#Whiskey Women

[proceduralbob]

The temperance movement and the associated politicians needed to control the country’s view of women. It was difficult for a churchgoing America to comprehend mothers and grandmas strapping flasks to their inner thighs or toting revolvers to protect a truck full of hooch. Prohibitionists wanted citizens to believe good women made apple pie and tucked their children in bed at night.

Whiskey Women: The Untold Story of How Women Saved Bourbon, Scotch, and Irish Whiskey, Fred Minnick

[anachronistic-falsehood]

leans into the mic. "saying all men are trash in response to the various ccs getting outed as abusers is the wrong move and will harm male victims of abuse and sa" and "the reason these male ccs were able to abuse people and cover it up for so long is because of rampant misogyny in the content creating space and it's important to listen to the women coming out with their stories right now" are statements that coexist. btw

[camarilla-arts]

Thinking about Sandra Lynne and Sklonda friendship. Sandra had to catch the Kalina-plague from somewhere. 👀

[crooner-deans-walkman]

listening to a radio company album is hearing something you connect to so deeply on an emotional level that alters your brain just a little bit immediately followed by a song written by steve carlson

[wavesoutbeingtossed]

I know you don't like discussing the muses but i love your takes and perspectives and i had to ask you about this. after listening to ttpd, did you have the impression that she really loved matty more than any of her exes/previous relationships?. And listening to the whole album as a whole would you call it the ''matty album'' or do you think there are more prominent themes in there than their period together?. (hope this doesn't bother you, feel free to delete if you don't feel like answering it)

hey anon! You're right, I don't really like to get into the muses as I don't really think there's anything to add to the conversation at this point, and ultimately I don't think it matters.

That being said, and with the caveat that I am not Taylor and I do not know Taylor so I cannot speak to her thoughts and can only make relatively educated guesses based on being an avid consumer of her work and a student of the human condition (lol), no I do not think Taylor loved Matty more than anyone else. I think there was maybe a brief period in the thick of things where she *thought* she did because she was not thinking clearly and was in full-on denial, but to me the message that is loud and clear in the album (and more or less explicitly stated in the epilogue) is that it was not any kind of real love affair. It was certainly infatuation and lust and the promise of something more, and there may have been some love as well, but he was in no way the love of her life by any measure.

I would call it a "Matty album" insofar as they're about events in which he was present, sure. But I feel it much more as a Taylor album, if that makes sense, even though I know that's a cop out because every album is to a degree. I can't explain it well, but I don't see TTPD as a Matty (or Joe) album in the way that I would maybe say Red is a "Jake" album or 1989 may be a "Harry" album or even Lover being a "Joe" album whatever, because even if they don't figure in all the songs, that kind of heartbreak permeates so much of the material.

The thing about TTPD and the Matty situation is that the Matty situation is really a Joe situation (which in some ways is actually partially a Jake situation). I always say I hate treating Taylor like a character so I hate speaking about her and her work in this way, but you don't get the Matty situation without the Joe situation precipitating it. It's @taylortruther's now-infamous donut vs. hole analogy. The reason Taylor makes the choices she does with Matty is directly tied to what happened with Joe that made her feel she needed to. Which is not to say Taylor isn't responsible for her own actions or doesn't have agency in her own life, but I mean it in that the situation in which she found herself with Joe, and the pain it caused, is what made the alternative so comforting and perhaps even necessary in her mind. It's why it makes it so hard to "paternity test" the album, because the stories are inherently intertwined and you don't get the former without the latter.

The major "theme" of the album to me is the loss of a very specific, very personal dream, and the way in which she lost it, and the way in which grieving that loss drove her to make the choices she did. We're all talking very delicately about it because it's a sensitive topic, but it's late on Friday and few people are going to see this, so I'm going to say it: it's the give you my wild, give you a child of it all. The yearning she expresses both overtly and sub-textually for having a family in the album is palpable in a very iykyk kind of way, and it's the realization that those plans are not going to come to fruition in the way she had once imagined that drives a lot of the pain she experiences, and makes her jump at the chance to find that again with someone else.

I started a draft post about the theme of womanhood and motherhood on TTPD three months ago that I never finished because I ran out of time and ran out of steam, but it was the most striking thing to me on the album, not because I didn't know that she wanted those things because that's been obvious for years (definitely since Lover, and again, peace put it all on the table), but because the vulnerability she expressed about it on the album is incredibly moving, and it's so generous of her to trust listeners with those feelings and experiences.

Again, it's the thirtysomething of it all.

She is in relationship A which she at one point believes is forever, one which she at one point believes is going to lead to marriage and children. She is so committed to that dream that she either ignores or tries to fix serious issues that may otherwise lead others to think the two people in the relationship are incompatible, both because she loves the person deeply and because she feels that this is meant to be the way she achieves that dream. She gives it her everything, and it still dies a slow, painful, onerous death, and she feels like it may take her along with it. The dream of getting married and presumably having a family gets taken off the table: how we don't know and will likely never know because that is private between the parties involved. All that matters in the context of the album is that those plans never come to fruition and never would.

Then you have relationship B, an old flame who knows just enough buttons to push both to trigger and to flatter. A person who she presumably trusts with very sensitive, personal information as her life slowly crumbles, and this person is telling her all the things she wants to hear because he knows about what is happening in relationship A because she's told him. Person in relationship B doesn't get an "in" with her and sell her this dream unless what happens in relationship A precedes it. It's not a grand love affair for the ages, it's not a mutual decision on building their own dream together. It's Person B learning about what is happening with Person A and saying "I can do that!" even if he can't or doesn't. The dream he sells her is a rental car; it's not his own, he's just borrowing it from someone else and selling it back to her.

And the reason she falls for it is because it is what she aches for the most in her personal life, and she is grappling with it disintegrating, so she (unfortunately for her) falls for the easy way out, and in turn sells herself a story about how this must be fated, and this must be meant to be, because this person wants all the same things she does and she didn't even have to bargain for it! Well, yes, because she fed him the dream in the first place. (Like a mark falling for a sleeper cell spy.) It's too good to be true because it isn't true. IMO Person B doesn't come running out of the gate with the marriage/baby/dream life promises unless he knows that is what she most desires. But what's left unsaid out of all of it is that: those dreams were her dreams because they were her dreams with Person A. It was a whole life they had together, and a whole life they had planned for in some fashion, and a whole life that has to be dismantled in the aftermath.

So all this to say, yes, on the surface, Matty is a "main character" on the album, but truly he's a side character to Taylor as the narrator and person experiencing it and Joe as the ghost bit-player-who-haunts-every-scene. (Again, I hate referring to real people as characters, it gives me the absolute ick, but in this case it's the only way to answer the question.) I jokingly call it the Matty album for shorthand or when I want to say something out of pocket, but really, it's a disservice to the album to say that because it's not a muse album as in it's about the romance (like, say, Red often is), it's about a soul-crushing heartbreak that goes beyond it. The romance is the symptom, not the cause.

The loss of youth is tied in with all this: she's not 22 anymore. She isn't even 32 anymore. She had a very specific idea of what her life was going to look like at this point and had planned for that life, and it goes up in smoke. But again, to bring the womanhood into it all: there is, unfortunately, a deadline for these things. You're with someone for over half a decade you think is going to be your life partner and father of your children and and then he's not. You spent half a decade building this relationship for it to crumble, but now you're in your mid-30s and you don't necessarily have another half-decade to build that trust and faith in someone else before being ready to start a family. And maybe you're scared that anyone else who may become your partner will need that much time to build that trust and faith, because that's kind of all you've ever know in relationships. But lo and behold, someone comes into your life you once had feelings for and maybe now do again and is offering you everything you want and thought you'd have by this point in your life right now. It feels like an elixir that as we find out is actually poison.

That youth is not just the chance for motherhood, but it's also the hopes and idealism and belief in the future that often gradually erodes as we age. But for Taylor as well, it's also tied into the trauma of what she went through particularly in 2016, which kicks off a lot of things on the album as well (her retreat, her relationship with Joe, the pivoting in her career, etc.). That event caused a pretty clear before/after in her life (like a few other events, I suspect), and another major theme in the album is her finally grappling with the full weight of that. They're all different branches of the same tree of the story of TTPD and her life.

I could talk about this stuff forever, but I'm going to stop here because it's long enough and I should save stuff for one of the dozens of drafts I have half-baked lol. But this is just something I needed to get off my chest perhaps.

[mossfilms]

something about her makes me fall in love

[reddeadsredhead]

Genuinely love how excited Tilly is at the beginning of Sean's return party. The way she squeals "SEAN :D" Also the little "I'd like to see you try" like she genuinely thinks he's so fun/funny and is so openly happy to have him back. I'd love to see them do a mission together or even just have more interactions :)

[theworldisyonces]

The Beynicé, Carter, Knowles, Rowland clan, and Victoria Monet at the Glamour Magazine’s “Women of the Year” awards at Paradise Club at The Times Square EDITION. Ms. Tina was one of the honorees of the “Mothers of the Year” award. (10/8/24)

[monsterfuckermilligan]

different person here but also, dean does constantly compare sam to female characters, especially in the early seasons, which is a big part of the reason i (and others) think dean somewhat sees sam as a women/questions his masculinity

i understand that, anon, and i also think supernatural was made in 2005 and the writers were/are misogynistic. this falls away more in the later seasons, especially when dean becomes more comfortable in his own masculinity and femininity and isn’t performing to the degree he is in originally. i don’t take much stake in this as a reading unless it takes into account that dean is the one who is narratively compared to women (he’s named after his grandma, deanna, compared to mary, has baby as a metaphor for his body who he refers to as she/her, is a direct comparison to amara, etc.) and is chastised for being too emotional by sam. it’s not to say that they’re invalid readings, or that headcanons aren’t perfectly okay, but i think when we’re comparing two characters who are written as men (particularly cis men) in canon, discussing who is more girl coded is just odd to me. that’s my personal opinion. i’m a big fan of transnatural as well, so this not a criticism of that by any means. headcanons, fanart, fanfic, etc. do not have to be based in canon. but i stand by my belief that many of the people who say sam is girl coded in canon are particularly focused on the pain and shame of femininity, and i just don’t like to think in that way. i think we could better focus on characters who are written to be women.

[gadawg-404]

St. Patrick’s Day Is Loading

[anachronistic-falsehood]

the phenomenon of taking guy characters and turning them into women in mcyt and mcyt-adjacent fandoms due to a shortage/lack of well-written and engaging female characters needs to be studied i think. this isnt a gripe with transfem hcs i love transfem hcs but im just wondering. why go out of ur way to take a male character and slap she/her pronouns on him when you could instead read or watch something with good prevalent female characters that are very well written already? like. there's a fucking Pattern with the characters ppl hc as transfem. its always the kind and loving level-headed voices of reason that get the transfem beam. why do you think the soft and kind male character who's meek and mild and folds easily under pressure is the one who's a woman. why is that. huh. why. answer quick.

[anotherlostman]

[wavesoutbeingtossed]

i just saw the clip in question and like??? what are yall even mad about 😭 im sorry but the only thought i had was “huh good for her 🙂‍↕️” and then “makes sense” cause all we’ve seen tells that exact story WHO’S SURPRISED

literally my reaction:

and like I said in the tags of my previous post, as funny as this all is, he wasn't even being specific. He was just like "sorry I can't relate to being a 50 year old dude who takes his wife for granted and expects things from her without considering her feelings." I don't follow Travis or the Kelces much outside of Taylor so I don't know the history of it all, but that's like, the greenest flag and hopefully bodes well for their future!

I think it was Jaime who said there was a tweet going around that said Taylor and Travis are "corny and horny" and that is 100% accurate from what we can see lol. AND GOOD FOR THEM. She didn't have either of those by the end of her last relationship and it almost killed her.

I don't think people should be exposing their entire sex lives for public consumption, um, unless they feel like it that is, but this is hardly that. It was just a couple of adults sharing some fairly healthy life experiences and maybe trying to open the eyes of some douchebags idk lol. Who'd a thunk open communication and appreciation and consideration of one's partner would be so sexy and scandalous!

I'd even argue maybe Taylor WANTS more people to know that this is how many women would like to be treated by their partners lol.

[pirunika]

U know a game is good when i want to replay it w the other gender version of the ro

[rexscanonwife]

I've been a little tired today but here's one thought. Hozier teased a new song and it's just one VERSE but....why is it so fitting for me n Charles already

[britneyshakespeare]

Man is saying weird things to me again