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beefrobeefcal · 11 months ago

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I have a Thot to contribute for the Beefro Repentance Tiddie Fic, in case it is helpful or shall I say... titillating? 😂 (I'm sorry)

Since it didn't specify who gets milked, maybe we go back to late-stage pregnant Mouse? A little lactation play where Frankie drinks from her after dinner until he tops off his big full belly? (Big enough to rival her bump 🥵)

Or since it sounds like nonnie wants some male breast play too...add Frankie and Mouse playing with each other's delectable chests first?

Anyway just some ideas! I wasn't expecting your poll to turn out how it did, not gonna lie 😄 But hey, I'll enjoy wherever you take us with this!

You're a lifesaver, Reby!

fucking RIGHTS we need to expose Frankie's Breeding, Pregnancy & Lactation Kinks!

Smuttiest regards,

Beefro 👌🥩💜

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Beefro Proudly Presents:

a Chubby!Frankie one shot

The Catfish & The Mouse: Mouse's Relief

Pairing: Frankie Morales x Pregnant Fem!Reader

Summary: Frankie helps Mouse find relief.

Rating: Explicit 18+ (MDNI)

Word Count: 2,382

Content Warning: pregnancy talk, main character pregnant, lactation kink, pregnancy kink, breeding kink, 5-knuckle shuffle (male), lactation, breast feeding, breast milk, cumming in pants, weight talk, eating, sore breasts

Author's Notes: Thank you @rebel-held for the assistance you provided in your THOT. Thank you to @thehalflifeofloveisforever, @theywhowriteandknowthings & @neverwheremoonchild for their input, eyes and THOTs.

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It had been a day. You were now on maternity leave, supposedly to be giving yourself some down time before your baby arrived, but you’d been anything but relaxed today.

Your baby had been kicking the same rib over and over for the last three days, not allowing you to have any restful sleep; your big belly weighed heavily on you, making movements hard; and to top it all off, your milk had come in, making your breasts extremely sore and heavy.

Pregnancy was so uncomfortable.

Thankfully, it was a Friday and that meant you had Frankie all to yourself from the moment he got home to Monday morning at 6:00 am. He’s been so patient and caring with you, rubbing your feet and back, switching sides of the bed with you so you could be closer to the bathroom, and giving you your space when you needed to just be left alone because of the raging hormones in your body, then running back the moment you needed to be held.

Despite being so uncomfortable, you decided to do something special for him to dinner and make his favourite – lasagna.

****

Frankie arrived home, opening up the back door to the smell of his absolute favourite. He smiled and walked into the kitchen, seeing you leaning against the counter, your hands holding your phone and resting on your big belly, while you scrolled through whatever app you were hooked on today. He couldn’t help but notice how much more pronounced your chest was, and his cock twitched in his jeans. But before he could do anything, he knew he needed to test the waters first.

“Hey mama…”, he said softly with a smile, coming up beside you and splaying his hand over your middle. He pressed a kiss on your temple and moved his hand over your sore side. “How’s the rib?”

You sighed with a tired smile. “Sore… but okay. How was work?”

He didn’t want to talk about work. Not when that sigh heaved your swollen tits, making his cock twitch harder.

“Baby…”, he cooed as he kissed your neck, continuing to test whether you’d let him go further, and he reached up and gently palmed your tit.

You hissed in pain, and he jumped back. “What? What happened?”

“They hurt… so much… I’m sorry, Frankie. Please don’t touch my boobs.”

“What- why are they so sore, Mouse?”, he asked, sounding concerned with a slight hint of annoyance.

“Milk’s coming in, and they’re swollen and-“

“I can see that.”, he stated, his eyes glued to your ample cleavage.

“Frankie.” Your tone was indicative of your own irritation and a warning that your hormonal temper was rearing its head.

He looked up to your face and offered a sheepish grin.

“Okay… no touching the tiddies.”

You sighed again, not wanting your weekend to start with your mood. “It’s okay, baby. Dinner will be ready soon so you should have your shower. “

He nodded with a smile and kissed you quickly before heading to the bedroom.

As Frankie stood in the shower, he tried to ignore his semi hard-on but his mind kept slipping back to the sight of you, round and heavy, tits swollen and all because of him. He gripped his now fully hard cock and pumped himself, thinking about how good you feel and smell and look, and…

He came fast, his come hitting the shower wall then washing away under the spray of the shower. As he calmed down, he thought about how quickly he hit his release by his own hand when his mind was filled with you being pregnant. He grinned to himself as he finished his shower, making a mental note to take some more pictures of you like this for his personal spank bank, especially if you decided one kid was enough. He dried off and got dressed, heading back out into the kitchen with you.

*****

The lasagna was gone, and Frankie’s belly was the only evidence that it had ever existed. You couldn’t stomach it, so he had eaten your portion as well, so you had some fruit and soup instead.

“Fuck me, Mouse… we both look like we’re about to pop.”, he chuckled, trying to pull down his T-shirt, the same one that fit just fine a few weeks ago.

“Head to the couch, I’ll clean up.”, you said, standing up and wincing.

“Abso-fuckin’-lutely not, mama.”, he grunted as he stood up. “I’ll clean up later. You need to relax.”

After some coaxing, Frankie had convinced you to have a bath and he would be ready for you when you were done.

As you soaked, Frankie sat on the couch, full belly sitting heavily on his lap, and he searched online for how to help you with your sore breasts. He read about warm compresses and massaging, then his heart almost jumped into his throat and his cock came to standing attention at once when he read that he could express the milk by sucking it out. He groaned and palmed at his hard on through his sweatpants. Yup. He was going to be so helpful.

You got out of the bath, feeling more relaxed, minus your breasts, and got into your lounge clothes, then made your way out to the living room. You stopped in the doorway and watched as Frankie grunted looking at his phone with a feral intensity and his hand palming his crotch.

“Am I interrupting anything?” Your tone was teasing and the grin on your face told him to not stop on your account.

“I think I can help you… with your tiddy problem.”, he grunted, tossing his phone to the couch and standing up. He walked towards you, his eyes fixed on your chest, and he licked his lips.

“Frankie! I said they’re sore!”

“I know… and I wanna help.”, he groaned as he pulled you into his arms and kissed your neck. If it wasn’t for the fact you both had pronounced bellies, you know you’d feel his cock pressing into you.

His hand came up and slipped under your shirt and he gently caressed your breast through your flimsy bralette. Your breath hitches and he hushed you and kissed your neck again.

“Don’t think you understand what you do to me, looking like this, mama… your fucking body is just…”

He grunted as his cock tried to find friction when he bucked his hips, and he softly twisted your nipple. You gasped and let out a pained whine, but he held you firmly where you were.

“Lemma help, mama… please.”, he pleaded against your neck, breathing heavily. “Lemme make it better.”

You winced again at his hands, as gentle and wonderful as they felt, and seriously considered telling him off. But the desperation in his voice plus the warmth of his hand on your swollen breast gave you pause.

He stood up, nudging his nose against yours, his eyelids heavy and he whispered please again. You nodded and he led you to the couch.

Once you were seated, he went to the bathroom and grabbed a few towels, and put them beside you. He leaned down, holding himself above you with his hand on the back of the couch. He kissed you, and you could tell he was holding himself back as he did. He released your lips and pressed his forehead against yours.

“Fuck, Mouse, you look so good like this…”, he panted as he stood up. “I’m gonna help…”

He dropped to his knees between yours and pushed your shirt up over tour belly, kissing and mouthing his way up. You watched him with wide eyes, and it dawned on you what he was planning.

“Frankie? What are you gonna-“

“Gonna make it better, mama… gonna help you.”, he grunted again, pushing your shirt your breasts and pulling it over your head.

He sat back on his heels and looked you over with a ravenous ferocity in his eyes.

“Fuck... yes, mama... look so good...”, he groaned, his hands going to your swollen middle. “No idea what it does to me to see you stretching out your shirts because you're so full of my baby... tits looking amazing....”

He dove his face forward, kissing your belly again, moving up to mouth your nipple through the jersey knit fabric of your bralette. It felt amazing, but also completely confusing and overwhelming. The only time Frankie had expressed this much admiration for your swollen body was when he was drunk; he would get handsy and needy and would whine and beg you to ride him or let him fuck you in front of a mirror so he could see you. He was never this demanding and gropey and domineering. This was new and you were not mad at it.

“Frankie...”, you whined as you panted when he nipped just a bit too hard at your breast. “Please! They’re so sore... please be gentle!”

“I know... I know, mama... I’m gonna help.”, he cooed, sucking your nipple lightly through your bralette.

You sucked in your breath and your hand went to his head, gripping his hair, and you winced as he added pressure with his hand to your other breast, causing it to leak a bit. When he felt the warmth of your milk saturate your bralette, he sat back and stared. His pupils were so blown out, you could no longer differentiate where his irises were, and his eyes were fixed on your clothed, leaking breast.

“Frankie... are you gonna...?”, you asked quietly through heavy breathing.

His eyes didn’t move as he nodded slowly and licked his lips. His hands came up and pulled your bralette off, releasing your heavy breasts, and his mouth immediately grasped one of your nipples and sucked. You let out a breathy whine and once again gripped his hair, this time with both hands. The pinch and pull of him sucking to get your milk moving was almost too much until you felt a release. You sighed at the relief that washed over you and Frankie groaned as milk spurted into his mouth.

He swallowed mouthful after mouthful of milk, grunting as he suckled, despite his belly already being full from his big dinner. He didn’t care about the ever-tightening feeling in his middle; his mind had a singular focus and that was what he had in his mouth.

When he felt like he couldn’t get more from that breast, he released your nipple and licked it, looking up at you with dark eyes and panting. He moved over to your other breast, now leaking even more, and nudged it with his nose and his tongue darted out, licking up the escaped milk.

“Jesus... Mouse... you taste so fucking good...”, he grunted as he lapped up the warm liquid. His voice sounded deep and primal, like your weeping tits had unlocked some deep seeded need Frankie hadn’t tapped into yet.

You locked eyes with him again and he made a low growl as he pulled your nipple into his mouth and began sucking on it greedily.

You leaned forward a bit and one of your hands slid down, looking for his hard cock, but his belly was in the way. You knew he was full before, but now his belly would rival yours. It felt tight and as your fingers rubbed and prodded him, and you felt his body move as he rutted his hips.

“Poor baby... bet your dick is just aching... but you’re too big for me to get it... I can feel how full you are, Frankie baby... belly’s getting big... but you like this, don’t you... getting fat because you put a baby in me... that’s it... good boy...”, you cooed, stroking his hair.

A low moan emanated from Frankie and his grip on your thighs tightened and he panted through gulps. When he finally drained the second breast, he sat back, and you released his hair. He looked like he was in another realm of existence, with milk dripping down his chin and his eyes blown out. He was panting and fell back and laid on the floor, his extremely full belly prominently jutting out above him and groaned.

It took some work, but you got up off the couch, pulled on your sweater, and stood above Frankie, gently rocking back and forth, rubbing your belly.

“Baby... your belly’s bigger than mine right now.”, you smiled, nudging his lovehandle gently with your foot and noted the wet patch on the crotch of his sweatpants. You grinned, knowing exactly what that was.

He lifted his head and looked at his swollen middle and dropped it back down again. “Fuck, I’m full.”, he groaned and closed his eyes.

“I’d get on the floor and give you a belly rub, but...”, you grinned, motioning to your baby bump. “We both don’t need to be stuck on the down there.”

Frankie huffed a laugh, his eyes opening as he looked up at you. “How are your boobs?”

“Much better, thank you.”, you chuckle, as he struggles to lug himself upright.

Once he stands up, you can see his back arching to accommodate the weight in his belly. You reach forward and rub his tummy and smile.

“Kinda over did it, huh?”, you asked, giving him a pat and leaning towards him to press a kiss on his cheek. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”, he murmured as smiled and splayed his hand on your belly, feeling your little one moving around.

“So, you came in your pants, huh?”, you said pointedly with an eyebrow raised.

He huffed a laugh, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, and pulled you to his side. “Yeah... I came in my fucking pants.”

“Sucking on my tits was so good that you came in your pants? You kinky bastard...”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah... ”, he grinned, nudging you towards the bedroom and swatting at your backside.

You stopped and grinned, biting your lower lip, as you felt his belly press into your back, and he wrapped his arms around your middle.

“Watch your mouth... carrying my baby can only save you from so much, Mama.”, he growled into your ear as he guided you down the hallway and int your bedroom.

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@theywhowriteandknowthings @harryleatherfit @toxicanonymity @harriedandharassed @neverwheremoonchild @rebel-held @beee-haw @nevergoingbacknowshine @idolatrybarbie @v4vayha @lalocitos @xdaddysprincessxx @deathsholywaterr @heareball @lyssramscal @wintrwinchestr @blackfemalenerd @southernbe @starkeydaviss @noxturnalpascal

#pedro pascal #pedro pascal characters #pedro pascal fanfiction #pedro pascal tummy #frankie morales #triple frontier #you ask beefro answers #francisco catfish morales #frankie morales fanfiction #chubby frankie rights !!!!!#🥩#the catfish & the mouse one shot #friend of beefro

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bleachbleachbleach · 2 years ago

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how bleach imagines work in my head

One of my colleagues posted this Cultural Dimensions Test, which meant I proceeded to spend my entire lunch taking the quiz from the POV of various Bleach characters, which feels like kind of a deep cut hobby, but like--I love it??Is anyone else obsessed with taking random internet quizzes on behalf of fictional characters?

It’s not particularly about the results, or expecting any great insight from the results. I just really like imagining blorbos in Scenarios. Which like, of course I do, but I think I enjoy imagining the scenarios offered by the quiz questions as much as I enjoy imagining the scenario of... a blorbo responding to questions in a lab somewhere. I’m not even sure I can express how enjoyable I find that train of thought. Even I can knowledge that that sounds boring af--why can’t I find joy in something normal like coffeeshop AUs or A/B/O--but man, the titillations!!! The titillations!!!!

I really like thinking through the responses and thinking about like, the distinctions between what a character expects of others vs. their expectations of themself, or all the things they’d let slide as part of the way of the world.

Anyway, because you were all definitely wondering, the Cultural Dimensions test results I got were:

Hitsugaya --> Norway

Zaraki --> Sweden

Nnoitra --> Great Britain

Mayuri --> Estonia

Allegedly there are options that aren’t in northern Europe but despite the weirdos I chose I COULDN’T FIND ANY.

Then I found out that that website has a bunch of different quizzes, so I also took the “moral foundation” quiz for Hitsugaya:

Which wasn’t a great quiz for him, scenario-wise, but I maintain that the Gotei dating pool is extremely sloppy. I will not be convinced otherwise!

#my life is greatly improved by the knowledge that i can text my co-blogger shit like this and she will actually respond #and further improved by the knowledge that there is an entire website that will also just let me post stuff like this #also if you tagged me/us in anything i am planning to catch up with this week in tumblr soon!!! please know you're not being ignored #i was ambushed by The Quizzes #my love language: 'i would take random online quizzes from the POVs of fictional characters with you'#no brain just bleach

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pagebypagereviews · 2 months ago

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The realm of psychological thrillers teems with tales of deceit and moral ambiguity, yet few stand out as starkly as "The Silent Wife: A gripping emotional page turner with a twist that will take your breath away." This novel, penned by contemporary author Kerry Fisher, is a masterclass in narrative tension and emotional depth, drawing readers into the volatile dynamics of a seemingly perfect marriage unraveling at the seams. At its heart, the story circles around Lara, a woman grappling with painful secrets and the façade of contentment, and Maggie, her sister-in-law, who harbors her own hidden sorrows and insights. The intersection of these complex female perspectives injects a refreshing authenticity, challenging conventional tropes and pushing the psychological thriller genre into new emotional territories. What makes "The Silent Wife" significant is not just its ability to titillate the senses or keep readers perched on the edge of their seats, but also its profound exploration of the unspoken struggles that put relationships to the test. Fisher adeptly dissects themes of betrayal, silence, and the oppressive weight of societal expectations. The book adeptly bridges the gap between a gripping narrative and the poignant realities of emotional survival in marriage, addressing the often-taboo topic of domestic emotional turbulence with finesse. For readers wrangling with their battles or seeking deeper understanding within their personal lives, this tale serves as a mirror and a beacon, offering both solace and sobering truths. ## Plot The plot of "The Silent Wife: A gripping emotional page turner with a twist that will take your breath away" is a masterclass in tension and unexpected turns. The narrative revolves around the protagonist, a wife who finds herself entangled in a web of deceit, betrayal, and hidden secrets. As the story unfolds, each chapter adds a new layer of complexity, keeping readers on the edge of their seats. The author expertly paces the storyline, alternating between moments of intense suspense and emotional revelation. Several key plot points, such as the unraveling of the protagonist's marriage and the shocking discoveries she makes about her husband's clandestine activities, serve as crucial turning points that propel the narrative forward. ## Characters The characters in "The Silent Wife" are richly developed and multi-dimensional, each contributing to the story's depth and intrigue. The protagonist, whose journey is central to the narrative, is portrayed with an intricate blend of vulnerability and resilience. Her emotional arc is compelling, reflecting the complexities of dealing with betrayal and the quest for truth. Secondary characters, such as the protagonist's husband, her confidants, and even the antagonists, are intricately woven into the storyline. These characters are not mere plot devices but are given substantial backgrounds and motivations that make them believable and relatable. Their interactions with the protagonist highlight various facets of the human condition, from love and loyalty to fear and deception. ## Writing Style The writing style of "The Silent Wife" is both evocative and engaging, making it a standout in the genre of psychological thrillers. The author's use of descriptive language paints vivid pictures of the settings and characters' emotions, pulling readers into the world of the story. Dialogue is another strong suit, with exchanges between characters feeling natural and authentic, often laden with subtext that hints at deeper underlying tensions. The narrative voice is clear and distinct, guiding the reader through complex emotional landscapes and intricate plot twists. Furthermore, the author employs a deft hand at balancing showing versus telling, providing enough detail to evoke empathy and understanding without overwhelming the reader with unnecessary exposition. ## Setting The setting of "The Silent Wife" plays a crucial role in establishing the mood and tone of the novel.

The story is primarily set in a suburban environment, which starkly contrasts with the dark, suspenseful events that unfold within its seemingly tranquil confines. This juxtaposition amplifies the sense of unease, as familiar and safe locales become the backdrop for the protagonist's growing fears and suspicions. The author describes these settings with meticulous detail, from the layout of the family home to the serene yet unsettling nature of the neighborhood. This attention to setting not only grounds the story in a believable reality but also enhances the suspense by highlighting the eerie normalcy that masks underlying threats. ## Unique Aspects "The Silent Wife" stands out for several unique aspects that distinguish it from typical novels in the psychological thriller genre. One of its most striking features is the twist that redefines the entire narrative, challenging readers’ assumptions and expectations. This twist is not just a gimmick but is intricately woven into the plot, altering the reader's perception of previous events and characters. Another unique aspect is the deep psychological exploration of marital dynamics, providing a lens into how trust and communication—or the lack thereof—affect relationships. Additionally, the book's portrayal of the protagonist's internal struggles offers a nuanced view of resilience and recovery, making it more than just a suspenseful read but also a profound examination of human emotion and strength. Similar to The Silent Wife: A gripping emotional page turner with a twist that will take your breath away Book Review Pros Cons Engaging Plot: The plot is gripping and keeps the reader hooked, which enhances the entertainment value. Well-developed Characters: Characters are detailed and multi-dimensional, making them relatable and interesting. Emotional Depth: The book delves into complex emotions, providing a deeply engaging emotional experience. Unexpected Twist: The surprising twist towards the end adds excitement and keeps the reader intrigued. Easy to Read: The writing style is accessible and fluid, making it a quick and engaging read. Predictable Elements: Some parts of the story may feel predictable to seasoned readers, which could reduce the thrill. Pacing Issues: Certain sections of the book may feel slow, leading to potential loss of interest. Character Stereotypes: Some characters fall into stereotypical roles, which might limit their complexity. Emotional Overload: The intense emotional aspects might overwhelm some readers. Unresolved Subplots: A few subplots may feel unresolved, which could lead to dissatisfaction. Plot and Genre When evaluating "The Silent Wife: A gripping emotional page turner with a twist that will take your breath away," it’s crucial to consider its plot and genre. This book is categorized as a psychological thriller interwoven with elements of domestic suspense. The story focuses on complex relationships and deep emotional underpinnings, making it an ideal choice for readers who appreciate intricate, character-driven narratives. An understanding of these aspects can help potential readers gauge whether this book aligns with their literary preferences. Author's Writing Style The writing style of an author can greatly influence the reading experience. Look for reviews and excerpts that highlight how well the author uses language, constructs sentences, and develops the plot. Investing in "The Silent Wife" will be more enjoyable if you appreciate the narrative style employed by the author. Sometimes, reviews from fellow readers can provide valuable insights into whether an author's style resonates with you. Character Development Character development is a critical element in any gripping novel. Consider the complexity and growth of the characters within "The Silent Wife." Well-developed characters can make a substantial difference in how engaging and relatable the story becomes. Reader reviews often shed light on whether characters are multi-dimensional and evolve effectively throughout the narrative.

Plot Twists and Suspense For a psychological thriller, plot twists and suspense are vital components. "The Silent Wife" promises a breathtaking twist that will take your breath away. Assessing other reviews can be useful in determining whether the book successfully delivers on its promise of keeping readers on the edge of their seats. Look for keywords such as "unexpected," "twist," and "suspense" in reviews to gauge the effectiveness of the plot twists. Pacing and Length The pacing of a book can significantly impact your reading experience. Thrillers typically require a balance between steady tension and moments of heightened suspense. Check if "The Silent Wife" maintains a consistent pace suitable for your liking. Additionally, consider the book’s length to ensure it fits well with your reading time constraints. Reader Reviews and Ratings Reviews and ratings from other readers can provide valuable insights into the overall reception of the book. Look for common themes in both positive and negative reviews of "The Silent Wife." This will help you identify potential strengths and weaknesses of the book, enabling you to make an informed decision. Price and Availability Evaluate the price and availability of the book across different platforms. "The Silent Wife" might be available in various formats, including hardcover, paperback, and e-book versions. Comparing prices from different retailers can help you find the best deal. Also, consider checking if the book is available at local libraries or through subscription services for a more cost-effective option. Book Awards and Recognitions Books that have received awards or recognitions are often worth considering. Check if "The Silent Wife" has been acknowledged by reputable literary institutions or has appeared on bestseller lists. Such accolades can be a testament to the book’s quality and appeal. Recommendations from Trusted Sources Recommendations from trusted sources such as book clubs, literary critics, and friends can also guide your purchase decision. If "The Silent Wife" comes highly recommended by sources whose opinions you value, it may be worth adding to your reading list. ```html FAQ What is "The Silent Wife" about? "The Silent Wife" is a gripping emotional thriller that focuses on the secrets and lies within a seemingly perfect marriage. It delves deep into the complexities of relationships, with a twist that will leave readers breathless. Who is the author of "The Silent Wife"? The author of "The Silent Wife" is Kerry Fisher, a bestselling writer known for her emotionally charged and gripping novels. Is "The Silent Wife" part of a series? No, "The Silent Wife" is a standalone novel, though Kerry Fisher has written other books that explore similar themes. What genres does "The Silent Wife" fall under? This book is primarily categorized under psychological thriller and contemporary fiction, with strong elements of domestic drama and suspense. Who would enjoy reading "The Silent Wife"? Readers who enjoy emotional thrillers, stories about complex relationships, and unexpected plot twists will find "The Silent Wife" compelling and hard to put down. How long is "The Silent Wife"? "The Silent Wife" consists of approximately 320 pages, making it a moderately quick read for most readers. Are there any trigger warnings for this book? Yes, the book deals with themes of infidelity, emotional abuse, and domestic turmoil, which may be triggering for some readers. Is "The Silent Wife" available in audiobook format? Yes, "The Silent Wife" is available in audiobook format, as well as in eBook and paperback formats. What makes "The Silent Wife" unique compared to other thrillers? "The Silent Wife" stands out due to its deep emotional impact, well-developed characters, and a twist that surprises even seasoned readers of the genre. The psychological depth and exploration of marital dynamics add a unique layer to the narrative. Can I find "The Silent Wife" at my local library? Availability can vary, but many libraries do carry "The Silent Wife.

" It’s recommended to check with your local library or their online catalog to ensure they have a copy. ``` In conclusion, "The Silent Wife: A gripping emotional page turner with a twist that will take your breath away" stands as an enthralling read that will keep you hooked from beginning to end. With its intricate plot, well-developed characters, and surprising twists, it offers a compelling narrative that delves deep into the human psyche and the complexities of relationships. This book not only delivers suspense and emotional depth but also provides readers with profound insights into the fragile nature of trust and the layers of secrets that can exist within a marriage. Whether you're a fan of psychological thrillers or seeking a richly woven story that will leave you pondering long after the last page, "The Silent Wife" is a valuable choice. Adding this gripping novel to your reading list promises a thought-provoking and intensely immersive experience that you won't soon forget. Other The Silent Wife: A gripping emotional page turner with a twist that will take your breath away Book Review buying options

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maciek-jozefowicz · 1 year ago

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Forbidden Thought #94

Isn’t it time we legalize rape?

The idea may seem shocking to some, but that’s just fear of progress, fear of the evolution of the Sexual Revolution. Rape is sex and sex is sex and sex is love and love is love and rape is love. What I mean is that rather than seeing rape as horror, as an abominable act of violence*, we should see it as a form of sex. We need to rethink rape.

Rather than shaming them, we need to make an effort to empathize with rapists and with their “victims”** to better understand them. (Isn’t empathy fashionable in today’s culture?) Doing so, we will gain a new insight, a new perspective, resulting in a new, healthier, non-judgmental, more sexually inclusive mindset towards rape.

We should first start by acknowledging that rape is sex.*** It is titillating sex. For some men, once they have experienced rape sex, consensual sex is bland and boring. It lacks the struggle of battle and the thrill of conquest.

For some women, consensual sex is also bland and boring. They crave the excitement of being physically overpowered, the play of struggle — legs kicking, arms flailing, screaming, groaning, moaning. For some, tears are an aphrodisiac and rape-sex is an emotionally addicting melodrama that leads to an experience of catharsis.

For these women, “no” doesn’t mean no. “No” is a challenge, a test of man’s will, of his fitness, of his resoluteness, of the strength of his desire. They think — “Are you fit enough to claim me, are you worthy of having me, or are you a weakling, a sissy, a mamma’s boy?” A “no” means — “Prove yourself!”

Rape is natural.**** The sex act is by nature an aggressive act, a conquest.***** Rape is merely an extension of that act, an amplification.

There is a rapist inside every man. That is because nature made it so and it made it so to ensure the survival of our species. Sex at any cost, consent being irrelevant. Culture has tried to mitigate nature. In other words, man created culture to mitigate his own nature, to repress his drives; shackling himself of his own free will. It is a form of men’s self-sacrifice that has not been acknowledged.

What many women have labeled as a culture of misogyny, is actually the opposite. It is a culture that has tried its hardest to protect women from men’s primal, instinctive need to conquer.******

Isn’t it time for the Sexual Revolution to take the next step and unshackle men, end their repression, and make rape-sex legal?*******

______

* Abortion, too, used to be seen as a horrific act, an act of violence, murder. Now, it has been embraced and made into an inalienable human Right. The idea of abortion being illegal is now abominable, a social injustice. Shouldn’t rape be also a human Right — abortion being a woman’s Right, rape being a man’s Right? (Let’s not forget that abortion is not a consensual act. The baby inside the womb does not consent to being aborted. Abortion has a victim, as does rape, but we have deemed that this victim, the victim of abortion, does not matter. Why should the victim of rape matter?)

Abortion and rape go well together. They are like the Yin and Yang. In the “old days” rape was used to justify legalization of abortion. Now that abortion is legal, maybe we can use it to justify legalization of rape.

** Our society has often shamed rapists and just as often shamed rape victims — being raped was seen as something to be ashamed of. Many raped women felt as if they were wearing a scarlet letter on their chest. They were shunned. But what if we liberate ourselves from this meek, old-fashioned, Victorian mindset and it’s meek, old-fashioned, obsolete morals? What if we reevaluate our judgment of rape?

*** We have acknowledged that sodomy is sex (and not violence) and given it a new, more appropriate name — “anal sex”. So, too, we might want to acknowledge that rape is sex (and not violence) and also give it a fresh new name. (Some psychologists consider rape as not being about sex, but rather being an expression of hate of women. They see rape as misogyny — rape is hate. But that’s a simplistic, ideologically biased view.)

The renaming of sodomy has had an impact on sex, as to be expected. It has led to a new kind of rape, one that is being ignored — rape inside consensual sex. Many women who consent to sex do not consent to sodomy, yet that doesn’t stop men from sodomizing them by force during what started as consensual sex. This becomes rape, but it is almost never charged, partly because it would be difficult to prosecute (after all, it was consensual sex) and partly because women don’t want to be shamed into being “prudish”.

**** It is interesting to compare the nature of rape with the nature of abortion. Abortion is unnatural. The natural reaction to a baby in the womb is to protect it, to cherish it; not to kill it. Rape, in contrast, is natural. It is lust amplified. It is the desire to possess that leads to a near insanity, a sexual frenzy, a loss of self-control. But it is natural because that lust, that desire, has a practical purpose that is beneficial to a species, nature endowed men with it — it’s a survival instinct, but on a species level rather than personal level, and therefore is of greater importance.

***** The conquest of land and the conquest of flesh are similar. Both conquests serve the purpose of enjoying and controlling the resources that each provides — the resources of the land and the resources of the woman’s body. In both cases the instinct is to possess and not share. Hence, the possessive nature of most relationships. We want to own land as well as own a woman — it’s our land (our property) and it’s our woman (our property).

****** No culture will ever entirely eliminate male aggression, and men’s propensity for violence and conflict. That’s because these are connected to our sexuality and our sexuality is vital to our existence. It would be interesting to study to see if male aggression is linked to sexual repression, sexual deprivation. Are men who have easy access to sex less violent? More sex = less violence? That is what the sexual revolutionaries believe. That is what the famous 1960’s slogan — “make love, not war” — essentially implies. But is it true or is it a myth that is used to pimp promiscuous sex?

******* When thinking about rape, it is important to recognize our subconscious bias — we think of rapists as being heterosexual men and of rape victims as being women. But there is no reason to think (and no scientific proof) that heterosexual men are more likely than homosexual men to commit rape. In other words, homosexual men are just as likely to be rapists as heterosexual men. The strength of their lust is the same. Men are men. The only difference between heterosexual rapists and homosexual rapists is the gender of the victims.

It should be noted that in the current iteration of Western culture, one that is enamored with homosexuality and is highly protective of homosexuals and their public image, this subconscious bias has become a conscious bias and has led to an entire group of victims — victims of homosexual rape — to be ignored. It is a cultural climate that enables homosexual predators to thrive. (“HOMOPHOBIA! HOMOPHOBIA!” My point exactly.)

#politically incorrect #abortion #sexuality #tabooromance

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jazzywazzy89 · 2 years ago

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can we talk about that Stefonnie fic real quick . Because ma’am…idk how you came up with that concept…here for it though

Hey Anon,

Liiiistennn! I tried so hard not to write Seven Sins but the muse wouldn't go away. A couple of things, I've always wanted to do a Stefonnie infidelity fic and I wanted to see if I could incorporate Stefan's canon addictive tendencies in a different way. There's something fascinating to me about these two moral characters descending into amoral behavior. At first I was leaning towards drugs or alcohol because I also wanted to incorporate Vicki because I feel like she got shafted on the show. Then I watched two movies, Shame, and, Thanks for Sharing. Both with very different takes on sex addiction but both inspired me in different ways.

I began to think about sexual addiction and what that would mean for these characters. Because in real life most people don't have as much difficulty seeing alcoholism and drug addiction as diseases as they do with sexual addiction. It's a whole other animal and there's different psychology behind it.

Transferring Stefan's blood addiction to sex was easier than I thought. His history with Katherine fit. Him being susceptible to darkness and having this image to maintain fit. I even reframed some dialogue from this scene with Amber in Season 1 during his conversation with Bonnie in the fic and it just made sense to think about it alternatively as sexual in nature.

youtube

I mean come on, like what in the repressed sexuality even is this scene! "I just want one taste," legit who wrote this?! LMAO!

With Bonnie it was a bit different because she never struggled with addiction on the show but there is an underlying masochism to her hero complex and this neglect she suffers and also this need to feel wanted and loved and this constant feeling of having to prove her worth to those around her. She uses her powers for that on the show and uses sex for that in the story.

What's also interesting about sex addiction in particular is that it has a sort of titillating aspect that's easy to exploit by virtue of it being sexual in nature. So there's a lot to play around with because when Stefan and Bonnie see each other at the SAA meeting they immediately feel a kinship but they also trigger each other and they feel guilty about triggering each other but also get off on it. So there's just constant sexual attraction, tension, manipulation, and exploitation happening between the two that's really fun to play around with. Each encounter is sort of a test to see who breaks first but at the same time you can't place the blame on either because they're both consciously making these choices and also both suffering from addiction. It's been really fun to write.

I wasn't sure how it would go over so I'm so glad you're enjoying it so far. Things do continue to get hella messy though so I hope you continue to enjoy the ride! No spoilers but with relapse comes escalation and things continue to escalate! LOL! There's a reason why I went with the Seven Deadly Sins here!

#stefonnie #bonnie bennett #stefan salvatore #stefan x bonnie #anons #replies #this fic is already a hot as mess #and it gets so much worse #lmao

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solarishashernoseinabook · 2 years ago

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Hey, me again! Tired of me yet?

Anyways, in the story I'm writing, I have an asexual character. I'm not ace myself, I'm bi, although I considered that I might be a few years ago. Do you have any tips on writing asexual characters?

I will never get tired of cool people :"D

Okay, ACE CHARACTERS! Firstly, thank you for writing an ace character! I love seeing good faith depictions of ace characters, no matter who's writing them ❤

Also I'm gonna assume your ace character is alloromantic, and add a disclaimer that I can't always properly separate my ace and aro identities, so some of this may be a little speculative on my part, and mandatory disclaimer that this is mainly my opinion. That said, here we go! Bear with me for the first part of this, because it's going to seem like a bit of a non-sequitur.

Think of your pet. Your dog, or cat, or hamster, or hermit crab. You absolutely adore them. They're a wonderful companion, and the cutest dog/cat/hamster/hermit crab you've ever seen! You want to hug them and give them little kisses (tho be careful kissing your hermit crab), and your life wouldn't be the same without them.

But...well, you're not attracted to them, are you? It doesn't even cross your mind, and you can't understand it at all.

Well, that's what all sexual attraction is like to me

No moral judgment - I may be sex repulsed, but that only applies to stuff involving me. But sex isn't a natural part of the world for me. I get nothing out of it in fiction (apparently for allos sex scenes mean something beyond titillation??), I never actually think of it in daily life...genuinely if I stopped seeing all references to sex, I could easily forget it exists at all

(And I'm serious about that. A few years ago, some friends of the family announced they were having a baby, and I was happy! But it wasn't for a few months, when the dad-to-be mentioned that he wouldn't need condoms for a while, that it occurred to me they had had sex. If you asked me on a biology test how babies are made, I'd be able to tell you, but in real life pregnancies just kinda...happen)

So why did I start with this tangent about pets? Because writing from the POV of an ace character is going to mean realising that the character is going to have a very different outlook from most people, and that's something to keep in mind while you're writing them. It won't necessarily be as simple as just not having them have sex at all - in fact, your ace character might very well have sex, especially if they have a love interest! But it's going to be different from writing your allo characters.

With that all said, here's some bullet points about what I'd love to see out of ace characters, what you can include, and what I would prefer you avoid when writing them:

Your character probably won't think anyone is hot. They can definitely think they're cute or beautiful, but in the same way you'd appreciate a nice landscape or your pet! If your ace character has a love interest, they'll probably appreciate their looks, especially after a period of time, but that doesn't equate to thinking they're sexy

If your character gets a love interest, sex is going to be something they'll have to grapple with. They may have sex for their partner's sake, but it'd be different from sex between allo characters! Here's some things to consider if you include any sex scenes (no matter how descriptive), or if you don't, here's somethings you may reference:

Your character might enjoy sex, but it wouldn't be something they actually seek out. If their love interest asks if they want it, they may say sure, but if their love interest decides to watch a movie instead, your character wouldn't feel all that put out at the lack of sex

Your character might be willing to have sex, but they may have to prepare themselves for it. Their love interest might say tell them in the morning that they want sex that evening, and your character will spend the day preparing for it. They'll enjoy it that evening, but sex would absolutely not be a spur-of-the-moment thing for them

Consent WILL be an on-going discussion! Just because they're okay with sex one day doesn't mean they will be another day, or they may be okay with some sex acts but not others

They may well mentally "check out" of sex - think back to a TV show or make a shopping list or imagine a game of tetris or so. Granted, this is likely something you'll only include if you actually write out a sex scene, but it could be something that gets mentioned when/if your character discusses sex with their love interest

Honestly it'd also be SUPER cool to see a couple scenes at least where their love interest wants sex, but the ace character says they don't feel like it and to have that respected

Your character might actually enjoy sexual media! Some aces may enjoy sex scenes, or even porn, but there'll definitely be a disconnect between them and what they're seeing - they won't imagine themselves taking part in the scene

If the setting allows it, it'll be cool to see a bit of a purple motif with the character! References to dragons, unicorns or cake would also be cool little nods to ace in-jokes. A subtle sign of asexuality is wearing a black ring on your left middle finger, so that might also be a nice little nod, if it fits with their aesthetic!

It can be common for aces to feel a bit distressed about their lack of attraction, especially if they're in a relationship and they only recently realised they're ace. However, I'd say please DON'T include this - it can be really easy for it to come off as pitying aces, especially as it's super common in fiction to have characters struggle with not being able to have sex. Instead, it'd be great to see your character happy and confident with their asexuality, or if they realise they're ace during the course of the story, it'd be cool to see that come with a sense of relief, like "OH, so THAT'S why I feel this way"!

Please avoid phrases like "but I can still love" - it's pretty arophobic and unfortunately very common in the ace community

I might add more as I think of it but I hope that helps! My inbox and DMs are always open for questions of literally any nature and I'd also be happy to beta read any scenes featuring your ace character to give feedback, so don't hesitate to reach out ❤❤

#slhglghg beetles u rock <3 #asks #asexuality

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indomitablemegnolia · 4 years ago

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Languishing at the bar, ruby lips caressing my glamorously green margarita; the midnight purple dress hugged my body like a sports cars paint, black beaded fringe thrummed on my thighs as I moved my hips to the music, all road signs spoke of warning hazards; my goal, mayhem; I am tired of being this good reliable human; I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond this daily life; I am here at this lovely bar, to test the morality of a priest, I am prowling, wanting, needing desperately to have an itch scratched, and finding; and needless to say, oh Lordy he was no priest. The single purple jeweled flower pinning my hair slipped making the picture perfect, exquisite, glittering in the sunshine of preening laughter showing the dulling edge of my personal lack of compunction and slipping morals. I watched his dark eyes watch me in the mirror, why him, I licked my lips, he was just the kind of naughty I had in mind; oh yes, there he is, exactly what I was hoping to find; I was just thinking, I am in the mood for some Latin spice. He watched me from a distance just waiting for his opening and here it was, I swilled the last of my drink through the red straw, reaching my tongue out to lick seductively at the salt; the song changed my laugh was unstoppable as the bartender flirted with me; he pounced sliding next to me; “Dos margaritas por favor” he held up two fingers; the bartender waited for me to approve before starting assemble the drinks in a shaker; he stood there smiling that suave smile at me sliding in close to me, running a hand along my back, I didn’t pull away “It is too beautiful of a night to be drinking alone.”

I took it, shrugging evocatively, dipping my top lip over the edge I took in a fair-sized drink, “So, how is the weather in Albuquerque?” I settled closer to him but not touching, never taking my eyes off of him in the mirror, he expected me to turn and look at him, I smiled a half smile and waited swirling my drink slowly.

Oh, the way he just let his full bottom lip lower, then hang still a little knocked askew; god that lip, so provocative, so titillating, so kissable; it was the perfect mismatch for his shaped cupids bow top lip; God though, the way his sensuous, heavy, pouty bottom lip hanging slightly ajar, showing interest and the evaluation that was being made; so enticing, seductively evocative; when his assessment was finished the muscles tensed in his cheeks pulling that mouth into the most provocative suave smile; given the deep, wildly dark abyss of his eyes that were swimming with approval and temptation; lord with the light crinkle to the corners and that smile sharp teeth and delicious dimples a belying innocence it was a dead certainty that he may well be Lucifer himself; solidifying my assumption as he spoke dropping the delicious sound-sex of his carnal voice down a full octave; letting it rumble through his chest; his simple words not seductive in and of themselves; goddamn, the concerted effort together all served to bring my pulse to life; his chuckle danced on my skin. I watched his satisfied lazy smile draw his lips as the offhand phrase that taunted like a dare. “Perhaps, we are lost in translation.” God that Latin lilt at the end of his words. The Oxytocin running through my veins thick as honey; “though as long as you stay, I hope that we are never found.” He clinked the rim of his glass on mine.

My eyes drawn away from those lips’ reflection; “Oh, darlin’, there is no translation for this, just instinct.” I licked the salt, snagging the cherry stem from the rim I pulled it into my mouth; I watched those terrible, sexy fingers rolling deliciously, accentuating the dare, telegraphing a none too subtle promise of delicate fiddling with my vivid, hungry nerves. Yes, this might be a mistake, but if all I do is all I have ever done, nothing will ever change; I have to break the cycle; nibbling the fruit from the stem my mind wandered from those hands.

God, this time of year, this season, there is not much in it to make me smile; it is not yet, not quite yet, the saddest time of the year; yet, there is a haunting sense of the imminent doom, like a bleak abeyance of life; it’s not stark introspective weather, grey and bleak, but none the less the blue skies, fresh green, seemed to be festering, suppurating, killing my soul, I know that time had run out; that horrible clock with the second hand ticking tightening the garrote around my neck painfully, slowly; Jesus what a sick suffocating weight; there are too many things that I wanted to feel, wanted to do and always time… that small hyphen between birth and death the ultimate cause of death… that time; I tied the stem into a knot using my tongue, pressing it back between my shiny lips, pulling it cleanly from my lips with a thumb and forefinger. The time to hesitate was through; my hand shook as I watched a delectable twinge running along that delicious bottom lip, like a smile still trying to hide; waiting for the trap to spring when I ask a simple single syllable question, the ubiquitous air of his words raised several; or did I miss part of the conversation? Should I ask… mmm why, or what, but no, I so not want to play his game; I double down and call the bluff, answering with a simple whispered. The trap is sprung, I really have no idea if it is, he who is caught or me.

“Yes.” My whisper much huskier than I had intended, my margarita wavering in my hand, my hip bumping his; his delicious thick brow shot up tilting his head slightly to the left, he let out a silent ‘what?’ I watched him in the mirror behind the bar, he hovered those dark delicious eyes staring into mine; I nodded, and again “Yes.” I smiled chewing lightly on my straw; I took joy in his face caught off guard, lazy smile pulled the edge of his lips; again, his lips waved in a silent, ‘what?’

“Oh, come on, I answered your real question, the one written in your eyes and on that sensual pouty lip, the answer is yes.”

He looked even more confused, “What is the question are you are answering?”

“Well, I have read promises written loosely in your fingertips, I saw previews of plans in your eyes, and lies you will tell to get there, on that lip.” I turned and stepped to him, running my thumb along that bottom lip. “Why go with pretense, so simply, I said yes, should I include a please?”

He chuckled and edged behind me turning me back to the mirror, pressing his forehead to the back of my head, his cool fingers sweeping my hair out of the way, he kissed the back of my hair, “Then no, mi cariño don’t say anything.” His eyes so lusciously dark and turbulent never looking away from mine in the mirror; “I want to watch you revel in the feel of my hot breath against your ear. Now I ask you;” he breathed in deeply, the cool air passing my skin into his lungs sent a shiver down my spine; the contrast in temperature mind blowing, my skin prickled into Goosebumps; “do not move.” He let his breath excite yet again, the warmth had all those tiny hairs stand to attention, his lips touched feather soft, moist warm breath, my heart kicked a little each pass of his lips, then words. “Te amo sin saber cómo, ni cuándo ni de dónde.” I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. His lips caressed the skin just behind my ear, “Te amo simplemente, sin problemas ni orgullo.” I love you simply, without problems or pride, his hands with those delicious rolling fingers danced down the satin at my sides, my breath shuddering; “te amo de esta manera porque no conozco otra forma de amar sino esta,” I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, his lips ghosted just along the edge of my ear sending small shivers through me, “en la que no hay yo ni tú, tan íntimo que tu mano sobre mi pecho es mi mano. Tan íntimo que cuando me duermo tus ojos se cierran.” so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close. My eyes reflexively flutter closed, and I lean back into him. I took a long breath, pulling away looking right into his

“Coelho?” Arching one eyebrow, I downed my margarita looking somewhat the part of the provocateur

“Si.” He looked cocky, he looked far too self-assured, so much so that I almost forgot my goal.

“Esto no es amor, es lujuria.” this is not love but lust… hmm, in my current state lust even the delectable word sounded so much more alluring en español.

“En este momento la lujuria functiona para mi.” in this moment lust works for me, oh yes it does for me as well. Good lord that word in his Spanish just added a delicious wanton edge to the overdose of libidinous delight that he wrought in me, making my head literally spin. His soft cool fingers delectably caressed the other side of my throat, his tongue ran lightly along the rim of my ear; I shivered still our eyes connected in the mirror, I was putty in his hands.

His lips danced along my neck commanding my already tittillated nerves into a frenzy; nuzzling with intent, his cheek pushing my head to a delicious angle, he feasted on the left side; his lips and teeth acting in a beautiful tango so delicious that I leaned back into him reaching behind me for an anchor; he gripped my wrists in one hand, using his other to sweep my hair such as it was to the other side as his libertine lips began to such and feast on the right side, “Ser mío no es fácil. Tengo expectativas Yo hago demandas.” Being mine is not easy. I have expectations. I fell back into him, his warmth reminding me that I was indeed alive for now, his tongue caressing the side of my neck. “Cuando ofrezco mi corazón espero devoción.” I make demands. When I offer my heart, I expect devotion, he devoted his tongue and teeth to appreciating my flesh, and I accepted. “Insisto en la pasión, cruda y completa, necesitada y fuera de control.” I insist on passion, raw and all encompassing, needy and out of control. He pulled me roughly to him, his hands claiming parts of my soul, “Quiero que me duela el corazón cuando estamos separados. Quiero que mis manos sean incapaces de no tocar su piel cuando esté cerca.” I want my heart to ache when we’re apart. I want my hands to be incapable of not touching your skin whenever you are near. His hands seemed to somehow bypass the satin of my dress and let him feast of my skin directly, I shivered; “Quiero que nuestros cuerpos se quemen cada vez que nos besamos. No puedo y nunca aceptaré nada menos. Por eso ser mío no es fácil, pero créeme, vale la pena.” I want our bodies to burn every time we kiss. I can’t and I will never accept anything less. That’s why being mine is not easy, but believe me, it’s absolutely fucking worth it. Needy and out of control I could do, I was on a mission for exactly that; I let myself ease into the moment, feeling as much as I possibly could devouring it as if it was my last chance at living, enjoying the sweet and the salt and … oh gosh, my eyes flared as he kicked it up a notch his tongue sliding from just behind my ear to the spot where all nerves collide where shoulder and neck meet, my eyes fluttered; apparently to get my attention back his free hand traced across my bare flesh just above my modest neckline, dipping lightly between my breasts.

Jittery my attention came front and center back on his eyes; I raised a single eyebrow; "¿Quién dijo que era tuyo?” Who ever said I was yours? His lips again moved along my neck to the place where neck meets shoulder, I became soft in his hands; his free hand caressing up to the edge of my chin, coaxing my head turning it, he kissed along my clavicle; my eyes finally rolled closed as he kissed my lips, he tasted of strong tequila, lime and dreams; I moaned softly.

“Oh, you just did, right there. No translation needed for that…” his hands more licentious pushing farther “Voy a probar, disfrutar del calor de su sabor embriagador.” I want to breathe in your sighs. He kissed me roughly, my breath leaving in a sigh, “Quiero respirar tus suspiros; quiero sentirte desde adentro,” I’m going to try, to enjoy the heat of its heady taste; he kissed me deep again, “I am drawn to you, like a moth to fire, he kept his glorious mouth moving, all tongue and teeth and temptation, “I see a frantic almost panic on you;” his hand still holding mine in check, “I have you safe here,” his loose hand pulling me to him; “I hunger for your touch after get you excited and how easy it is.” Neck kissing, is honestly the most sensual, seductive things that I have ever known, but when it is done as well as this gorgeous man is… it is not just a syllogy for sex, I feel his talented tongue slide on my skin, we may as well be going at it right on the bar. “Deliciosa, caliente, con una gota de salsa picante” Delicious, hot, like a drop of hot sauce. He gripped my wrist spun me on the stool, taking off at a run.

We made it as far as the dance floor where he stopped suddenly, turning with accentuated drama. The smooth rolling bass, guitar plucking with an ironic blusey twang; my soul soaked deep in the delicious vibrations; the difference in the textures of the sound, graceful single plunking guitar with that light percussive slap, reverent, erotic. He closes the distance of those few inches between us, his dark deep eyes searching my face; I stretch my arm up above my head, arching back, his hands pulling me closer. At that second the song hits a soaring note, my pulse kicking up making me dizzy I confuse the feeling and I set myself soaring; my hips tolling into his, arms dropping to drape around his neck; we spun in tight circles; I laugh, his face intent; I watch the gentle subtle light refract through the beads of sweat that graced his brow. His grip on my waist strong, lifting me high on the music and we sink into the slower rolling bass again; a natural rhythm to our clashing hips, searching hands in this pulsating dance. His steps now slow rocking, like a playful cat pounce back and forth, rocking up onto the toes; delicious salty perspiration bonded his heather gray shirt to his glorious chest. Then closely he held me as we spin in small circles in a circuit around the room, he spins me out, only to retract me even closer to his tall frame. The music builds again soaring, romp of cross over foot work and dramatic hip work, our bodies meeting and clashing lending a dramatic friction between bodies, two souls.

Slowing again to that now extremely sensual bass roll, spinning in wide circles this time rolling me back into almost a dip on each half revolution, every time he pulls me back up we make a sizzling eye contact, the zing of it traveling my entire body making it to the tips of my toes. He spins me out pulling me back, his front to my back.

The pace picks up again, we step in a syncopated pattern, he pulls my arms in tight holding my body so close to his we may well become one, then spreading my arms wide, our hips taking a wide swinging cadence as we step, step, then spin. He spins me out leaving us at arm’s length from each other, the music slows rolling. He lowers his head; I take retreating steps as we keep to the sensuous rhythm. He pulls me in and close then out spinning me so many times I leave the earth far behind. Pulling me to him tight we keep the playful foot work a back and forth pounce, my face tucked close to the collar of his shirt, his fresh lavender and tea tree scent relaxing the last of my senses.

“So if you wake up with the sunrise;” he sang along with the music, “with all your dreams still brand new;” his lips caressing my neck, my ear; “happiness is what you need so badly…” his hands lifted me again, “girl you know it’s up to you…” he spins us again

Soon it feels as if my feet leave the earth, slowly using a foxtrot step on a delicate cloud, the rest of the world disappears and it’s just the riot of music, his hands and the feel of my soul on the melody singing my own vow of love, the moon and all the stars. The soft strum of guitars transports us away. His lips finding the rim of my ear caressing it sweetly whist we are spinning in small circles, making a completely transcendent feeling. We continue dancing for endless moments close, held in a spell. Slowly the world returns and finally I notice there is no longer that melody cradling us in its soft arms. I look up at his classic beautiful face; the world comes back into focus but the ethereal feeling still there. We smile softly at one another.

He danced me in circles, whirling me making me feel as if I were flying. He dipped me and lightly kissed me as the song ended. An argentine tango starts. He stops in his tracks and spins me to face him, a motion soaked with drama. I chew my bottom lip unsure of my ability; he wiggles that delicious eyebrow, giving me a new amazing smile. His beautiful straight teeth taking on a Big Bad Wolf glint as the look in his eyes goes from that ever-charming cavalier to dazzlingly predatory. My stomach drops out like the upswing on a roller coaster completely titillated, entranced by this new facet of his nature. With that smile he pulls me tight to him, our frames lock, we step and we are gone. My chin lowered nearly touching my chest a coquettish shyness over taking me. My eyes looking up into his gloriously seductive gaze, his face looks as if to say, all the better to eat you with my dear, a provocative and risqué promise to me, body and soul. His pearly white grin showing more of his straight sharp teeth than usual, my heart speeds its rhythm, thumping hard in my chest. Spinning in tight circles we make a circuit of the floor, the background swirls the only thing clear and constant in my vision was his fantastically angular face enveloped in secreted promise. As I step into him, keeping pace, not being shy of how our bodies are clashing and rubbing, one of his fantastic eyebrows slowly rose. The look on his face now completely Big Bad Wolf thrilled that Red Riding Hood snapped up his challenge. I tenaciously add flair as I keep step with him and boy did he step.

Our gazes locked, he spins me out to arm’s length, inertia and drama send my outer arm and leg flinging artfully as he retracts me like a yo-yo.

He pushes me around the floor his chin lowered a predatory look to his eye growing deeper, darker. He spins me twice under his arm and out and leaves me out there. I wrap my arms around myself and sway he adds a little light stepping pizazz. Suddenly he stops looking straight into my eyes. He hesitates one, two, three, beats then slowly stepping with a stalking intent towards me, I retreat, stifling a welling up giggle. I gather my skirt in my hands not entirely sure if it is just part of the act of the dance or if I truly was about to bolt. That look in his eyes tied my stomach in knots, I retreat two steps but his beautiful legs eat up the ground between us. His lovely long legs moving to a sensual rhythm he catches me around the waist, I freeze. He steps between my separated feet, pulling me tight to his chest. Our eyes, hips and arms locked. My insides nearly gelatin, the rhythm, the dance and his looks affecting me drastically, my breath coming out in short pants, desire kicking up to amazing levels. He pushes me around the dance floor our legs stepping in the syncopated pattern he draws us in. Spinning me under his arm holding my back to his front, I hear his faint growl in my ear, the hair on my neck stands on end as we again spin in tight circles around the floor, a high note on the accordion signals him to spin me out again. Retracting me, pulling me tight to his chest face inches from mine my heart roaring in my ears. We undulate together, hips colliding adding drama to the dance. My eyes lock onto his beautiful blue green depths and he sweeps me away, sparking my truly libidinous nature. Sensuality and passion overtaking me, I had never felt as free or as alluring as I used every ounce of my soul to keep up with him, dips, twirls and some of the sexiest looks I have ever seen.

As always the entire world fell away as we danced, nothing existed but he and I and the music, desire racing through my veins, ratcheting up every time our hips touched, I had only eyes for him. Our bodies match in a fantastic unison he anticipates my foot falls and I knowing when he is going to use me for a frisbee. This was the most intimate and carnal experience, fantastically delicious nearly out of body moment in my life. As the music spools up for its dramatic end, my cheeks are cramping from the smile. A laugh escapes me as we crescendo, nearly hitting an erotic plateau. A sudden sexy spin sets me out and retracts me, my back to his front. The last pose full of drama, his arms wrapped around me, holding my one my hand pulling my arm across my torso to my hip, as the last keening note peals across my ears; my arm tossed up and behind his neck, my palm caressing his cheek. My eyes closed, breath coming in heaves. I enjoyed his delicious rasping breath on my neck a step above a growl. I turn my face to him, our gazes lock; slowly our faces magnetically nudge closer, our lips all but touching in a kiss before the applause breaks into our private universe. Confusion floods my brain as he chuckles the cavalier returning to his face. He spins me out, and bows, I take his cue offering an awkward curtsy, laughing like mad.

He pulls me tight to him his hands delicious on my skin he pulls me to a dark corner and pressing my back to the wall he kisses me with a passion I had never felt, hot, searing like kissing the sun; he pushes for more my hands greedy grabbing him deliciously, one finding his rump, the other pulling his lightly sweaty hair. He leaned in closer, his hand ghosted my face, his finger ran along my cheek, his tongue playing merry hob in my mouth, his warm, fingertips lightly whisper along my throat, coaxing me, and honestly it didn't take much coaxing; I surrendered, returning the kiss, my breath now coming billowing pants, he frames my face with his hands. His jittering hands held a desperation that ratcheted up my own to a frenzy; the hip that had cocked toward mine pressed delightfully as it came to meet mine dominating, rocking lightly; a knee nudges slyly between mine making my skirt wrap tightly around my thighs. I bite his full bottom lip playfully, his hands glide down the sides of my neck tickling, he nips me back, my hands gathering his suit jacket tight in my fists; I slide my body along his, rising on my tip toes, flicking my tongue along the roof of his mouth; the clean sweetness of margarita and his flavour making such a heady delicious cocktail.

My hands loose themselves from his lapels, hunting for more of him; caressing along his jaw; his fingers finding their way beneath the edge of my blouse, flitting along my waistband; the small tickling caress sending shivers through my body; my hands pushing into his curls, they wrap around my fingers invitingly, I fist my hands pulling lightly; pressing into me, bending me slowly backward, his kiss deepens, air and breathing become elective, superfluous. He growls, his fingers now gripping, pulling, demanding; I am overcome, letting out a breathless whimper. He slows. He sighs, dropping his chin to his chest, emerging from the throughs of passion.

God do I want him… I want him so badly; I try to clamp my legs together until the wanting passes, but I find his knee there, keeping me from relieving pressure; in fact, he added to it. He grips both my wrists swinging them above my head; I am lost in feeling, watching his hands, those fingers, feeling his determination; I shiver as he chuckles, letting it rumble deep in his chest; the thrill of his gasping breath dancing across my face with the delicious sweet libidinous sigh making the loose hairs at my forehead dance; his scent exhilarating, and so intoxicating to me. I watch a surge of electric passion wash over his features like an ocean wave, intention evident in his every motion.

He slowly presses into me, holding me securely in place; he stood close, but not touching, simply dominating with his presence, using that delectable knee pressed between my own; he pressed it higher adding even more libidinous pressure to my need; my slim fit skirt worked like hobbles holding my thighs in place for his teasing; his posture holding me lightly suspended secured, but freely dangling in his grasp pressed against the wall for his rapacious perusal; he raised that knee higher, eliciting a shiver from me and a full smile from him, all locking us into place, using his muscled thigh pressed deep between mine coaxing, caressing, keeping me bent to his will. My breath escaped as a ragged sigh, my heart hammering in my chest feel my pulse surge," yeah, no kidding, I was a rabbit being toyed with; he dips his head, his lips and tongue dancing along my neck as my blood thrums along the column of my throat under his lips, my body reacts as I try to regain control, but I am simply left to move against him.

His voice quivered, his hands shook: I, myself was a leaf in a hurricane. His breath was shaky as he went on, caressing the place where neck meets shoulder. God it’s hard to admit this, but the feeling of him holding my wrists above my head with one hand, trailing the other lithe fingered, free hand flowing down the inside of my arm, tracing the edge of my blouse, dipping a single sticky finger in deeply caressing the edge of the lacy black longline bustier and the side of my breast. Lifting my chin with that same reverent fingertip, tilting my head back. Gently, pushing my hair from my forehead, tucking it behind my ear, letting his hand slowly softly caress down my neck. Finally, I look up into his wide exotic deep dark soul-searching eyes, he peers down into mine… into my soul, his holding a particularly delicious intensity that changed his from a tranquil, reflective, mirrored abyss to a raging blackhole pulling me in. As those fiery orbs, searing with the desire I am sure matched the one burning deep in mine. I barely stop myself from devouring him whole.

He leans in close letting his shaking, raspy breath tickles my face, caress my ear. He almost inaudibly whispers his wanting wish so close, so low; “Ah, dios mio is that answer still, Yes.” It may as well have been coming from my soul, speaking in that delicious rumble of rolling thunder voice adding to the evocative question.

“Si.” I feel him shiver as I become boneless in his hands, His long-lashed lids flutter closed as he finally leans into me, his hand softly finishing the descent to my hip. Then, only then does he softly brush my lips with is sweetly supple soft lips, I feel him sigh, warm against my lips. I kiss him slowly, intently, but playfully, it will be a dance, a dance of caress, a give and take, a feel and respond. I never would be the first to break that kiss. My hands strain against his hold, but he never lets loose. Not even when the passion notches up quickly in this kiss.

@keeper0fthestars @pedeka @writernotwaiting @iamhisgloriouspurpose @freudensteins-monster

Last try at regaining my words.

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arcticdementor · 4 years ago

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There’s no nice way to say this: a certain subset of (mostly) white people have lost their minds online. These people wake up to a vast insurrection crossing all racial and national boundaries – and contrive to make this all about themselves. Their affects, their unconsciouses, their moral worthiness. How can I be Not Complicit? How can I be a Better Ally? How do I stop benefiting from white supremacy in my daily life? How do I rid myself of all the bad affects and attitudes? Can I purify my soul in the smelter of a burning police precinct? Occasional ratissages out into mainstream culture (we’re decolonising the Bon Appétit test kitchen!), but mostly what this uprising calls for is an extended bout of navel-gazing. Really get in there, get deep in that clammy lint-filled hole, push one finger into the wound of your separation from the primordial world, and never stop wriggling. Maybe there’s a switch, buried just below the knot, and if you trip it your body will open up like a David Cronenberg nightmare to reveal all its greasy secrets to your eyes. Interrogate yourself! Always yourself, swim deep in the filth of yourself. The world is on fire – but are my hands clean? People are dying – but how can I scrub this ghastly whiteness off my skin?

You could set aside the psychosexual madness of this stuff, maybe, if it actually worked. It does not work. It achieves nothing and helps nobody. Karen and Barbara Fields: ‘Racism is not an emotion or state of mind, such as intolerance, bigotry, hatred, or malevolence. If it were that, it would easily be overwhelmed; most people mean well, most of the time, and in any case are usually busy pursuing other purposes. Racism is first and foremost a social practice.’ Social practices must be confronted on the level of the social. But for people who don’t want to change anything on the level of the social, there’s the Implicit Associations Test. This is the great technological triumph of what passes for anti-racist ideology: sit in front of your computer for a few minutes, click on some buttons, and you can get a number value on exactly how racist you are. Educators and politicians love this thing. Wheel it into offices. Listen up, guys, your boss just wants to take a quick peek into your unconscious mind, just to see how racist you are. How could anyone object to something like that?

…

See, for instance, the form letters: How To Talk To Your Black Friends Right Now. Because I refuse to be told I can’t ever empathise with a black person, I try to imagine what it would be like to receive one of these. Say there’s been a synagogue shooting, or a bunch of swastikas spraypainted in Willesden Jewish Cemetery. Say someone set off a bomb inside Panzer’s in St John’s Wood – and then one of my goy friends sends me something like this:

Hey Sam – I can never understand how you feel right now, but I’m committed to doing the work both personally and in my community to make this world safer for you and for Jewish people everywhere. From the Babylonian Captivity to the Holocaust to today, my people have done reprehensible things to yours – and while my privilege will never let me share your experience, I want you to know that you’re supported right now. I see you. I hear you. I stand with the Jewish community, because you matter. Please give me your PayPal so I can buy you a bagel or some schamltz herring, or some of those little twisty pastries you people like.

How would I respond? I think I would never want to see or hear from this person again. If I saw them in the street, I would spit in their face, covid be damned. I would curse their descendants with an ancient cackling Yiddish curse. These days, I try to choose my actual friends wisely. Most of them tend to engage me with a constant low level of jocular antisemitic micoaggressions, because these things are funny and not particularly serious. But if one of my friends genuinely couldn’t see me past the Jew, and couldn’t see our friendship past the Jewish Question, I would be mortified. Of course, it’s possible that the comparison doesn’t hold. Maybe there are millions of black people I don’t know who love being essentialised and condescended to, who are thrilled by the thought of being nothing more than a shuddering expendable rack for holding up their own skin. But I doubt it. Unless you want me to believe that black people inherently have less dignity than I do, this is an insult.

…

If you want to find the real secret of this stuff, look for the rules, the dos and don’ts, the Guides To Being A Better Ally that blob up everywhere like mushrooms on a rotting bough. You’ve seen them. And you’ve noticed, even if you don’t want to admit it, that these things are always contradictory:

DO the important work of interrogating your own biases and prejudices. DON’T obsess over your white guilt – this isn’t about you! DO use your white privilege as a shield by standing between black folx and the police. DON’T stand at the front of marches – it’s time for you to take a back seat. DO speak out against racism – never expect activists of colour to always perform the emotional labour. DON’T crowd the conversation with your voice – shut up, stay in your lane, and stick to signal boosting melanated voices. DO educate your white community by providing an example of white allyship. DON’T post selfies from a protest – our struggle isn’t a photo-op for riot tourists.

Žižek points out that the language of proverbial wisdom has no content. ‘If one says, “Forget about the afterlife, about the Elsewhere, seize the day, enjoy life fully here and now, it’s the only life you’ve got!” it sounds deep. If one says exactly the opposite (“Do not get trapped in the illusory and vain pleasures of earthly life; money, power, and passions are all destined to vanish into thin air – think about eternity!”), it also sounds deep.’ The same goes here. Whatever you say, it can still sound woke. Why?

…

This stuff is masochism, pleasure-seeking, full of erotic charge – and as Freud saw, the masochist’s desire is always primary and prior; it’s always the submissive partner who’s in charge of any relationship. Masochism is a technology of power. Setting the limits, defining the punishments they’d like to receive, dehumanising and instrumentalising the sadistic partner throughout. The sadist works to humiliate and degrade their partner, to make them feel something – everything for the other! And meanwhile, the masochist luxuriates in their own degradation – everything for myself! You’re just the robotic hand that hits me. When non-white people get involved in these discourses, they’re always at the mercy of their white audiences, the ones for whom they perform, the ones they titillate and entertain. A system for subjecting liberation movements to the fickle desires of the white bourgeoisie. Call it what it is. This is white supremacy; these scolding lists are white supremacist screeds.

But systems of white supremacy have never been in the interests of most whites (‘Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin when in the black it is branded’), and they have never really fostered any solidarity between whites. Look at the stories. I had a run-in with the police, you announce, and a black person might have died, but I’m fine, because I’m white. No – you’re fine because you’re white and rich. You’re fine because you look like someone who reviews cartoons for a dying online publication called The Daily Muffin, which is exactly what you are. Bald and covered in cat hair. Frameless glasses cutting a red wedge into the bridge of your nose. The white people who get gunned down by police don’t look like you. Their class position is stamped visibly on their face, and so is yours. And you’ve trained yourself to see any suffering they experience as nothing more than ugly Trump voters getting what they deserve.

Why aren’t there protests when a white person is murdered by police? Answer 1: because, as John Berger points out, ‘demonstrations are essentially urban in character.’ Native Americans are killed by cops at an even higher rate than black people, but this too tends to happen very far away from the cities and the cameras; it becomes invisible. Answer 2: because nobody cares about them. Not the right wing, who only pretend to care as a discursive gotcha when there’s a BLM protest. And definitely not you. Sectors of the white intelligentsia have spent the last decade trying to train you out of fellow-feeling. Cooley et al., 2019: learning about white privilege has no positive effect on empathy towards black people, but it is ‘associated with greater punishment/blame and fewer external attributions for a poor white person’s plight.’ A machine for turning nice socially-conscious liberals into callous free-market conservatives.

The rhetoric of privilege is a weapon, but it’s not pointed at actually (ie, financially) privileged white people. We get off lightly. All we have to do is reflect on our privilege, chase our dreamy reflections through an endlessly mirrored habitus – and that was already our favourite game. You might as well decide that the only cure for white privilege is ice cream. Working-class whites get no such luxuries. But as always, the real brunt falls on non-white people. What happens when you present inequality in terms of privileges bestowed on white people, rather than rights and dignity denied to non-white people? The situation of the oppressed becomes a natural base-state. You end up thinking some very strange things. A few years ago, I was once told that I could only think that the film Black Panther isn’t very good because of my white privilege. Apparently, black people are incapable of aesthetic discernment or critical thought. (Do I need to mention that the person who told me this was white as sin?) This framing is as racist as anything in Carlyle. It could only have been invented by a rich white person.

Give them their due; rich white people are great at inventing terrible new concepts. Look at what’s happening right now: they’re telling each other to read White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard For White People To Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo. You should never tell people to read White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard For White People To Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo – but we live in an evil world, and it’s stormed to the top of the Amazon bestsellers list. You maniacs, you psychopaths, look what you’ve done. I’m not saying people shouldn’t read the book – I read it, and I don’t get any special dispensations – but you should read it like Dianetics, like the doctrine of a strange and stupid cult.

…

The book is a thrill-ride along a well-paved highway – ‘powerful institutions are controlled by white people;’ true, accurate, well-observed – that quickly takes a dive off the nearest cliff – ‘therefore white people as a whole are in control of powerful institutions.’ Speak for yourself, lady! All a are b, DiAngelo brightly informs us, therefore all b must also be a. She doesn’t advocate for her understanding of the world, she simply assumes it. So it’s not a surprise that the real takeaway from White Fragility is that Robin DiAngelo is not very good at her job.

…

Imagine a devoted cultist of Tengrism, who sometimes gets invited by company bosses to harangue the workforce on how the universe is created by a pure snow-white goose flying over an endless ocean, and how if you don’t make the appropriate ritual honks to this cosmic goose you’re failing in your moral duty. But every time she gives this spiel, she always gets the same questions. Exactly how big is this goose? Surely the goose must have to land sometimes? Geese hatch in litters – what happened to the other goslings? Something must be wrong with these people. Why don’t they just accept the doctrine? Why do they hate the goose? We need a name for their sickness. Call it Goose Reluctance, and next time someone doesn’t jump to attention whenever you speak, you’ll know why. Of course, the comparison is unfair; ideas about eternal geese are beautiful, and DiAngelo’s are not. But the structure is the same. Could it be that Robin DiAngelo is a poor communicator selling a heap of worthless abstractions? No, it’s the workers who are wrong.

(By the way, how did you feel about that phrase, racial humility? I didn’t like it, but her book is full of similar formulations – she also wants us to ‘build our racial stamina’ and ‘attain racial knowledge.’ Now, maybe I’m an oversensitive kike, but I can’t encounter phrases like these and not hear others in the background. Racial spirit. Racial consciousness. Racial hygiene. And somewhere, not close but coming closer, the sound of goosestepping feet.)

I didn’t seek out any of the material I talk about here. It came to me. And it’s making me feel insane. The only social media I use these days is Instagram – because if I’m going to be hand-shaping orecchiette all night, and serving it with salsiccia, rapini, and my own home-pickled fennel, it’s not for my own pleasure, and I demand to receive a decent 12 to 15 likes for my efforts. (I will not be accepting your follow request.) A week ago, on the 2nd of June, my feed was suddenly swarming with white people posting blank black squares. People I’d never known to be remotely political, people whose introduction to politics was clearly coming through the deranged machine of social media. Apparently, that was ‘Blackout Tuesday.’ I don’t know whose clever idea this was, and I don’t want to know, but it came with a threat. If all your friends are posting the square, and you’re not, does it mean you simply don’t care enough about black lives? Around the same time, I was helpfully made aware of a viral Instagram album titled Why The Refusal To Post Online Is Often Inherently Racist. I honestly can’t imagine how terrifying it must be to live like this – always on edge, always trying to be Good, always trying to have your Goodness recognised by other people, in a game where the scores are tracked by what you post on the internet, and the rules are always changing.

#sam kriss #read the whole thing

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sadrejectedpitches · 5 years ago

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Parental Guidance Not Suggested: HBO's Euphoria Puts Parents In Their Place

Euphoria has received mixed reviews by critics who are mainly concerned about its impact on younger audiences. I think this line of critique is actually addressed in the show itself, in its calculated decision to feature parents as peripheral yet powerful figures. Sam Levinson grants the teenagers in this show autonomy of thought and full fledged, yet flawed, identities that are influenced but not overridden by their parents. Euphoria avoids the pitfalls of cautionary-tale-teen-TV by remembering the way teens experience these years: as protagonists, not auxiliary tools in the quest to impart specific morality in the audience.

Rue's own journey through addiction, sexuality, and mental illness is not moderated by her parents, but rather painted in their image. The source of her underlying pain comes from her father's death, her overmedication, her inherent belief she is too broken to be authentically loved. And while the adults of the show attempt to disavail her of this belief, there's no concerted effort to show them actively intervening. Rue's story is her own ship to wreck, and other characters follow suit. Jules's sexual activities seemingly happen unbeknownst to her father, who seems to have little concern for her activities other than being relieved she is functional in the world after bouts of self harm. And it's better this way. For once, we see a parent neither battling nor fiercely advocating for a teen's identity on screen. Jules is allowed to breath and mess up wholeheartedly. If there were some sort of parental Bechdel test, Euphoria would fail it epically. Thank God for that.

Teen TV staples like Gossip Girl, The O.C., and My So-Called were beholden to networks to make all of the titillation they were trying to sell through the teenage storyline very neatly conclude in a "lesson learned." There is no lesson in most HBO dramas other than "life is cruel and unfathomable but sometimes punctuated by joy." Euphoria is actually a bit better than this because it at least shows that empathy is the only real character trait anyone - regardless of age - can develop that will win the day.

#euphoria

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bloodybells1 · 6 years ago

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Motley Boo: The Dirt 2019 and a Tertiary Failure to Reframe the “Baddest Band”’s History within Patriarchal Discourse

It’s difficult to overstate the impact Mötley Crüe made on the history of heavy metal with their 1981 debut album, Too Fast For Love. Raw, phlegmatic, and, yes, fast—it clocks in at less than 40 minutes—the album dropped into the world of heavy metal like a megaton anvil (or a turbocharged racer, depending on how you looked at it). The repercussions were conclusive and far-reaching. Shortly after the release, the band would support established acts like Kiss on the road, and later followed up the record with an even bigger smash hit, Shout at the Devil, permanently engraving them into the annals of heavy metal.

What distinguished this freshmen effort in the larger context of the metal scene, however, was the band’s—well, really, Nikki Sixx’s—intelligent cross-referencing of glam rock optics within the giant soundscape of the Marshall amp set. Almost a decade before Guns’n’Roses would introduce a similarly decadent soupcon of glam rock attitude into heavy metal’s DNA (more in the form of LA dispossession, but you know what I mean), there stood Crüe, bow-tying the cranked distortion of heavy metal with an androgynous, lipstick-smeared pucker.

Yet, the record was more than just a public relations gambit to redesign heavy metal in the image of T. Rex. After all, it seemed the band had actually made a great album. It was good enough to make it into the mixtapes of LA punks and New York skinheads, at least, as well as those of breadbasket-America headbangers—quite a feat for a band that cared little for the punk scene’s headier nihilism. Punks, for their part, looked past the cockrocking and focused instead on the record’s straightforward production and live sound. As it turned out, it was a good sign that a band like Crüe, for all their apparent fluffiness and ostensibly commercial leanings, had gained the favor of this more reticent community, having passed the “canary in the coal mine” test of punk rock’s preoccupation with authenticity.

And yet, I bet the first thing that comes to mind when prompted by the name of Mötley Crüe, at least to that of the layman, isn’t the infectious speed of “Live Wire”’s thunderclap-opening riff, but rather the band’s notoriously depraved extracurricular reputation. In fact, the quartet was already infamous for debauched hedonism prior to their even getting signed, the lore going back to their salad days as local lotharios at the Viper Room in downtown Los Angeles. Right out of the gate, they were as famous for fornication and drug abuse as for their music.

Far from discouraging the storyline of excess, Crüe seemed right at home with their association with drugs and sex. The emphasis on carnality became a career-long feature of their mystique, both as a marketing strategy and as a core element of the philosophy implied in their music. Ultimately, they would enshrine this element in the form of a tell-all, committing all the sordid details of their exploits to paper in their aptly-named 2001 anthology of licensed sin, The Dirt.

Couched as an entry of the confessional genre, the volume was jointly written in equal parts by each band member, offering long, anecdotal chapters, written in an extemporaneous, oral style. The accounts dove deep into the cesspool of their origins and the progress of their career. Obviously, the band didn’t write an exhaustive account of their entire story up to 2001, when the book was published, on their own; journalist Neil Strauss adroitly arranges their tracts with a wink and a nod. Not satisfied with a simple tell-all, though, he weaves the band members’ submitted drafts and “journal entries” into a grand narrative fabric that belies not only Strauss’s objective’s gaze, but a teleological vision of the price of fame, a tale steeped in storied entries of similar abasement, perhaps dating all the way back to Joris-Karl Huysmans’ A rebours.

Despite The Dirt’s clear insistence on the prevalence of moral transactionalism, it has nonetheless become known as a foundational text for the “sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll” trope of decadence. Readers seem to cherish the opening chapters of early hedonic excess without making much of the larger morality play laid out through the book’s end. The earlier chapters are so naked (excuse the pun) in their reportage of the band’s debauched activities, they’ve been taken as advertisements for that behavior. This rendering misappropriates the book’s real value—as a text on moral cosmology—by turning it into further glorification of rock’n’roll’s early hedonistic credo. Those early chapters are really a set up for what the book truly is, and should be known for most, that is, a discrediting of that credo.

The Dirt makes a clear case that the band has paid for their excesses—Vince Neil loses his daughter, Nikki Sixx almost dies, Mick Mars fights his way up to become the true sage in the band, Tommy Lee keeps getting divorced. These facts are laid out convincingly through a simple prose style: diaristic reportage of the self that, through careful pacing, mines deeper and deeper levels of personal pain and reckoning. Strauss is methodical in doling out these sojourns into the moral deep, making sure not to preempt their trials with hints of the future (never mind that we know how the story ends). This, along with the distinct voice of each band member, has the added effect of keeping the reader on the edge of their seat.

The supranarrative that emerges by the final page, one that supplants the traditional one that the unsuspecting reader no doubt imports into the book from decades of formulaic pandering to baser perspectives, states the fundamental primacy of Fate, that even the world’s most riotous band could not escape cosmic will. Mötley Crüe, as authors of the commodity known as “Mötley Crüe,” and through the media amplification of commodity fetishism, have become godlike and must be thrust down, made human again. Fate will make a human out of the man no matter how demiurgic he becomes.

It’s no surprise that, with heady matter like this associated with a known commodity like Crüe, an early film deal sprang out of the publishing of the book. The Dirt came out in 2001, 20 years after Mötley Crüe came on the scene, and it has taken almost as much time for its dramatization, in the form of a Netflix biopic, to emerge. That’s a long time for a movie based on a book to come out, and there has understandably been a lot of anticipation.

Through the years, I’ve come to loathe biopics, which with few exceptions turn out to be the mere regurgitations of original texts, authored under viably artistic circumstances and trademarked, but then repeated by a committee of capitalist shills for a waiting audience eager to consume the brand anew. This explains why almost every biopic is a formulaic compendium, lacking any vision or direction, since its objective in the first place is to provide brand pornography for consumers of established texts.

It’s quite sad that the cinematic dramatization of The Dirt is no exception to this rule. It so exemplifies the craven absence of real art in the modern biopic as to appear almost comical at times. Indeed, when I looked at the image on my Netflix home page of the movie, I initially thought that perhaps someone had given Mötley Crüe’s inimitable story the Christopher Guest treatment.

Alas, no.

The movie is a sorry parade of every single biopic cliché that was ever established in the history of biopics. I won’t go into just how pathetically—shamelessly, even—this movie panders to the basest titillations of brand pornography. That sad fact has been firmly established by the critical consensus. (It carries a 43 percent Tomatometer on Rotten Tomatoes, a rating I, in fact, find charitable.) My point in writing about this infuriating piece of exploitative pablum is to direct the reader to the incredible missed opportunity of this movie.

As I’ve already written, the book’s greatest accomplishment is not the lascivious proxy to bad behavior its protracted tales of sexual promiscuity and substance abuse offer the more upstanding, less adventurous reader. It’s the successful reframing of the “sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll” narrative as a cautionary tale. Granted, we’ve seen this story inscribed into the annals of pop stardom before the publishing of The Dirt (hello Buddy Holly movie, Walk the Line, et al). Yet, its innovation lies not in the mere fact of the reframing, but in its offering the pen to the miscreant author: The Dirt is perhaps the first bad boy memoir: a behind-the-scenes tell-all yes, though of the Gore Vidal sort, and repurposed for the headbanger set with a moral edge.

By 2001, it had long been understood that this snot-nosed gang of aging rockers no longer had a decent recording in them (that’s no criticism if you believe, as I do, that the artform of rock music entails an inherent expiration date). Instead, they produced a memoir that, shot straight from their shaky typewriters and notebooks, reinvents the band as willing atoners. In so doing they reemerge as personal subjects of a grand, cautionary tale, a heavy metal story for the era of Oprah, if you will. Mötley Crüe, then, performed a more authentic act in the writing of this book than any album they would have dared record.

Yet, along the current of its blood-soaked river of retribution, The Dirt, misses one crucial point of reckoning, one that positively begs for further exploration.

Thanks to the #MeToo revolution, we are now given a critical apparatus to judge the excesses of the past committed in the name of patriarchy. Prior to this revolution, texts containing sexist, heteronormative givens were accepted reflexively by the zeitgeist. These were mythologies that historically debased and objectified women as the enslaved recipients of male lust, simple organs of the hedonic will of masculinity. We might have laughed at the music video for “Looks that Kill,” which features, among other debasing tropes, a gaggle of women in generic Neanderthal livery, but today we laugh harder—and more painfully. We no longer turn our eyes away from the now obvious rooting of this imagery in patriarchal attitudes.

The Dirt admittedly has almost nothing to offer by way of a #MeToo moment. (Early kudos, though, to Mick Mars who dedicates many of his paragraphs to the ludicrousness of male promiscuity.) But this isn’t necessarily a shortcoming of the book, anymore than that we may fault any number of classic stories and records that import similarly unexamined masculine, heteronormative givens into the 21st Century. As late as 2001, our eyes were yet glazed over with the unquestioned spectacle of male desire. Furthermore, the book is rife with vulnerable emoting and painful rumination. It thereby confers it an atmosphere of thoughtfulness. To a certain extent this vitiates against accusations of insensitivity.

But this potential forgiveness isn’t possible in cinema, where the taut storyline and shorter format require a more conclusive, unshaded verdict. Never mind that in 2019 it’s positively inexcusable. The #MeToo movement has today firmly established a visible discourse that supersedes antique notions of male desire, yet the movie seems to have taken no note of this seismic occurrence. To name but one of the movie’s baffling examples of cultural myopia, there are at least two scenes portraying women materializing out of the darkness underneath dining room tables, complete with satiated visages fresh from a round of clandestine fellatio. This is only one of the movie’s dated pickings from pre-#MeToo boilerplate, but it is perhaps the most glaring.

The film seems to conflate factual verisimilitude and hindsight objectivity; to which the simple response is that portraying something “as it was” doesn’t inoculate you from the sins of the past. One need only watch a couple seasons of another Netflix offering that traffics in garish ‘80s pop-cultural paraphernalia, GLOW, to witness a successful handling of these two elements. Many of the antique notions that were part and parcel in the ‘80s are now clearly offensive from today’s standards of race and sex discourse. These are reframed as racist and sexist mythologizing by the show’s deep dives into the family life of one of the African American wrestlers.

There’s nary a hint of this sort of wokeness from the film version of The Dirt. You really have to scratch your head as to how the committee let this fly, not to mention how desperate anyone would need to be in order to ignore such profligate tone-deafness under their collective noses.

The Dirt in 2019 truly encapsulates the most tragic outcome of a band like Mötley Crüe. The film’s failure as a work of art is not surprising when you consider that most biopics fail in that regard (Bohemian Rhapsody, anyone?). But the movie’s failure becomes truly irretrievable, of a completely different order of magnitude, when you consider that Mötley Crüe missed another opportunity to reframe themselves along the contours of contemporary discourse. They were successful in 2001, when, during the era of Oprah, they took their foundational text of rock’n’roll hedonism and reframed it as a personalized descent into Orphic confrontation. This gave us cause for hope in 2019, during the era of #MeToo, when the missing piece of that story, the accounting with the greater societal harm caused by unexamined patriarchy, was given an incredible opportunity to be placed back into the spine of the band’s legacy. Unfortunately, as Netflix and Mötley Crüe have made clear, the hope was misplaced.

#motleycrue thedirt metoo

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alittledropofheaven · 6 years ago

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On the internet, where people become data and popularity is conveniently quantified, it’s easy to learn what a community values most. Twitter embraces celebrities and #brands. Reddit stans for Barack Obama and elaborate pop-culture GIFs. Quora is an asylum of techies questioning their morality and their stock options; its second-most-upvoted answer is a “soul-satisfying” account of a sales bro helping a homeless man.

On the Bodybuilding.com forums, the two most popular threads of all time are not about deadlifts, intermittent fasting, or maintaining motivation. They’re about women. Specifically, women Bodybuilding.com members would “love to pound.” While one thread features pictures of “petite/slim girls” and the other of “athletic girls,” both are an endless stream of lightly Photoshopped near-nudity and predictably lecherous comments. Both have been viewed almost 3 million times. And both are on the lone section of the Bodybuilding.com forums that’s explicitly unrelated to fitness: the Misc.

“Participate at your own risk, some content NSFW,” reads the description of the Misc. on the forums’ homepage. “U Aware?”

The number of people who are Aware, it turns out, is over 16 million. As of January 2018, these members of Bodybuilding.com have made more than 137 million posts on the forums, including 90 million on the Misc. The forums first became active in 2000, a time before Wikipedia and when “Skype” was neither app nor verb. Myspace—Myspace!—didn’t exist until three years later. The Misc., as the predominant section of an internet community with such immense popularity and longevity, has cemented its place near the top of Google’s search results for any query imaginable. To appropriate Rule 34, if it exists, there’s a Misc. thread for it. Online, at least, the Misc. is inescapable.

A cursory scroll through the Misc. reveals what it has in common with the still-popular internet communities it predates, Reddit and 4chan. There are the memes, comics, copypastas, acronyms, and slang recycled endlessly in a digital echo chamber largely devoid of moderation. There are the forum members—Miscers, they call themselves—who post, and post in, intentionally incendiary threads about whether tongue rings scream “cum dumpster” and how “Crossfit is gay,” then fan the flames for entertainment’s sake by doubling down on their inanity. There are moments ofuproarious, absurd, gut-busting idiocy. There are ideology-clarifying usernames (RICHSTRONG, MinisterOfLust, weightsb4dates, WishIWasJawBrah, MericaThatsWhy) and statement-making profile pictures (deliberately titillating yet invariably off-putting abdominal shots, monochromatic selfies, strategically underlit bicep closeups). There are trolls surely seething and/or laughing maniacally, their keystrokes like machine-gun fire, as they launch poorly punctuated ad-hominem attacks and, at their most destructive, encourage people to commit suicide. There are sexists, racists, xenophobes, and homophobes. There is the sense of being in a parochial, patriarchal madhouse where decorum has gone to die.

What emerges, when you spend enough time on the Misc., is a ghoulish portrait of a place that embodies the white, male id currently at the helm of S.S. America. The Misc. is a stone-faced Uncle Sam with Popeye’s forearms and a cocked pistol in each hand. It’s a screeching bald eagle with a foreign Bad Thing in its talons. It’s everything that defines America’s bro culture, magnified and weaponized. But it’s deeper than that.

“Bro-merican” culture is largely defined by the stratification of power and status, both real and imagined. So, too, is Bodybuilding.com, where a power imbalance is embedded in the structure and design of the site’s forums. Unlike on 4chan, where all posts are anonymous and ephemeral, or on Reddit, where the grand sum of a user’s upvotes has little value, Bodybuilding.com members’ reputation points, or “reps,” mediate and deeply influence community interactions. While reps are similar to Facebook likes—weighted such that getting either “repped” or “negged” by a user with hundreds of thousands of reps will drastically affect your own rep count—they function as the Misc.’s de facto currency. Your rep count is displayed next to your every post. It’s like your bank account balance flashing on your forehead whenever you speak.

Bullying by those with power (high-rep Miscers) and obsequiousness by those without it (low-rep Miscers) is rampant. Getting negged by a high-rep Miscer means potentially becoming a “red,” a user with negative reputation points, displayed beneath your username as a gradated red bar as jarring as a stop sign. If you’re a red, you’re a second-class citizen. Your posts might as well come with a disclosure: “I’m a worthless idiot. Please listen to absolutely nothing I say.”

The opinions and caprices of high-rep “green” Miscers, then, dictate the forum’s personality. Any Miscer brave enough to post contrarian ideas—including, and especially, those that are liberal and feminist—is often negged into oblivion. Bad joke misses the mark? Negged. Sincere comment comes off as sarcastic? Negged. The Misc. is an echo chamber in which “greens” are given a megaphone and a gun.

But in contrast with Reddit and 4chan, the Misc. has been filtered through and molded by bodybuilding subculture, a set of beliefs and customs rooted in the many manifestations of stereotypical masculinity: egotism, aggression, hypersexuality, über-competitiveness, entitlement. Insecurity, intolerance, misogyny. Bodybuilding, after all, is not about functional strength but about vanity and surface appearances, how masculinity is projected to the world. It fosters narcissism by trading in cosmetic superlatives: the highest bicep peaks, the most vascular calves, the most extreme V-shaped back.

The Misc. applies this dog-eat-dog frame of mind to every topic. Everything is a masculinity- or dick-measuring contest. Including, of course, the actual dick-measuring contests, because Miscers are nothing if not cripplingly aware of their own inadequate manhood. Swears and slurs are censored but their creatively misspelled phonetic workarounds are not, which makes for a forum full of “kunts” talking “chit” and menacingly telling each other to “pepper your angus” (prepare your anus). The most recurrent insults all concern perceived masculinity, or lack thereof. “U mad bro?,” a popular retort, juxtaposes one-of-the-guys slang with the notion that showing emotion means demonstrating debilitating weakness. A real bro doesn’t get mad, he only gets testosterone-fueled revenge.

Near the bottom of the masculinity totem pole are “low-T beta manlets”—that is, short, shy, effeminate guys. Lower down are “phaggots,” a word that gets tossed around the Misc. like salt at a Sichuan restaurant. Lest any Miscer think you’re a “phucking phaggot,” all posts about personal care, fashion, home decoration, or how to look like a certain actor/model/bodybuilder are appended with “no homo.” Yet shaky Misc. logic dictates that even if you’re a gay man, there’s still someone you genetically out-alpha and who is, therefore, below you: a woman.

While the entire internet is teeming with horny men whose dark loneliness and insecurity wears the cloak of misogyny, they seem to be especially vocal, and in especially high numbers, on the Misc. Every other thread is a depressing question (“Think she’s faithful to him?”) or a charged statement (“Drunk Sex > Sober Sex”) about women—their bodies, hitting on them, their innate tendency to cheat—and sex—where to find it, how to go “no contact” after having it, why she is fucking him.

The Misc.’s ties to PUA (pickup artist) forums and Reddit’s /r/TheRedPill, a perniciously misogynist, anti-feminist Reddit community dedicated to “discussing sexual strategy in a culture increasingly lacking a positive identity for men,” are as well documented as they are unsurprising. One of PUA’s most frequent suggestions is to acquire “inner game,” or self-confidence through self-improvement. Miscers, being on what is ultimately a bodybuilding forum, have inverted that mantra—they’re going from the outside in. Look good, feel good.

Other elements of the manosphere, from cries of societal misandry to sexual techniques like kino escalation and shit-testing, permeate the Misc. All women are “thirsty sloots” to be conquered, their emotions and physical well-being to be toyed with for internet strangers’ entertainment. When, to the forum’s delight, a Miscer posts about a sexual conquest in lurid detail—a surefire way to rack up the reps—the verbs employed are barbaric: “took down,” “smashed,” “hit.” To have “oneitis,” or an obsessive and unrequited crush on one woman, is to be afflicted with a masculinity-destroying emotional disease, one that can be cured, naturally, by sexually subjugating another woman. Regardless of whether a Miscer is successful or is rejected in the pursuit of sex, the response is the same: “Sloots gonna sloot.”

Despite the Misc.’s obsession with women, it has the latent homoeroticism you’d expect of a website devoted to a male-dominated sport in which bronzed, muscled competitors get smeared with oil and put on thongs before preening onstage in front of other men. This is no more obvious than when discussing a “Chad.” While there is a 5,000-post thread asking what, exactly, defines a Chad, the consensus is that he’s shorthand for a tall, built, strong-jawed, big-dicked, thick-haired, financially successful, athletic, confident, funny, sociable man who, because of these eminently desirable qualities, has his pick of the XX-chromosome litter. You look at a Chad and say, “This guy fucks.” (The prototypical Miscer might be a “Sheldon,” minus any TV-driven connotations of high-level intelligence.) Rob “Gronk” Gronkowski is a stone-cold Chad. Chad Johnson of The Bachelor is a Chad, and not just in name. It’s no accident that “Chad” is one of the most generically white and straight names imaginable, nor that archetypal Chads are nearly always white and straight. The etymological origin of the name Chad is the Welsh word cad, meaning “battle,” a fact that would surely delight Miscers to no end.

The Misc.’s resident Chad is an Australian bodybuilder known by his Bodybuilding.com handle, Zyzz. In early 2010, Zyzz began regularly detailing his “aesthetic” lifestyle on the Misc. As the so-called and self-proclaimed “king of aesthetics,” and with the zingy catchphrases “U mirin’ brah?” and “U jelly?,” Zyzz became the preeminent demigod of the Misc., where he and his “Aesthetics Crew,” acolytes similarly lacking in shirts, body fat, and social grace, were #bodygoals and #squadgoals come to life. Pictures and videosof Zyzz fist-pumping shirtless in public, wrapping his tanned arms low around the waists of nipple-pastied ravers at festivals, adopting a Herculean pose while standing in a shopping cart—these were the icons of the Misc. religion. When Zyzz died of a heart attack in 2011 at the age of twenty-two, his death became the sixth-most-searched death-related topic in Australia that year. His Facebook page, still regularly updated, has over 400,000 likes.

Zyzz’s masculinity showed itself in vain but harmless demonstrations of grandiosity, but other headline-making Miscers have expressed theirs through violence and morally indefensible acts. Gable Tostee first became a Misc. star by posting screenshots of his Tinder and text conversations with women he “rooted,” or had sex with; he entered Misc. lore after creating an ill-advised thread titled “Regarding the balcony tragedy” in the wake of news that one of his Tinder dates had been found dead from a fall from his apartment balcony. (Tostee was later acquitted of murder and manslaughter.) A Miscer known as YaBoyDave secretly filmed himself having sex with women—“whale-smashing,” in Misc. parlance—and posted the videos on the Misc.; he served 10 months in jail and is now a registered sex offender.

Still worse was Luka Magnotta, a wannabe model whose desperately misguided attempts at fame led him to asphyxiate kittens on camera and, later, live stream the brutal murder and dismemberment of a Chinese student while music from American Psycho played in the background; he was arrested at an internet café in Berlin, alternately surfing for pornography and reading news stories about himself, and it was later revealed that he’d posted on the Misc. Most infamously, Elliot Rodger, the Santa Barbara shooter, was active on the Misc., starting threads like “Why do girls hate me so much?” and “I’m tired of seeing losers with hot chicks.” In the latter thread, he recalled being “disturbed and offended” by seeing a “short, ugly Indian guy driving a Honda Civic” with a “hot blonde girl in his passenger seat.” It’s the bro’s classic sense of entitlement: Why should someone less masculine than me have what I know I deserve?

Miscers reaching toxic masculinity’s most violent nadir are mercifully few and far between. Yet the obvious connection between these people is one shared by the vast majority of the Misc. They’re young, white men whose social and sex lives are marked by absence or humiliating rejection, and their worldviews have likely been shaped by those failures. Rodger, for one, admitted in his autobiographical manifesto to having “never even kissed a girl.” He was an “incel,” or involuntarily celibate. “Not getting any sex,” he wrote, “is what will shape the very foundation of my miserable youth.”

A pervasive negative sense of self, of disappointment about one’s past and simultaneous anxiety and hopelessness for one’s future, is to the Misc. what the iceberg was to the Titanic: visible if you know to look for it, destructive if you don’t, and lurking below the surface all the same

The running joke about Miscers is that they’re all sad, awkward, forever-alone virgins who don’t lift and are on the only non-fitness-oriented section of a bodybuilding website because they can’t get their shit together. It’s revealing that one of the Misc.’s celebrities—there’s a 24,000-word condensed version of his “saga” on a fan-made website dedicated to him—is a weird, often clueless Everyman. He’s neither egregiously out of shape nor conventionally “aesthetic,” and his videos show a distinct lack of social awareness, a trait cultivated, presumably, by a life spent behind a computer screen and under a barbell.

Users of other Bodybuilding.com sections and other internet communities entirely propagate this idea of the Misc. as a cesspool of beta males with hopelessly futile aspirations of being alpha. “They have to be some of the most insecure dudes out there,” a Hypebeast forum user said of Miscers. On another forum, a user wrote that the Misc. is “filled with people [who] make fun of autism, while at the same time they themselves complain about their jobs, women, etc.”

More often, however, the call is coming from inside the house. Miscers reveal their vulnerabilities and problems in earnest with critically self-aware, self-deprecating posts. There are countless threads about “beta” topics like being a virgin (a Google search of site:bodybuilding.com “virgin” yields nearly 70,000 results), undergoing hair loss, not knowing how to normally interact with women, and giving up entirely. The Misc.’sRelationships and Relationships Help sub-forum would be more aptly titled “Sex: Help.” The “Depression Discussion and Support Thread Part III” thread is “stickied” by moderators at the top of the Misc., indicating that it resonates with the community; “Part II,” before it got so long that a new thread had to be created, had 10,000 posts and 1.6 million views. After the two aforementioned pornographic threads of “petite/slim girls” and “athletic girls,” the most-viewed Misc. threads are one about “Beta/cringe” moments of social awkwardness and another that documents the 350-pound weight-loss journey of a Miscer named Wetbreasts. For many Miscers, undoubtedly, browsing those threads is either motivational or like looking in a mirror. Or both.

It might appear counterintuitive that unconfident, sex-deprived, socially awkward young men would congregate—by the millions—on a bodybuilding website. But that paradox is precisely what’s responsible for the Misc.’s enduring allure.

It goes like this: A young guy thinks that improving his body will improve himself, that lifting weights will make him more confident, which will make girls like him more, which will make him happier, which will get him laid. And so on. In search of guidance, he finds Bodybuilding.com, where, after analyzing fat-to-ripped or skinny-to-jacked transformation stories, he ends up on the most popular part of the website: the Misc. But in the Misc. he finds a different kind of self-help: a vibrant, active community of like-minded guys. Guys who’ve felt inadequate and lonely and somehow less than manly, who’ve struggled with women and friends and money and body image, who’ve laughed at internet jokes and self-referential image macros that no one found funny, much less comprehensible, in real life. With a newfound sense of solidarity, this young guy wades deeper into the Misc., a community that gets him, his worldview increasingly shaped by this bodybuilding subculture, his mind warped by the community’s devil-may-care, “LOL, nothing matters” ethos.

It’s this last quality of the Misc. that Miscers themselves most readily use to characterize the forum. They see the stupidity of getting worked up over little green internet squares. They don’t take themselves seriously—it’s a motley crew of dudes on a bodybuilding site, bro—so nor should anyone else. Their attitude, one adopted from the bro culture with which they’re intertwined, is predicated on actions not having consequences. Break shit and someone else will pay for it. Get blind drunk, scream offensive things in public, and your boys will carry you home. Sexually harass or assault a woman, more than one woman, dozens of women, and you’ll still be revered, promoted, elected. You’re just “bro-ing out,” man, be easy, be chill, have a beer, have a protein shake.

“bro that forum is a fucking laugh man, just need a sense of humour,” a Hypebeast forum user wrote, in a thread titled, “The misc section of the bodybuilding forums is full of clowns.” If you’re young, white, and male, with a sense of humor shaped by the internet and a sense of privilege shaped by, well, everything else, the Misc.’s “clowns” can certainly be hilarious. But the further you are from that in-group, the more those clowns start to look like a horde of disturbing, misogynistic Pennywises.

Zyzz was once your standard insecure teenager with bad hair and spaghetti-thin arms. “I remember feeling like a little bitch when I was out with girls, walking next to them and feeling the same size as them,” he said in an interview. Becoming “aesthetic” hid a profound insecurity. His no-fucks-given attitude hid a fierce desire to be wanted.

Miscers see only the mirage. To them, Zyzz was living, walking, flexing proof that an average guy could eventually open the door to the HBB-filled alpha-male kingdom by gaining confidence and an aesthetically pleasing body. But the king is no more. And not every guy in search of personal fulfillment finds the key to that door by picking up a barbell. Not every young, white male who’d otherwise troll Reddit or 4chan becomes, through bodybuilding, the type of bro who doesn’t spend time on internet forums because he’s too busy crushing it, whatever “it” is, in real life. The Misc.—an online fraternity of the average and awkward, a safe space of the resentful and lustful and doubtful—is for the bros still searching.

#masculinity #toxic masculinity #bro culture #sexism #misogyny #male insecurity #article #bodybuilding.com #misc

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teenguyen92 · 3 years ago

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Why Friends With Benefits Are the Best Relationships

Just a nice article to read. It seems true to me though.

In a few days, I’m going to Cuba on vacation with a guy I’ve been sleeping with for eight years, but whom I've never once called my boyfriend. We live on different continents, but inevitably, a few times a year, we find each other somewhere in the world, have a few days of romance, and then go our separate ways. This arrangement would generally be called a friend with benefits, or a fuck buddy, or a romantic friendship, or perhaps even a relationship—with “no strings attached.” But let’s be real: There are always strings, aren’t there?

It was while planning this vacation that it hit me: The two longest relationships of my life have both been with men who I was never officially dating. Boyfriends and girlfriends have come and gone, but my friends with benefits have stood the test of time. I mean, eight years. That’s longer than I predict my first marriage will last. And while I can’t imagine being with my Cuba date “for real”—I mean, he’s a low-key homeless anarchist who once took me on date to his Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous meeting; there are red flags—I still value our relationship immensely. And he actually knows me better than a lot of my partners ever did. So what is it about the friends with benefits dynamic that is more sustainable, and often more transparent, than an actual relationship?

People are skeptical of fuck buddies. They’re like: How can you have sex with the same person, again and again, without falling in love? Or at least, without getting super-jealous and Fatal Attraction–esque? Some assume that one of the “buddies” is always being strung along, secretly hoping that the fucking leads to something more serious. Others dismiss fuck-buddy dynamics as just being compulsive sex that’s devoid of emotion. But why do things have to be so black and white? Surely it’s possible to find a middle ground between eternal love and zombie-fucking a stranger: a place where you can care about someone, have good sex, and yet not want to literally implode at the thought of them sleeping with someone else. Right?Case in point: The most significant romantic friendship of my life was with an ex-editor of mine, whom I’ll call Malcolm. We started “a thing” five years ago and have yet to end it. When I met him, he was 45 and charmingly grumpy, and he would always tell me: “Sex is so perfect. Why destroy it with a relationship?” I’d go over to his apartment for a couple hours in the afternoons, we’d have sex (soberly, which meant I could actually cum), and then afterward we’d drink tea and complain about stuff. It was the best.

There were times when we saw each other frequently, and other times when things dropped off for a while, usually because one of us had a partner. And sure, when he would get a girlfriend I would be a little bummed out—I’m (unfortunately) not a sociopath—but it didn’t cause me to spiral into an emotional cyclone the way I would have if I’d been cheated on by a boyfriend. After all, disappointment comes from expectation.Over time, Malcolm and I became really close. It felt like we had entered this secretive bubble of transparency—we were emotionally intimate, yet free of the burden of jealousy and ownership. We could spill our guts to each other because we didn’t have anything to lose. I told Malcolm about my previous relationships, my fantasies, my heartbreak. Once, he told me this long, complicated story about an affair he had with his cousin, adding, “That’s not something I tell most people.” Probably wise on his part, but I loved that story, as problematic as it may be, because I loved knowing something about him that no one else did. Sometimes it feels like we are more honest with our friends with benefits than we are with our partners.This paradox always makes me think of that Mad Men episode when Betty seduced Don at their kid’s summer camp, well after they had both remarried. Afterward, when they’re lying in bed together, Betty says of Don’s new wife, “That poor girl. She doesn’t know that loving you is the worst way to get to you.” Harsh. But sometimes, romantic friendships can offer a type of intimacy that committed relationships can’t.I was curious to know if Malcolm felt the same way I did about all of this, so last week (for strictly journalistic purposes), I paid him a visit. “Having a friend with benefits is great because it’s just—it’s just less annoying,” he said, smoking a cigar and dressed in an inexplicable beige silk onesie. “It’s more of a low-intensity intimacy. It’s not encumbered by obligations, which just lead to resentment.”He then gave me that look—the one that means he’s about to admit to something despicable and blame it on humanity. “We are all selfish—we all live in this Ayn Rand–ish self-centered world, whether we like it or not,” he said. “When you’re in a friends with benefits situation, you don’t have go to the other person’s awful friend’s birthday party. But if you behave like that within a conventional relationship, it causes problems.

“With [FWB] there’s no illusion about the carnal aspect,” he went on, “so you can be really literal about it: You are two people who like and respect each other—and you like to fuck. There’s beauty and freedom in that honestly. And you can be playful. You can have your sex-power persona, or you can play the super-misogynist pig, or the bimbo, and it’s okay, because you’re not being judged. But if you change that dynamic into being a real relationship, then those games might not seem so sexy anymore.”In other words, your fuck buddy gets all the good stuff about being in a relationship—the wild sex, the cuddles, the juicy dark secrets—minus all of the boring, would-rather-die activities that go hand in hand with commitment, like having to help assemble your boyfriend’s IKEA bed, or having to watch your girlfriend stab at the ingrown hairs on her bikini line while she watches the Kardashians. (That’s me—I’m the girlfriend who does that.)Essentially, you’re taking a relationship and removing the creepy ownership of another human being, which leaves more room for hedonism and sexual exploration. Like, who do you want to bring to the sex party—your boyfriend or your fuck buddy? It’s a no-brainer. I’ve done so many things with fuck buddies that I never would have tried with partners, because I was too much of a jealous monster. (Like once I let Malcolm tie me to a dresser while I watched him have sex with my best friend. Unsurprisingly, it was literally awful, but now at least I can say I’ve done it?)One of the most masterful fuck friends I know is my friend Casey, a 26-year-old Ph.D. candidate in English, who until recently had a FWB for 12 years. It started when she was 13, with a boy whose family spent every summer in the same beach town as she did. (Cute alert.)Over martinis at Cafe Mogador, Casey told me, “When I’m dating someone, my immediate impulse is to be like, ‘Let’s lock shit down! My anxiety will decrease if I know you want to marry me in six years from now!’ Which is crazy and not hot or sustainable. But my longer romantic friendships have been a safe space. They’ve helped me figure out how to relate to someone romantically without the immediate trigger of, Where is this going?” In other words, having a fuck buddy is a great exercise in non-possessiveness.

“The thought of my boyfriend fucking someone else makes me want to wear his skin like a goddamned wetsuit,” she said, eyes bulging. “But with my fuck buddies it’s been like, ‘Oh, my God, tell me more.’ There’s almost a level of titillation to sex stories when it’s somebody who’s not your boyfriend. But why is that? I wish I knew, so I could bottle it and never be possessive ever again.”For all the benefits of fuck friendery, it’s still possible for this dynamic to screw with your emotions. “At different points in our relationship,” Casey recalled, “it was hard to respect the line between friendship and flirting when he started dating someone, because I’d known him more intimately than his new partner. It’s like my morals were thrown out the window, and I felt this gross egotistical sense that I should come first, because I’ve been around longer, like, ‘Girlfriends come and go, but I’m forever.’” Sometimes it’s hard to accept that these dynamics usually have an expiration date, which tends to be when one person gets into a committed relationship. And, unfortunately, not only do you lose the benefits, but you sometimes lose the friend, too.We are taught that all relationships that don’t end up in marriage are failures (because, ya know, hetero-normativity and patriarchal narratives or whatever). But subscribing to that belief ignores the fact that romantic friendships can be extremely fulfilling, enlightening, and straight-up fun. Of course, I’m not dismissing the benefits of committed, long-term, loving relationships. But both dynamics are valuable in their own right. And perhaps the reason romantic friendships are often so sustainable is they lack the soul-baring vulnerability and intense emotional investment.Maybe the coolest thing about the fuck-buddy economy is that it allows women to actually enjoy sex in a casual way, without having to enter an old-fashioned ownership contract. It celebrates female sexual autonomy. It’s a chance to explore ourselves and other people. And in the interim, we can discover who we are and what we like, instead of committing to a pseudo-marriage we aren’t ready for.

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pass-the-bechdel · 7 years ago

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Orphan Black season two full review

How many episodes pass the Bechdel test?

100% (ten of ten).

What is the average percentage per episode of female characters with names and lines?

50.4%

How many episodes have a cast that is at least 40% female?

All ten.

How many episodes have a cast that is less than 20% female?

None, obviously.

How many female characters (with names and lines) are there?

Twenty-four. Sixteen who appear in more than one episode, ten who appear in at least half the episodes, and two who appear in every episode.

How many male characters (with names and lines) are there?

Thirty-two. Sixteen who appear in more than one episode, nine who appear in at least half the episodes, and one who appears in every episode.

Positive Content Status:

Thinks it’s better than it is. While there are undeniable positive points to the show, the creators are coasting on those and apparently oblivious to the problematic elements that still exist, which are more troubling this time around than they were in season one (average rating of 2.8).

General Season Quality:

Better than the first, and mostly gripping and intriguing and surprising in quality dramatic turns rather than lazy flashy twists just for twists’ sake. That said, there are some duds in there that really interrupt the flow of story. There’s still a lot of room for improvement.

MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) under the cut:

Let’s talk about dudes.

Normally, I don’t go for the guy discussions in these season reviews unless a) there are almost no women to speak of on the show, and/or b) I’m several seasons in and I have nothing to say about the women that I haven’t already said in previous reviews. Neither of those is true in this case, but the fact remains that there is one really big obvious weak link who manages to find his way to the centre of most of my major content issues with this show, and as much as I would love to NOT waste time talking about Paul, I probably gotta do it.

First things first: this show loves how attractive Paul supposedly is, and it’s bad. Not just because I think he looks like a doorknob, but because of the way the show handles him because it wants us all to see him as ‘the man-candy’. Obviously, the biggest problem that throws up is the dubiously-consensual pointless sex scenes, because maybe-actually-rape-but-we’re-too-busy-being-titillated-to-figure-that-out scenes are super high on the list of Things Which Should Not Happen On My Television Screen. It counts for the scene with Rachel in this season the same as the scenes with Sarah in the first one; if the show were less preoccupied with ‘Big Dick Paul’ being sexually available, we could avoid at least some of this awfulness (no guarantee they’d skip it altogether if Beth Childs had been dating an ‘average’ guy, but more of a chance of that if they hadn’t deliberately cast an ‘Alpha Hottie’ prototype mistake). Now, I hear the chime of ‘but they’re objectifying a man the same way that women are usually objectified! It’s subversive!’, but, no. Assault-adjacent voyeurism isn’t suddenly ok just coz it’s a dude. That’s not how subversion works, but it IS how double-standards that marginalise male victims works! The fact that this show is too busy finding Paul hot to bother evaluating the situations they showcase that within is a problem. The fact that Paul also has no discernible personality and therefore no discernible emotions about those situations is also a problem.

Paul having no personality is a significant part of why he’s an objectively garbage character, but it also plays in to the Bad News about the way the show handles him since they neglect to allow him fallout from his own experiences. What did Paul think about having sex with Rachel? We don’t fucking know. It happens and then he just goes and does some Paul things that Paul does and I’m not sure if he and Rachel even share a scene again? At any rate, him becoming her new handler et al. comes to nothing since he disappears for most of the season soon after, which just makes the whole gross sex thing worse because it really is meaningless, with no plot relevance even in the form of character responses. If Rachel has sex with Paul because she perceives him as something of Sarah’s (ew) and she’s out to get her, well, Sarah doesn’t care and Rachel doesn’t gloat and the whole thing just disappears, so, zero consequence. Things related to Paul’s presence on the show have a tendency to be like that, and that’s why he’s the weak link even when he’s not having questionable sex. The narrative repeatedly tells us that Paul is somehow important and what he does and who he’s allied to matters (remember how we also got that awful problematic visit from Tony the trans clone just so that we could waste an entire episode on the ‘revelation’ that Paul is some kind of black ops ‘ghost’, even though we, like...knew that already?). At least in the first season, Paul’s existence had a purpose because he was Beth’s handler, but once he found out that Sarah was Sarah and Beth was dead and, oh yeah, there’s clones, instead of becoming a stronger character for being in the loop, he got worse. What are Paul’s motivations, actually? What are his moral principles? What matters to him, what drives him, what gets him out of bed in the morning to shave his cereal-box face? I haven’t the faintest fucking idea. He mumbled some things once in an irritating tone of voice that I couldn’t hear properly, something about military history and Afghanistan, but you’ve gotta do better than that for character backstory. His entire existence is not based around that one experience, not least because he had to have had an existence predating the experience which in itself influenced how the Afghanistan thing turned out. Season three does appear poised to Do Something with Paul’s military life, but excuse me if I’m neither excited by that prospect, nor expecting it to suddenly make him have a personality. Honestly, why start now? He’s a meaningless character who just shows up intermittently (he’s only in half the episodes in season two) and has ~mysterious motives~ that conveniently allow him to do whatever the plot has decided he should do today, and then he flits off again, usually without having any lasting impact on the story, making it seem like he’s being written content just because someone decided he Has To Be On The Show, not because they have any place or purpose for him. They seem to care a LOT about making us think he matters, not so much about making him actually matter.

Paul being meaningless and yet given an inordinate amount of narrative attention whenever he bothers to show up is also INFURIATING because meanwhile, the actual-good characters are getting shafted. What did poor Art Bell get to do this season? Nothing much really, he was just that convenient Other Guy when they wanted to parcel something out his way. Like Paul actually, he got LESS quality story to work with after finding out about the clones, instead of getting more engagement. Most of what Art did this season was babysitting clones, often with Felix, who the show did only a little better at giving plot relevance. It’s a sad damn waste for most of the stronger male presences from the first season - the only one who gets some good stuff to work with this season is Donnie, really. Along with these three, Scott the science nerd, Mark the Prolethian boy-clone, and ye olde Ethan Duncan complete the illustrious list of Male Characters In More Episodes This Season Than Paul, and yet the plot between them is pretty thinly spread. Of course, on a female-centric show like this, there’s no reason why we should be crying over spilled male character purpose, but when you keep seeing the same faces one episode after the next it starts to mess with the plotting of your show when those faces don’t seem to be there for much of a reason. It’s one of the things that really stood out about the weak season finale: lots of characters in the cast list with nothing to actually add to the plot of the episode, and meanwhile, in waltzes Paul in his stupid uniform as if his return is momentous...

In waltzes Paul, and he meets Cal, who is in the same number of episodes as him this season as well as sharing a few other traits in common, the overt ‘man-candy’ one being flagged by Siobhan out loud just in case we hadn’t realised Cal is supposed to be hot too. As I said when he first showed his scruffy face, he has got more immediate charm and evidence of a personality of some description than Paul does, and while that’s not high praise it is better than being Paul. But I’m still not sold on Cal and it concerns me that the show is throwing another blando at Sarah, like she can’t just have her plot without also boning Prescription Babes along the way (and no, that’s not cool subversion either, that’s ‘woman needs a man’ cliche even when said woman is fucking surrounded by other strong capable female presences. Wasting time on a pointless male love interest is not subversive, but it DOES detract from time and relationships with other female characters who could fill the role without adding boring sex scenes just coz!). Cal has the makings of a real character, but they gotta at least make an effort, because currently he’s a handful of convenient skills in happy-puppy packaging who just kinda goes along with things in a way-too-passive fashion, just-happening to work out that Sarah is a clone off-screen where we don’t have to deal with the mess of him having a personal reaction to, um, anything. We never had enough time with Cal to establish a personality in which to contextualise the revelation of fatherhood, the forgiveness of the con artist who stole his money, the shock upheaval of his entire life as he knows it, the going on the run, the evil corporation and the clones and the and the and the...it’s a bit much to be not bothering to characterise on. You can’t throw all that out there and tell me that the guy went through the teething process on it in the space of three lines before he went and fell back in bed with Sarah again. Come on.

Usually, when I talk about dudes in these season reviews, I’ll repeat my line about how the way a show handles its male characters is as important to the issue of positive female representation as the handling of the female characters, because even if the female characters kick ass you can still fuck up the content royally through bad male characters being framed as cool heroes alongside them. Failure to include men in your feminism only allows the very problems you’re standing against to perpetuate and fester, because you can’t address a systemic issue without looking at all the angles. Orphan Black looks and smells like a show that should be making strides for progress with its stocked cast of dynamic and empowering female characters of various kinds, but it is hampered by an oversupply of male characters who take up screen time without having anything much to do. Fixing that doesn’t have to mean paying more attention to the men (because honestly, the world at large got to this problem point by doing way too much of that already, that’s why we’re talking), but it does mean working out why your male characters exist in the narrative and whether or not they’re necessary or being used to potential. For this show in particular, Paul really is the weak link, not just as an individual character, not just as a place where plot goes to be rendered inert, but as a centrepiece for a story that is oddly determined to keep a lot of male characters around without trying very hard to have a reason for it. ‘He’s there to be hot’ is not a valid reason, and it IS the same thing we’ve been railing against happening to female characters since the dawn of television, but it’s not a valuable subversion, it isn’t helping anything. The flip side of female characters having to fight to be allowed to have meaningful plot-relevant stories in male-dominant media is not to have male characters being pointless eye candy instead, it’s to have male characters be less dominant and only exist if they have a good reason for it. If they’re still occupying more than their fair share of space, then they’re still a problem.

...and thus, I will conclude another Orphan Black season review feeling weird and put-out about this show and my inability to really click with it. Is Paul their weakest link? Yes, fight me. Is Paul being their weakest link a crippling problem for the whole narrative? No, not especially. As noted, it has the potential to kill whole episodes or at least swathes of story that are given over to his meaninglessness for absolutely no sensible reason, like part of the show has to be sacrificed to a vengeful expressionless God otherwise it’ll get cancelled, but when Paul isn’t around - which he often isn’t - the plot is still getting along and doing interesting things that I haven’t seen before. So, why is it still falling kinda flat for me? I have a few more ideas as to why, but we’ll get to that (and then hopefully, we’ll get to me changing my mind about it). Until then...

#Orphan Black #Orphan Black season two #Bechdel Test #female representation #full season review

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serpicojones · 7 years ago

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Letter to My Grandma

I wrote the following a longtime back on here and then I never posted it. I am working on a new essay and I noticed this now. There are some things about this letter that have evolved for me. For instance, in the letter I refer to my pronouns as They/Them/Their and while I am generally still fine with these pronouns, I now also use She/Her/Hers. I think that my perspective on presentation is changing some (even while genderqueer still feels like an accurate term even as I also accept trans woman), but all of the details included in this letter were very truthful to the moment that I wrote it. I hope you can enjoy it and maybe learn a little about me as well as my particular experience with my gender and identity:

Dear Grandma,

I hope that this letter finds you well! I thought this would be an interesting way to communicate with you. Perhaps you would like to write or have my mother write a letter back to me. I am writing to you rather than calling because of the importance of the content of this letter and I wanted to make sure that it was all communicated clearly. As you know, sometimes communication over the phone can be challenging and I didn't want you to miss anything or feel like you missed anything!

All of my life, my relationship with you has been very important to me. You have always been a great person to talk about anything in the world with! My sister and parents are happy to listen to what I have to say about serious world stuff because they love me, but sometimes I've gotten the feeling that they are often just humoring me :-D. When we have talked it has been different. I think something that we share has been an overwhelming curiosity about the world. And nothing has ever been off limits. I feel sad that in the last few years, we've been unable to spend more time together because of where I live and how often I come to New York. I'm sorry about that. Some of the major ambivalent feelings I have about living across the country are cause I wish I could spend more time with you!

So anyway, I'm also sorry if I've been unable to keep you 100% abreast about what is going on in my life. I appreciate that my mom shares with you a lot of my goings on. I love you very much and so I really want you to know what's what. Maybe we can be pen pals! So let me share a little something with you that I would be happy to talk to you about in depth. Perhaps you would like to call me or write me questions in the form of a letter. That is absolutely welcome.

So here it goes...

I will start from the beginning of my pathway of discovery and fill in the details as I go along.

WYOMING

The sad truth about when I moved to Wyoming is well represented in this quote from Moby Dick:

"Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can."

I was running from something. Everything in my life seemed like it had the potential to be a happy one, minus the tough economy for finding work, and yet, I was almost desperately unhappy. Something was clearly not right and I was restless about it. I allowed for myself that it was my job prospects that kept me so unhappy, but it definitely felt deeper than that. Perhaps it also seemed my inability to deal with my own sexuality and relationships, but this was a bit under the surface--deliberately ignored by my conscious mind. I needed to get away from it all and Wyoming was my Pequod.

Accepting a job in Wyoming, a place I'd never been and could barely even imagine was a perfect experience for me. And for awhile, I was way happier! I was working on a creative job where people respected me, massaged my ego constantly, in a place that was foreign to me: ripe for discovery and exploration. In addition, after acquiring my own apartment, it was also a new sort of opportunity for me; it was one in which I could experience isolation and solitude. There were fewer pressures from the outside world in my 2 bedroom 2 floor apartment all to myself.

And so truthfully, I was surprised and shocked that the restlessness was still there even when so much in my life had been transformed. I was a different person in Wyoming. I was the easterner city "boy" that everyone marveled at. There was no pressure from my parents, no pressure from school, no pressure from friends. Work contained only pressures that I felt confident that I could deal with. So why was I feeling so restless that I would abandon my apartment in the middle of the night to stare at the star filled high desert sky?

Being truly alone with myself in a post-school, post-future world was devastating. I call it post-future, because up until that point in my life, I had always held out hope that things would be better in the future. I had markers of time and progress like tests and grades and watermarks like getting bar mitzvah-ed, graduating high school, etc.

Without those watermarks, suddenly I realized how incredibly long a lifetime is. As a kid, I could ignore my feelings with the expectation of a greater future and no concept of time in a life beyond childhood and adolescence. All time could be filled with distractions, mixed with endless hopes and dreams for the future, made safe by a loving family.

Alone with myself for the first time, I could feel the pain that I had been masking in my soul and had refused to face. AND for the first time, I decided that ignoring the problem as I had tried to do for so long, was MAYBE a satisfactory way to live my short life up until that point, but in the larger scheme of things was immensely painful. The prospect of living with that masked personal discontent unexamined for up to 60-70 more years if I lived a full life was a daunting and unbearable. And so finally, I looked inward.

Previous to this moment at subconscious and conscious intervals, a part of myself was always judging every action I did and every feeling I had. According to this voice in my head, something was wrong with me.

And so, I stopped judging for the first time. What was actually going on in my head? Well to start with, my problem that had no name related to my sexuality among other things, but it wasn't purely about my sexuality. Much of it related to how I saw myself in relation to others socially. SELF-EXAMINATION

The sun rose on a clear September day in Cody, WY. I heard my neighbor's horse whinny, and quietly I reflected that I had actually never had a single sexual fantasy that involved myself as a man. Many of them simply involved that act of turning into a woman and imagining masturbating or making a sexy video for the male version of myself.

Sometimes, the fantasies wouldn't even be sexual in nature. They would involve finding myself unexpectedly changed into a women and going into work the next day, trying to deal with the consequences or finding that everyone had already interacted with me as a woman, known me as a woman and this was an alternate reality that I would have to adjust to. Even this, I found titillating for the sexually repressed person that I was.

In elementary school, it was incredibly important to myself internally that I was different from the other kids. I didn't mind being different! I craved it. I loved it, but first and for most, I KNEW IT. Different how?

I didn't exactly know, but I definitely didn't like to be categorized. I wanted other people to know it also and it hurt when they didn't. My worst fear was that I was wrong about myself and I was the same as everybody else. This was before I learned that being different in the ways that I was was a problem. I couldn't really put my finger on it at the time. The reason as I can surmise was that I couldn't get out of my own point of view. Gender was a made up category that made a simple distinction between body parts. I assumed that everyone basically knew what I did. Boys and girls were literally the same asides from this one almost taxonomical difference. I was interest in the difference as one of my earlier elementary school memories was when I asked my mother with fascination and obsessive interest what my name would have been if I had been born a girl. She told me Jillian and I held onto this memory all the way up to my days in Cody. I was regularly jealous of my sister for some minor gender related reasons that seemed normal, and I also admired and loved her so much so I would let them go!

The ways that I was different became a problem in middle school when all of the kids started acting differently and as puberty set in. Puberty and the ways that kids began to socialize were super confusing to me!

Everyone else was in on a secret that I had never been privy. Boys and girls started acting in crazy ways that made no sense to me. All of the boys, even the shy ones started being sorta goofier about girls. Most boys were acting on feelings of attraction to girls, even if that only meant by just sharing their thoughts and acting a stupid way with each other.

I didn't understand. I didn't get the big deal over the difference between boys and girls. Most boys were acting in ways that I didn't like and wanted no part in. Truthfully, they were mostly doing stuff that made me not really want to be friends with them anymore. I wanted to have friends. Friends were important to me, but the ways in which guys started behaving made me uncomfortable to be around them a lot of the time. I regularly made exceptions, but was definitely confused and extremely stressed by these developments and in these environments.

Meanwhile, I had (what I felt like was a weird) obsession over girls. There was some sexual attraction as I started developing sexually later in middle school, but the attraction was always mixed with a sort of envy. This envy made NO SENSE to me. I was so confused! Did other boys have this envy? They probably didn't? They didn't seem to have the same feelings I did but maybe I simply hadn't sexually matured as far as they had. This is when I learned that my ways of being different were a problem, but I would often credit this feeling to not going through puberty as quickly as other people my age. They were simply better at it than I was. As I would get older, I would figure it out like they had and get over whatever things I was feeling.

It is around the end of middle school that I was realizing that feeling more explicit sexual desire (often, but not only for girls), was no cure to my discomfort around most boys and girls, sexually and socially.

I did a little self-examination and tried to be open with myself at this early date. I looked at the few options I had been aware of for things that would make me different. Was I gay? This definitely didn't seem entirely correct and men did occasionally enter into my fantasies, but there simply was always women there too. In these situations, I would be a woman in the scenario. Was I bisexual? This I decided was possible. It seemed to make sense that since I was clearly in my head attracted to women, I couldn't be gay, so I must have been bisexual! My homophobic young mind determined that while it was ok to be gay, I would pretend that I was straight (which is something that I think a lot of bi kids go through).

I had very little concept of what it meant to be transgender. The only thing that I was aware of in relation to transgender identities was these joke tv shows Maury Povitch or Jerry Springer where transexual women would come onto the show and be this scandalous crazy person character. These people thought they were something they weren't and that was that and women were attracted to men, so transexual women had to be attracted to men.

One night after watching one of these shows I had a dream that I was a woman (and this wasn't uncommon usually accompanied by euphoria) and I woke up with what must have been the most clarity about the issue of my youth. I had a fantasy or follow-up dream (I can't remember which) that I told this to the therapist I was seeing and their response to me was, "Did you ever consider for a second that you are one? You are a woman?" I freaked out and thought about that show with fear, disgust and (I guess self-hatred) that I--this wasn't real. I couldn't be a woman because of my body parts and life as a trans woman seemed to be fucking awful on those shows, and being sexually attracted to women the trans women were usually "ugly" in my minds eye.

I never told my therapist and this thought was basically pushed down into my mind until I considered it yet again in Wyoming.

The thing that remained constant as I grew and developed into a young "man" was how envious I was of girls and women. What they had, I could never have! I looked in the mirror with a sort of disgust at what I looked like, simply feeling unattractive and embarrassed by any body part or hair that made me look like a man. I regularly wished I could have been a girl in an abstract way (not a concrete one), but mostly tried to focus on other stuff, dreams for the future. I felt that when I finally had sex with a woman, I would get it what sexuality was supposed to be about as a "boy" who WAS attracted to girls.

I didn't masturbate or have any sexual encounters with people until my sophomore year of college and part of the reason for this was my overall discomfort. I had a gigantic crush on the girl that I went to prom with and late that night had the chance to push things further and the more intimate things got, the more my sexual feelings were turned off. Basically my relationship to my own sexuality was in itself a turnoff. My relationship with the sexual body part that I have been bestowed was itself a complicated and confused one. Anytime sexuality became concrete, there was a seemingly unbridgeable gap between what I had and what I needed to make things feel right and stay aroused or feel pleasure.

In my bedroom in the town of 10,000 people in the middle of a sage brush steppe up to the Rocky Mountains, I considered the way that girls had ALWAYS made me feel by including me in a category of men. I felt literally miserable. When feminists used to use gender exclusionary language before a wider feminist movement became inclusive of transgender identities, I was restricted and not allowed, alloft without a place to fit in--only a category assigned to me MEN by these trans exclusionary feminists. But then, I remembered the feeling of a visit I had to Los Angeles where I met my feminist friends possibly for the first time since they had been awakened to their "radical" feminist ideology and I learned about the space for trans identities (fairly recently added to their playbook This was 2012). I remembered how free I felt among these folks to not be a guy and just to be me.

In the context of all of this, I searched the internet and found out what people said about my fantasies. I found some very transphobic literature as it was designated as a disorder by the diagnostic and statistic manual created by the American Psychiatric Association and I found some less transphobic content as well.

I learned that transgender identities actually cross a wide range of possibilities and I learned the difference between sexuality and gender essentially for the first time. I learned transgender folks sometimes identified in between what was called society's gender binary between men and women. In addition, they had all different types of sexual attractions separate from and within these identities.

I immediately realized that cis gender (what is used to refer to people whose genders assigned at birth agree with the way that they feel), definitely didn’t apply to me.

I took immediately to an identity that I found mentioned called genderqueer. People choose this word for all types of personal identification reasons. The attractive part was that it felt like it was between masculine and feminine. Ever since that morning in Wyoming, I have been exploring and developing these thoughts. It has been a roller coaster of emotions.

I really moved out to Los Angeles because I wanted to be near those feminist friends that I had. I needed some space from my parents and my family and my long and storied history painfully thinking of myself as a guy, which had become more than simply a habit. It was like a habit, but a hurtful one, one that always cut me on some level, but to which I had developed a huge amount of useful, distracting and necessary coping mechanisms so that I could lead a full life.

All of those mechanisms did and continue to attempt to derail my progress. When I had a first real sexual encounter with another person, I discovered how incredibly difficult it was to feel pleasure and satisfaction with my appearance in the context of sexual activity and in the context of my body's shape and form. This along with other realizations helped push me into what was one of the worst depressions of my life. I mourned for my loss of being a "normal guy." This was a fiction that I had created and still continues to influence the way that I interact with the world. I also had moments of celebrating the same loss. GOOD RIDDANCE.

I denied my own identity, the possibility of it even making any sense, the possibility of living a "full life" in my mind leaping out the window all at the same time that I accepted my truth. These sort of things apparently happen concurrently and sporadically moving forward and backward between different stages of grief.

I legitimately felt like my life wasn't worth living, albeit never explicitly considered suicide.

I loved the way that my feminist friends treated me now that they didn't think I was a cis dude. I continued to feel incredibly rewarded for my openness in my feelings and the ways that I felt comfortable interacting with the world with this new conception of self. It was the greatest relief in my life at the same time that I struggled.

The new burden of what living my truth actually meant in the world replaced the previous self-hatred. This was a duller type of pain, generally more outwardly focused. And the other pain that grew and developed was the people around me not knowing or acknowledging my truth. This all happened without any steps I took in order to change the ways I felt about my gender presentation. My concept of my gender identity also developed beyond genderqueer. I will still use this as an identity label because on a certain level it still feels like it fits, but I can give you a more clear expression of the relationship that I feel I have with gender.

If you were to think of gender as a spectrum and not as a binary and you imagine that that spectrum has masculine on one side and feminine on the other, I would place myself a clear distinct amount of space feminine of center.

I am not a guy, or a man.

I don't generally care about my personal presentation from an internal perspective when we are just referring to me. In the context of social spaces however, I care a great deal! And I have come to realize like a Tomboy who decides she wants to do stuff that is feminine--that same stuff I don't care about--MATTERS TO ME. In the context of social situations, I really don't want to be read as cis male, even by a coworker or a stranger. This is something that my mom finds very confusing. Why would I have a desire to move my gender presentation almost completely into the feminine (at least of center) if I don't care? This is who I am and they are basically rendering me invisible by dismissing who I am. Gender really does MAINLY exist for me in the context of social situations, but it also exists in the concept of my physical body as well.

As I mentioned earlier, I suffered from what is called gender dysphoria all throughout my teenage years up until the present. This was a feeling of disconnect between what my body looks like and what my mind feels like it should look like. This was often quite triggering to my depression as was the things that I believe testosterone was doing to my mind and feelings.

These things plus my desire to present as female and my panic and depression of that year a year ago pushed me to visit a hormone doctor and begin taking hormone pills...an estrogen supplement and a testosterone blocker.

So hormonally at this moment, I am female.

My friends and family now refer to me as Jamie and it is the name I would like for you to try and call me as well. Everything in the past and that you have known of me before, and this letter has added up to equal who I am today.

I do still mostly dress the way you'll have remembered seeing me, but I am working on it and increased feminine presentation might make me feel more comfortable with the narrative that is still 2.5 years new to my life as compared to the previous 25.5 years. It is an adjustment for me as well as other people in my family, but it is just the way that things are. Whether or not it is a positive change or not, it is constantly developing (my gender identity) and also unavoidable. As soon as I would give up on this new narrative, I would have given up on the possibility of a happy life.

At the moment I use and tell other people to use gender neutral pronouns to refer to me. These pronouns are a creation of an alternative culture to mainstream English language so people claim that they are unnatural, but what is really unnatural is the concept of the gender binary that has been so enforced by European and christian society partially as a way to economically and physically oppress women and maintain past and contemporary power structures.

The pronouns I use are: they, them, their

And I would appreciate if you attempted to add them to your lexicon to refer to me. I am very understanding of folks who mess it up. Because of my 25.5 year narrative for myself, I occasionally mess up my own pronouns. It doesn't mean that my new narrative isn't true, but simply that old habits are hard to break.

I may in the future begin using feminine pronouns: she, her, hers, but that isn't right now. I just definitely don't want to be he, him, his

I am very glad to be able to share this with you and I'd look forward to discussing it further, whether on the phone or by pen pal.

Love always, Jamie

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indomitablemegnolia · 5 years ago

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Languishing at the bar, ruby lips caressing my glamorously green margarita; the midnight purple dress hugged my body like a sports cars paint, all road signs spoke of warning hazards; my goal, mayhem; I am tired of being this good reliable human; I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond this daily life; I am here at this lovely bar, to test the morality of a priest, I am prowling, wanting, needing desperately to have an itch scratched, and finding; and needless to say, oh Lordy he was no priest. The single flower pinning my hair slipped making the picture perfect, exquisite, glittering in the sunshine of preening laughter showing the dulling edge of my personal lack of compunction and slipping morals. I watched his dark eyes watch me in the mirror, why him, I licked my lips; I am in the mood for some Latin spice; he watched me from a distance just waiting for his opening and here it was, the song changed and my laugh was unstoppable; he pounced presenting sliding next to me; "Dos margaritas por favor" he held up two fingers; he stood there smiling that suave smile at me sliding a second glass to me, “It is too beautiful of a night to be drinking alone.”

I took it, dipping my top lip over the edge I took in a fair sized drink, “So, how is the weather in Albuquerque?”

Oh, the way he just let his full bottom lip, god that lip, so provocative, so titillating, so kissable; it was the perfect mismatch for his shaped cupids bow top lip; God though, the way his sensuous, heavy, pouty bottom lip hanging slightly ajar, showing interest and the evaluation that was being made; so enticing, seductively evocative; when his assessment was finished the muscles tensed in his cheeks pulling that mouth into the most provocative suave smile; given the deep, wildly dark abyss of his eyes that were swimming with approval and temptation; lord with those light crinkle to the corners and that smile sharp teeth and delicious dimples a belying innocence it was a dead certainty that he may well be Lucifer himself; solidifying my assumption as he spoke dropping the delicious sound-sex of his carnal voice down a full octave; letting it rumble through his chest; his simple words not seductive in and of themselves; goddamn, the concerted effort together all served to bring my pulse to life; his chuckle danced on my skin. I watched his satisfied lazy smile draw his lips as the offhand phrase that taunted like a dare. “Perhaps, we are lost in translation.” God that Latin lilt at the end of his words; oxytocin running through my veins thick; "As long as you stay, I hope that we are never found." He clinked the rim of his glass on mine.

My eyes drawn away from those lips; I watched those terrible, sexy fingers rolling deliciously, accentuating the dare; telegraphing a none too subtle promise of delicate fiddling with my vivid, hungry nerves; god, this time of year, this season, there is not much in it to make me smile; it is not yet, not quite yet, the saddest time of the year; yet, there is a haunting sense of the imminent doom, like a bleak abeyance of life; it’s not stark introspective weather, gray and bleak, but none the less the blue skies, fresh green, seemed to be festering, suppurating, killing my soul, I know that time had run out; that horrible clock with the second hand ticking tightening the garrote around my neck painfully, slowly; Jesus what a sick suffocating weight; there are too many things that I wanted to feel, wanted to do and always time… that small hyphen between birth and death the ultimate cause of death… that time. The time to hesitate was through; my hand shook as I watched a delectable twinge running along that lip, like a smile still trying to hide; waiting for the trap to spring when I ask a simple single syllable question, the ubiquitous air of his words raised several; or did I miss part of the conversation? Should I ask... mmm why, or what, but no, I so not want to play his game; I double down and call the bluff, answering with a simple whispered. The trap is sprung, I really have no idea if it is he who is caught or me.

"Yes." My whisper much huskier than I had intended, my margarita wavering in my hand; his delicious thick brow shot up tilting his head slightly to the left, he let out a silent ‘what?’ I watched him in the mirror behind the bar, he hovered those dark delicious eyes staring into mine; I nodded, and again “Yes.” I smiled chewing lightly on my straw; I took joy in his face caught off guard, lazy smile pulled the edge of his lips; again, his lips waved in a silent, 'what?'

"Oh, come on, I answered your real question, the one written in your eyes and on that sensual pouty lip, the answer is yes."

He looked even more confused, "What is the question are you are answering?"

"Well, I have read promises written loosely in your fingertips, I saw previews of plans in your eyes, and lies you will tell to get there, on that lip." I stepped to him, running my thumb along that bottom lip. "Why go with pretense, so simply, I said yes."

Pressing his forehead to the back of my head, his cool fingers sweeping my hair out of the way, he kissed the back of my hair, "Then mi cariño don’t say anything." His eyes so lusciously dark and turbulent never looking away from mine in the mirror; "I want to watch you revel in the feel of my hot breath against your ear. Now I ask you;" he breathed in deeply, the cool air passing my skin into his lungs sent a shiver down my spine; the contrast in temperature mind blowing, my skin prickled into Goosebumps; "do not move." He let his breath excite yet again, the warmth had all those tiny hairs stand to attention, his lips touched feather soft, moist warm breath, my heart kicked a little each pass of his lips, then words. “Te amo sin saber cómo, ni cuándo ni de dónde. Te amo simplemente, sin problemas ni orgullo: te amo de esta manera porque no conozco otra forma de amar sino esta, en la que no hay yo ni tú, tan íntimo que tu mano sobre mi pecho es mi mano. Tan íntimo que cuando me duermo tus ojos se cierran.” I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.

“Coelho?” Arching one eyebrow, I downed my margarita looking somewhat the part of the provocateur

“Si.” He looked cocky, he looked far too self-assured, so much so that I almost forgot my goal.

“Esto no es amor, es lujuria.” this is not love but lust… hmm, lust even the delectable word sounded so much more alluring en espanole.

“En este momento la lujuria functiona para mi.” in this moment lust works for me. Good lord that word in his Spanish just added a delicious wanton edge to the overdose of libidinous delight that he wrought in me, making my head literally spin. His soft cool fingers delectably caressed the other side of my throat, his tongue ran lightly along the rim of my ear; I shivered still our eyes connected in the mirror, I was putty in his hands.

His lips danced along my neck commanding my already tittillated nerves into a frenzy; nuzzling with intent, his cheek pushing my head to a delicious angle, he feasted on the left side; his lips and teeth acting in a beautiful tango so delicious that I leaned back into him reaching behind me for an anchor; he gripped my wrists in one hand, using his other to sweep my hair such as it was to the other side as his libertine lips began to such and feast on the right side, “Ser mío no es fácil. Tengo expectativas Yo hago demandas. Cuando ofrezco mi corazón espero devoción. Insisto en la pasión, cruda y completa, necesitada y fuera de control. Quiero que me duela el corazón cuando estamos separados. Quiero que mis manos sean incapaces de no tocar su piel cuando esté cerca. Quiero que nuestros cuerpos se quemen cada vez que nos besamos. No puedo y nunca aceptaré nada menos. Por eso ser mío no es fácil, pero créeme, vale la pena." Being mine is not easy. I have expectations. I make demands. When I offer my heart I expect devotion. I insist on passion, raw and all encompassing, needy and out of control. I want my heart to ache when we’re apart. I want my hands to be incapable of not touching her skin whenever she’s near. I want our bodies to burn every time we kiss. I can’t and I will never accept anything less. That’s why being mine is not easy, but believe me, it’s absolutely fucking worth it.” Needy and out of control I could do, I was on a mission for exactly that; I let myself ease into the moment, feeling as much as I possibly could devouring it like a man with his last meal enjoying the sweet and the salt and … oh gosh, my eyes flared as he kicked it up a notch his tongue sliding from just behind my ear to the spot where all nerves collide where shoulder and neck meet, my eyes fluttered; apparently to get my attention back his free hand traced across my bare flesh just above my modest neckline, dipping lightly between my breasts.

Jittery my attention came front and center back on his eyes; I raised a single eyebrow; "¿Quién dijo que era tuyo?" Who ever said I was yours? His lips moved along my neck to the place where neck meets shoulder, I became soft in his hands; his free hand caressing up to the edge of my chin, coaxing my head turning it, he kissed along my clavicle; my eyes finally rolled closed as he kissed my lips, he tasted of strong tequila, lime and dreams; I moaned softly.

“Oh, you just did, right there. No translation needed for that... Voy a probar, disfrutar del calor de su sabor embriagador. Quiero respirar tus suspiros; quiero sentirte desde adentro,” I want to breathe in your sighs. I'm going to try, to enjoy the heat of its heady taste; he kissed me deep again, "I am drawn to you, like a moth to fire," he kept his glorious mouth moving, all tongue and teeth and temptation, "I see a frantic almost panic on you;" his hand still holding mine in check, "I have you safe here," his loose hsnd pulling me to him; "I hunger for your touch after get you excited and how easy it is." Neck kissing, is honestly the most sensual, seductive things that I have ever known, but when it is done as well as this gorgeous man is... it is not just a syllogy for sex, I feel his talented tongue slide on my skin, we may as well be going at it right on the bar. "Deliciosa, caliente, con una gota de salsa picante" Delicious, hot, like a drop of hot sauce. He gripped my wrist spun me on the stool; taking off at a run.

@pedeka @writernotwaiting @keeper0fthestars @iamhisgloriouspurpose

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