing the Geek in his own fancy car, with his own fancy unconscious girlfriend next to him, and says, “Have fun.”

In the car, Caroline regains consciousness long enough to ask who the Geek is, and Jake assures her that the Geek is, in fact, him, a casual manipulation that Caroline is too drunk to register as false. The pair drives off into the night, and Caroline climbs into the Geek’s lap and purrs, “I love you,” disoriented and out of it. The Geek looks straight into the camera lens and grins, “This is getting good.”

The next time we see Caroline, she’s unconscious again, and the Geek is having his friends photograph him next to her unresponsive body. “Ted, you’re a legend,” they gush.

The next morning, a newly sober Caroline and Geek conclude that they had sex the night before. The Geek asks Caroline if she enjoyed herself. “You know, I have this weird feeling I did,” Caroline says.

“She had to have a feeling about it, rather than a thought,” wrote Molly Ringwald in the New Yorker last year, in a long, empathetic reexamination of her work with John Hughes, “because thoughts are things we have when we are conscious, and she wasn’t.”

The camera lingers on the mismatched pair — the beautiful cheerleader and the Geek, who we all know never, ever would have had sex if the cheerleader had anything to say about it in her right mind — and waits for us to laugh. The joke is that they had sex despite the fact that the cheerleader didn’t want to. It’s funny.

The Geek’s culpability here is muddy. He is ostensibly relieved of responsibility for the encounter because Caroline is the one who came onto him — although he was sober enough to recognize that she wouldn’t do so if she weren’t drunk. And like Caroline, he was drunk enough to black out the next morning, throwing his own ability to consent into question — although he was sober enough to drive, and unlike Caroline, he wasn’t fading in and out of consciousness all night.

Whether or not the Geek is directly responsible for committing date rape, the fact remains that Caroline had sex she didn’t consent to, and the movie expects its audience to respond to that development with righteous glee. Jake — perfect, dreamy, too-good-to-be-true Jake Ryan — orchestrated the situation while in perfect control of his faculties. The movie expects that fact to make him only dreamier, because every time Jake degrades Caroline it proves more firmly that he considers Sam to be special and above degradation.

Here are the basic ideas embedded in this plot:

• Girls who drink are asking for it. Girls who have sex are asking for it. Girls who go to parties are asking for it. They are asking for it even if they only drink and have sex and party with their monogamous boyfriends. Whatever happens to that kind of girl as a result is funny.

• Boys are owed girls. A good guy will help his nerdy bro to get a girl. Her consent is not necessary or desired.

• To avoid being the kind of girl who gets raped, you need to earn male approval. If you earn male approval, other girls might be raped, but you won’t be, and that will prove that you are special.

• Once you earn male approval, it can be taken away — as Caroline’s goes away once Jake tires of her — and then you’ll go from being the kind of girl who doesn’t get raped to the kind of girl who does.

• A good guy can participate in this whole system and remain an unsullied dream guy.

• The kind of girl who gets raped has no right to complain about what happens to her. Also it isn’t rape.

That’s how mainstream culture presented rape, and thus affirmed rape culture, in 1984.

On many levels, it’s not far off from how larges parts of our culture think about rape today — but we bury those values now. In 2018, we no longer enshrine these values in stories of unambiguous rape that are embedded into beloved romantic classics. We offer alternative narratives and are capable of having conversations about date rape.

In the 1980s, though, alternative narratives were few and far between. They were mostly offered only by feminism, and in the 1980s, mainstream culture considered feminism shrill and unfashionable.

That doesn’t mean that people went to see movies like Sixteen Candles and immediately thought, “Wow, that looks like fun, I’d better go get a bunch of girls drunk and have sex with them without their consent.” Sixteen Candles is not singlehandedly responsible for the rape culture of the 1980s. But like all popular culture, it does both reflect and help to shape the social context in which it exists.

The dominant cultural narrative at the time of Brett Kavanaugh’s high school experience was the one offered by Sixteen Candles. And it taught any girl who went to a party and got assaulted by an acquaintance that whatever happened to her was surely her fault, that it proved that she was the wrong kind of girl, that it was funny, that she had nothing whatsoever to complain about, and that it absolutely wasn’t rape.

Under those circumstances, the mystery is not why “any person would continue to go to … ten parties over a two-year period where women were routinely gang raped and not report it,” as Sen. Graham argued. The mystery is why anyone ever came forward with their story at all.

Original Source -> The rape culture of the 1980s, explained by Sixteen Candles

via The Conservative Brief