#and how do I express this without being seen as an anti-social no-fun bitch!!

[blujayonthewing]

a fundamental problem with me is that I do like people and I like being around other people and I like hanging out with my friends but I also almost exclusively like doing completely solo activities, which isn't, you know, how anyone expects or wants socializing to work

[sxnshxnxxnddxxsxxs]

so i have absolutely decided to make a director’s cut version of my current wip that will be published when it’s finished because of that one post about making directors cuts.

so i’m just gonna post a couple of examples of the range of commentary you can expect from me when i’m not limited to ao3 end notes.

everything below the cut is from chapter 25 of and your heart love has such darkness so don’t read it if you’re not up to date on chapter 25 and care about spoilers.

This was bad. This was very bad.

*in the voice of eric effiong*: very bad, very very bad

Grandfather cut him off before he could get any further, “Cornelius, what in the name of Merlin, Morgana and Hecate made you think that an appropriate course of action was to not inform me that a member of my House, my previous Heir no less, escaped Azkaban, before running your mouth to the Prophet.”

this i think really highlights a clear difference in how wizarding society is organised as compared to ‘general western government’ or even than extent compared to other governments in the wizarding world though as of writing this i really haven’t fleshed that out.

but fudge is only the head of one branch of government even though he’s the head of state. but beyond that fudge is a new house. so technically it’s not disrespectful for arcturus to address fudge by his given name since arcturus is the very top of the social hierarchy. but at the same time there is a blatant disrespect considering the fact that they are in the ministers office and fudge just addressed them by their titles. it’s the fact that arcturus can do this and face no backlash that illustrates the position in society he holds.

Once he had accounted for everyone, he had summoned Lord Black engaged the wards of Black Manor making it so that no one could move beyond the perimeter of the dining room without his express permission. The silence broke at the realisation of what he had done, an eruption of indignance of complaints of how he had trapped them, Arcturus took stock of who had joined the three residents of Black Manor: Lucretia Prewett, Phineas Black, Callidora Longbottom, Cedrella Weasley, Cygnus Black, Marius Black, Narcissa and Draco Malfoy, Andromeda and Nymphodora Tonks. Merlin’s balls the state of his House, laden with Blood Traitors and the elderly and decrepit, it was disgusting.

this definitely wasn’t an original thought i had this is definitely a concept i’ve seen in fics over the years.

the duality of man guys. some of this is genuine literary analysis, some of this is just jokes, some of this is just me being like i read this concept once 10 years ago and now i’m incorporating it. some of this is just anecdotes from my life like i start waxing poetic about peafowl in chapter six.

so this is the type of thing you can expect from the directors cut it really is just my normal a/n’s but on crack and with colour coded line references. and i am writing this whether or not anyone wants to read it because i genuinely find literary analysis to be really fun but whether it sees the light of day is down to you guys as my readers letting me know if this is the type of thing you want.

and on the off chance someone who is not a reader of mine and has got this far and has decided that they want to read my fic from this:

obligatory fuck jkr for transphobia, racism, holocaust denial, anti semitism, misogyny and the rest of her sins the old bitch can do one.

[mrsrcbinscn]

Franny’s 30 Day Cover Challenge

Playlist

Franny’s 30 Day Cover Song Challenge: (categories are mostly from here, and here, with some from here, and a couple I made) in September 2020 one of her musician friends challenged her to do the thing and she was like “It seems like a fun way to show everyone what kind of music has influenced me as a musician, singer, songwriter, and just like, person. So I’m going to do it.”

In reality, she recorded most of them in 1-2 days to distract her from how sad she is because Wilbur hates her and he’s sad lmao

It helped a little.

(If you want me to drop the playlist she mentions in #24 let me know, I have it started I can finish it)

TW: mentions of Franny’s political beliefs so tw: politics, an allusion to suicide though the word isn’t directly used, mention of 9/11 and the subsequent invasions...nothing graphic with any of these triggers but worth a forewarning

Day 01 - A song that makes you happy

Honey Spiders by The Parlotones

“The Parlotones are this fantastic indie rock band out of South Africa. And I actually thought about doing their song, uh, Stars Fall Down for day sixteen, but I’m going with Honey Spiders for day 1. There were lots of Parlotones songs, I mean. Push Me to The Floor, We Call This Dancing, Should We Fight Back...but ah, Honey Spiders always puts me in a good mood.”

Day 02 - A song that helps you clear your head

Light of a Clear Blue Morning by Dolly Parton

“I grew up on Dolly, and it’s funny because for the longest time this song wasn’t really on my radar as much as it is now. But when I was twenty-two I was going through something really difficult, and my then-fiance now husband was abroad for work, so I was alone in our apartment and just. Really, profoundly sad and lonely. So I put on a Dolly Parton record and just laid on the bed and Light Of A Clear Blue Morning played and I had a good long cry and felt so much better after that. When I need to think about how to solve a difficult problem, or I feel overwhelmed, I just listen to that song.”

Day 03 - Song you love from a band/artist you hate

Should’ve Been A Cowboy by Toby Keith

“Honestly, he’s called me a nasty lady to my face and I’ve called him a facist enabling pig to his, so I have no qualms openly saying I hate Toby Keith. That being said, Should’ve Been A Cowboy is one of the best country songs of the 90s, undeniably. I loved that song when it came out when I was thirteen, and I still love it.”

Day 04 - A song about drugs or alcohol

Whiskey Lullaby by Brad Paisley and Alison Krauss

“This is probably cheating, because my lovely best friend Daniel and I cover this a lot at Dara & Danny shows. But today look who I have! My friend Max from Seoul Hanoi’d! Max the Korean Scot who can’t hide his accent to save his life, so let’s see how it sounds in a Scottish accent.”

Day 05 - A protest song

Talking Vietnam Blues by Phil Ochs /// and Here’s to The State of Mississippi by Phil Ochs

“This one was hard because I. Fucking. Love. Protest music. I could have done a whole 30 days of protest music - wow, let me know if I should do that and give my husband a heart attack with all the twitter threats I’ll invite. Huh. Right, so I was going to do Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven by John Prine. But I decided to do two Phil Ochs songs because I don’t think Phil Ochs is talked about enough. It’s a shame we lost him so young. Ochs’ sardonic humor and honesty in his writing has influenced me as a songwriter deeply. When I write political songs, I don’t hold back, and it’s because of Phil Ochs’ writing that I have that courage. I’ve been singing Love Me, I’m A Liberal since I was in college with constantly updating lyrics. It was so hard to even choose which songs of his to do because for his fairly short career his songbook is lengthy and full of gems. I’m Going to Say It Now, Draft Dodger Rag, Spanish Civil War Song, I Ain’t Marching Anymore...I couldn’t pick one so I’m cheating and recording two.”

Day 06 - A song you wish you wrote

When I Think About Cheatin’ by Gretchen Wilson

“I will forever be pissed off that I didn’t write this song. I’m absolute trash for my husband, so it’s never -- I’ve never had to be in a situation to ever consider -- but this song gets me every time. It feels like I could have written it. Because we do spend a lot of time apart travelling for our work. And the sentiment expressed in the song is a little too real.”

Day 07 - A song in a language you don’t speak

Khattar by Khine Htoo

“This will either be a charming attempt to sing in Burmese or I’m about to offend a lot of people. Which, being a politically outspoken woman on the internet, I’m used to anyway. So. 1, 2, 3, okay here goes.”

Day 08 - A song by an artist no longer living

Phop Samnang by Sinn Sisamouth (inspiration)

“Haha, you thought I’d see the name of this category and not do a Sinn Sisamouth song? You were wrong.”

Day 09 - A song you want to dance to at your wedding

Devoted To You by The Everly Brothers

“I’m already married, so this was actually our first dance song at our wedding. Day three of our wedding, like the more Westernized wedding ceremony day. We had a three day long traditional Cambodian wedding and I felt like a princess. An-y-way!”

Day 10 - A song that makes you cry

Borrowed Rooms and Old Wood Floor by Emily Scott Robinson

“Unfortunately, Emily Scott Robinson and I aren’t related. Sad, I know, because she’s so talented. Almost her entire album Traveling Mercies is...sad as hell. The record reminded me of early Dolly Parton, and my second solo album. You know, all those sad-ass songs. The Dress is honestly the song that makes me the saddest but I can’t even listen to it without crying so.”

Day 11 - A song that you love hearing live

Prove My Love  by Violent Femmes

“There is nobody I have seen in concert more than Dolly Parton, but Violent Femmes and George Strait come incredibly close. The Cranberries, the amount of times I saw them in the 90s and early 2000s...close fourth. Probably. The very first concert I dragged my husband to was a Violent Femmes concert, he was not prepared for how hard college me went.”

Day 12 - A song from before 1960 

There Ain’t No Sweet Man That’s Worth The Salt of My Tears by Libby Holman

“This song is from 1928. I came across it when I was in grad school and it’s, as the kids say, a bop.”

Day 13 - A song you think everybody should listen to

White Man’s World by Jason Isbell

“I think perspectives of people of color should of course take precedence in these conversations. But I find this song to be a good faith attempt of a white man coming to terms with the institutional racism and sexism in the world around him. And I think this song can be a useful tool to explain certain concepts of racial justice to ignorant but well-meaning folks. As a woman of color I think Jason Isbell did a great job not centering himself even though it was from his perspective. This song is great musically and necessary socially.”

Day 14 - A song from the 1970s

You’re No Good by Linda Ronstadt

“Linda Ronstadt is grossly underrated, that’s all I have to say here.”

 Day 15 - A song people wouldn’t expect you to like

Racists by Anti-flag

“I mean, I’ve talked about how much I like punk in the past, and I remember a video of Seoul Hanoi’d doing Spanish Bombs at a San Antonio show made the rounds, but I don’t think I’ve talked about how much I like Anti-flag. People don’t expect me to like punk for some reason. But I agree with...everything punk music is all about.”

Day 16 - A song that holds a lot of meaning to you

Blue by LeAnn Rimes

“It’s silly, but I won a county fair singing competition with this song in high school and it really fueled my passion for music, that win. It’s also the first song Cornelius heard me go full Georgia on, with the yodels and all, at the little bar in my hometown on his first trip meeting my parents. The song doesn’t cut to my very soul ot anythin’, but it’s special to me.”

Day 17 - A song attached to a memory

Supernova by Liz Phair

“I remember buying Liz Phair’s Whip-smart album when I was eleven. And in college, when I was getting ready for dates with Cornelius in my dorm room, I would dance around to a CD I burned and wrote on it with a sharpie, ‘Pre-date Movie Scene Music.’ God, what was even on there? I’m about to expose myself as the most basic 1999-2001 bitch. I remember Head Over Feet, I mean, Alanis Morisette? I was a young woman in 2000, obviously I loved her. Mm, Dreams by The Cranberries...oh, Kiss Me, Sixpence None The Richer...yeah, anyway, Supernova was on there.”

Day 18 - A song from the year you were born

Call Me by Blondie

“...I can’t believe Call Me is as old as I am.”

Day 19 - A song that reminds you of someone you miss

Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing (yes, of course she does a cover with banjo)

“This was my late best friend Molly’s favorite hymn. And I sang it at her funeral at her husband’s request. Molly and I grew up together in the small town of Payne Lake, Georgia and Molly was the most devout Christian...but she was also the first person I came out to as bisexual when I was a teenager, and she said that Jesus taught her that love was the greatest commandment and that meant I was automatically twice as good at it as her. Her faith guided her every action but she never talked down on her two best friends - Dan(iel Maitland) and I for not sharing it. Molly was doing the whole emulate Jesus thing beautifully. I miss her every day and it’s been seven years. If you ever think that people won’t miss you...you’re wrong. All right, let’s see if I can get through this without crying.”

Day 20 - A song by an artist you discovered this year

Hello, Anxiety by Phum Viphurit

“I just discovered this quirky Thai-Kiwi singer and not to be dramatic, but he’s my favorite thing in the world right now.”

Day 21 - A song with a city or country in the title

Oh! Phnom Penh (track 20)

“This song was written after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, and after people began to make their way to what was left of their homes, alone, or with what was left of their families. If you want to learn more about what that was like to actually live it, my cousin Reena Boran has a video interviewing her parents and paternal grandfather and uncle about it. Reena is a journalism student currently studying in London but she lives in Cambodia. Her mother is my aunt Malisruot, my mother’s youngest sister. The video is English subtitled on her channel, I’ll link it in the description box below.”

Day 22 - A song from the 1960s

To Sir, With Love by Lulu

“I didn’t actually discover this song until I heard it covered at a 10,000 Maniacs concert in the 90s. My friend Allison was standing next to me and I just started crying and she’s like ‘are you okay?’ and all I just blubbered out ‘My dad!’ For the uninitiated, my dad married my mom, who’d raised me alone until then, when I was six and he adopted me when I was eight. My dad didn’t have to adopt me, he didn’t have to call me his daughter, he could have just been like half of my friends’ stepdads and give me a place to live and nothing else. But my dad was my biggest supporter from day one. He convinced my mom to let me join the dance team and show choir instead of science club, he was the one that talked my mom down from probably killing me when they found out I was only studying music and not music and political science at NYU. I am who I am today because he is my dad. And this song just says everything I’ve always thought about him.”

Day 23 - A song from your childhood

Una Lacrima Sul Viso by Bobby Solo

“But Franny, aren’t you a Cambodian raised in the US? Yes, but you were fooled. My very white father is also an immigrant. He is from Switzerland and while he didn’t teach me to speak Italian and German growing up, he played German, Italian, and French records all the time. My parents often spoke to each other in French and I picked up some French but properly studied it starting in high school, and I didn’t study Italian until college -- and my German is still …. [points to a spot on the screen where she later inserted a card linking to a video on her cousin Köbi Framagucci’s YouTube channel titled ‘Can My American Cousin Speak German?’ where he tests her Standard and Swiss German speaking and comprehension]. But hell if I couldn’t sing every one of the songs from my father’s French, German, and Italian record before I knew what the words even meant.”

Day 24 - A song that gives you chill vibes

Glorify by Ivan & Alyosha

“Dan(iel Maitland) and I actually have an entire playlist on my Spotify accounts of songs to listen to to get us out of writers’ block. And one that I often will put on repeat and just absorb through my headphones with my eyes closed is a song called Glorify by Ivan & Alyosha. I think it touches on a lot of the themes I include in my songwriting. Christian mythology, the darker side of humanity, it often reminds me of what I love about songwriting. If you say please I might drop a link to that playlist.”

Day 25 - A song that’s your signature song

Long Gone Lonesome Blues by Hank Williams“Right, so I chose this instead of a Kitty Wells song or I Get A Kick Out of You (her being

featured on a 2005

recording propelled her career majorly) because if you’re familiar with me you might have seen a video that went around in like….2017? 2016? of Dan(iel Maitland) and I doin’ the song at our hometown bar in 2014. I posted it in response to some tweets because hoes mad when a WOC calls out racism and sexism in the Nashville music industry. ‘Bet she don’t even know Hank’, really? You think I wouldn’t know the history of one of the two music industries I work in? Please. Anyway, she knows Hank and nails the incredibly technical yodel -- the

most difficult

one in Hank’s songbook - in Long Gone Lonesome Blues. Mm...Lovesick Blues though, that also strikes fear into my heart. Anyway stay mad I guess?”

Day 26 - A song by your favorite band

Gun Shy by 10,000 Maniacs

“10,000 Maniacs was one of my favorite bands when I was in like 5th grade through 10th. I listened to them for a little while after Natalie Merchant left for a solo career, but the Natalie Merchant era was really what resonated with me the most. Gun Shy was a bit too advanced for my little 5th, 7th grade ears to really appreciate when I first discovered the album In My Tribe. Merchant’s voice -- because like, I don’t have a very conventional voice either, so her and Dolores O’Riordan really changed my entire perspective on what a woman’s voice can sound like in rock music. Um, yeah, so her voice more than the lyrics just wowed me. And as I got closer to graduating high school and especially in college I actually understood what What’s The Matter Here, Hey Jack Kerouac, and Gun Shy were talking about. Gun Shy...really became a significant song to me because...being born in 1980 I grew up in a relatively peaceful time. The Cold War was all but thawed by my tenth birthday. But I was getting ready to leave my then-boyfriend-now-husband’s apartment for class at NYU on the morning of 9/11. We stood in line for hours to donate blood. And then my government invaded two completely unrelated countries and jingoism and terrifying, fervent nationalism, and xenophobia just smacked me in the face. And friends of mine from high school were convicted to drop out of college and join the Army, and died, for an unjust, imperialist war, and suddenly Phil Ochs, John Prine, and Bob Dylan lyrics hit a lot different, and I understood what Gun Shy was really about.”

Day 27 - A song you hate by an artist you love

Mrs.Robinson by Simon & Garfunkel 

“Paul Simon is one of my favorite songwriters ever, um, and I actually used to like Mrs. Robinson….until I got married and everyone sang it at me. It’s kind of my fault, I did choose to take my husband’s last name. And I leaned into it by making my social media handles all Mrs. Robinson...but still. Only play the song around me if you want to die.”

Day 28 - A song that a younger you would have loved

Mean by Taylor Swift

“I’m so genuinely glad that I am older than Taylor Swift. Middle school Franny did not need Taylor Swift to enable me and fuel my ego. Some of her singles, while not really 35 and 40 year old Franny’s cup of tea, young me would have played until my mother hid the record or cassette from me. Although - fuck if Tim McGraw didn’t immediately give my happily married ass flashbacks to my first love and make me bawl like a baby? Right, so when Speak Now came out and I listened to it, Mean, while not a song that adult me has listened to maybe more like ten times, I immediately thought ‘wow, I needed this song when I was in middle and high school.’ I could literally picture 7th grade me with my little guitar and my little cowboy boots my dad bought for me singing this at the talent show making eye contact with the kids who bullied me as if it was some kind of own when it’s not. I could still, almost thirty years later, name them if I really wanted. So, for 7th grade me, Mean by Taylor Swift.”

Day  29- A song that reminds you of your partner/spouse

ផាត់ជាយបណ្តូលចិត្ / Phat Cheay Bon'dol Chet by Sinn Sisamuth (translation) (female singer covering it) (modern, studio recording of a male and female singer dueting it) (a cool violin cover) (another female singer) (cool guitar cover)

Feat. some members of Seoul Hanoi’d. Andy Chaiyaporn (violin), Max Cho (piano), Jodie Batbayar (cello), Aisulu Niyazova-Li (percussion) and Franny has her guitar

“The song, lyrically, only reminds me of my husband a little bit. But Phat Cheay Bondol Chet has several memories with my husband attached to it. The first time he heard me sing in Khmer was at my mother’s house in Atlanta when I had him visit the first time to meet my parents. My mom had a little dinner party at our house to show him off, like Asian moms do when they think their daughter snags a good one, and I was hand washing the dishes while my mom and the other Cambodian parents were listening to Sinn Sisamuth records. I’ve always loved the song I’ll be showing y’all today, like I’ve always just stopped what I was doing and -- so it came on and I just started singing along without really being aware of it. And then at a different diaspora get together that summer, that song came on and I just kinda. Pulled him aside to the side yard of that person’s house to look at the stars with him and translated the song. It’s one of the Khmer songs he instantly recognizes now, so it’s special.”

Franny did NOT say in the video that college her 100% had him sit in the grass with her outside that person’s house, where nobody could see, so she could makeout with him 

 Day 30- A song by one of your favorite songwriters

Reincarnation by Roger Miller

Feat. Seoul Hanoi’d, done more in the style of the Cake cover 

Also instead of singing the lyric “you’re a girl, I’m a boy” she goes “you’re a girl, so am I” because she doesn’t ever change pronouns, she just makes it gay because she is a bi-con

“Roger Miller, to me, is as important as Dolly Parton, Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, in the American songbook. He’s not as talked about which is a shame because his discography is iconic. Getting to be a part of King of The Road was one of the highlights of my career.”

[buckskinblues]

i feel like i’m a right-winger of the kpop fandom cuz most stans are against stans who do things that are consider toxic or inherently horrible, like having different opinions. i don’t post or tweet crazy stuffs like my faves hate cishets or useless phrases whereas most fans including non-kpop stans tweet the same stuff to make people angry and straight up being asshole. one of the main reason why I dislike the kpop fandom is because of the demonization of men

cont. [what i mean by that is when i see a tweet that talks down about male bands and other anti-male bullshit while they ironically like a male celebrity. i even feel bad for liking male bands (i also like female bands as well, i just wish kpop stans, especially gg stans will stop pitting every group against each other, like no need to be hostile to others), the fandom is becoming politicize for me and i hate myself so much]

I feel you, anon. I really do. Though I do consider myself more of a moderate, I definitely come across as more conservative to people who are really invested in the social justice/SJW/activism side of the left. I used to think I was leaning more left too, until I started to take a look around and realized I don’t actually agree with a lot of what they say. Regardless though I stay away from labeling myself as much as possible.

I don’t think it’s just Kpop though, a lot of fandoms have seemingly become politicized. It’s partly just the climate and also just a by product of the ways fandom on social media has changed things too. Attaching more of your real world, personal self into fan activities has become common, even expected--and with that comes inserting our political views and ideologies in there as well. I don’t really agree with this because it has a lot of nasty side effects (like a lot of people who are really young feeling like they have to take a stance without maturing and thinking things through for themselves...there are a lot of really young fans in Kpop and none of them should really be forced into picking up a mantle...just let them enjoy music and gush over their favorites like normal kids FFS). But suffice it to say I don’t think fandom is any place for that sort of stuff. It’s just a bunch of individuals who like [x] thing and that’s really all it should be seen as. Regardless people should be able to get along despite differing political ideologies--it’s what we do in meatspace and any halfway adjusted adult is able to do it, it’s essential to navigate life. You can’t spend 25/8 and every conversation you have with every person being defensive and on high alert for whether they have a different perspective. Every conversation turns into a battleground this way. It’s dumb AF.

I really hate the generalizations that both sides do, though, as far as Kpop goes. Each fandom for a different group is so busy throwing accusations of “hypocrite” at each other that they don’t even stop to consider whether their mudslinging is necessary or the fact that fandom isn’t an identity...at least, it shouldn’t be. Saying “[x fandom] is [y]” is usually always a bad take (and usually always just to make the other person feel better because they aren’t [x fandom] and don’t do [y] so they can pat themselves on the back). It gets even more ridiculous when so called “gg stans” and “bg stans” throw hissy fits? That’s not even a fandom, honestly. It’s so broad. Just like Kpop fandom isn’t really one cohesive group of people, just a way to group in all the people who like all the different groups together into one big pile. It’s like saying “anime fandom” or “comic fandom” or “video game fandom”--it’s a way to round up all the people who like a certain genre or type of thing but it’s rarely a good why to categorize people because it simply cannot pinpoint anything. It’s almost like Kpop fandom (or individual group fandoms for Kpop artists) don’t even know how to do fandom, honestly. But the [x] is a bad person and are terrible because they think [y] is a thing that’s been around for a while and isn’t particular to people in Kpop.

Don’t feel bad about yourself though. You aren’t doing anything wrong. You should be able to like what you like and express your enthusiasm for it. Fandoms are supposed to be fun. Don’t let other people make you feel guilty for believing what you believe. People who hate on bg groups simply because there’s boys in them are sexist--simple as that. People who constantly hate on men in general I see as miserable people. Hating half the world’s population isn’t going to get you anywhere and honestly? frothing at the mouth over something (let alone making it a part of your identity or personality) poisons you, so despite the fact it’s terrible to think about other people it’s also terrible for the person doing it too. Honestly I tend to ignore what other fans are up to most of the time. I do this for almost anything I’m into. It’s a headache otherwise.

Anyway, long story short: those other fans who hate men, get political, or get angry there are people with differing views can stay pressed. I still like some Kpop groups and I sleep perfectly fine at night despite being moderate/more conservative (in any case we all know that the reason they want everyone to be far-left is just that being a Super Progressive Woke Activist is in-style and there’s a lot of pressure to be either or...a lot of people probably wouldn’t even give two shits to the wind about it otherwise). Bitches stay bitchin but I’m doing fine.

[spideywars]

prompt- a highschool AU where people judge harry as a bad boy even though he isn't but he doesn't correct people, he has only 2 bffs (liam and zayn) and cue niall and louis and their pranks they pull and running in the hallway laughing really hard, until one day while running, niall bumps into harry and bang their heads together and please don't make them shy or a stuttering mess. THANK YOU X

Don’t know if I like this, and it might be longer than I want but I wanted to give you guys something today. 

~~~

Harry didn’t have piercings, they looked painful just staring at them, like when Zayn first got his nose pierced he had cringed and almost squealed when Zayn gave it a careless tug saying it didn’t hurt. But he did have a collection of tattoos, all pretty patterns along his arms, chest, and even some he managed to get on his legs.

That was all though, the tattoos. But apparently everyone thought he was a bad boy. Liam and Zayn both had more tattoos than he did, both going on their skateboards and smoking in front of the school before class. It wasn’t fair really, that girls swooned over them but looked at Harry as if he’d bite their heads off.

“It’s probably your resting bitch face.” Liam had suggested when Harry had asked them if they thought the rumours were true that he was the school ‘bad boy’ and ’rule breaker.’

“Resting bitch what?” He had asked, almost choking on the soda he was drinking as they sat in the skate park. Zayn was puffing out his smoke while slowly rolling along the sidewalks with his board, looking uninterested with their conversation.

“You just look angry all the time, you walk around with no expression most of the time, and you don’t usually talk to anyone else but me and Zi.” Liam sounded like he was trying to be cautious talking with Harry, as if he was walking around egg shells. This wasn’t that sensitive of a topic, and Harry couldn’t help but scoff.

“Zayn doesn’t talk to anyone else but us too! This lad has a girlfriend and still gets girls begging on their knees for him to take them out.” Harry pointed an accusing finger at Zayn, who stopped his lazy rolling on his skateboard to give him a raised brow.

“It’s probably cause I am in the art program, girls dig artsy guys mate.” Zayn was back to pushing at his board, slowly moving past them with the cigarette back in his mouth. Harry gave him a glare, making Zayn abruptly stop to stare at him in annoyance.

“Sorry, and guys…you like girls and guys, forgot.” Harry never wants to be annoying or pushy, but he’s told Liam and Zayn a thousand times since their second year of high school that he was bisexual, they still weren’t so sure about it, tip-toeing around him and worrying they’d insult him every time they talked.

They’re getting better though, asking him who he likes and dislikes, listening carefully to his rants on the homophobes in the school. Zayn was usually the forgetful one, and it wasn’t a horrible thing, they have known each other since grade five and it’s only been recent that Harry has openly talked about his sexuality. 

“Doesn’t matter who I like, probably won’t get a boyfriend or girlfriend with the way everyone hates me.” He shoved his head into his hands, staring down at his dirty converse with a pout on his lips.

He felt a slap on his shoulder, Liam’s hand giving him an encouraging squeeze before letting go. “You’ll find someone, it’s our last year of high school so after that you won’t have to see anyone again.”

-

There is so many more students in this god damn school that are worse than he is. Harry is anti-social and apparently has something called the ‘resting bitch face’ and all of a sudden that means he’s the baddest boy in the building,

There’s guys like Louis Tomlinson and Niall Horan who tear up the school with graffiti at night, then go around shoving toilet paper in the toilets so they overflow, pulling kids pants down as they walk by, stealing the boys gym classes clothes so when they come back to the change rooms they have nothing. They are ruthless with their pranks, Louis being the mastermind of it all and that’s pretty obvious by the way he’d have that snake-like smile come across his face whenever the people who caught them would tell them off.

But they were just seen as silly hooligans who made the school years a little more eventful and fun. It boiled Harry’s blood.

“Lou, fuck Lou slow down!” It was Niall’s voice, speak of the devil. Harry could hear them from where he was standing at his locker, grabbing for his binders and ready to leave since he had a spare for his last period. He felt something whiz past him, the squeak of sneakers hitting the polished flooring was loud and fast, quickly fading till whoever it was turned the corner.

Harry had just closed the locker door, ready to get the hell out before he’d have to witness one of their unfunny pranks again when he felt something collide with him so hard his body spun, back hitting the lockers harshly with his binder flying across the hallway.

That wasn’t as bad as whoever hit him, the person was like a blur in front of Harry as they hit the ground hard, slapping against the floor and a cracking sound echoing down the empty halls.

“Oh fuck, sorry!” It was Niall, now that Harry refocused after the shock of it all. The boy was still sprawled out on the floor but slowly was picking himself up, looking out of breath.

“Watch where you’re going ya?” Harry growled out, but forced his anger deep back down into him when he saw Niall staring down at his broken glasses, the lens was popped out and the arms of them were snapped off and laying a few feet away.

“Shit, can you see without those?” Harry knew Niall needed glasses, the smaller brunet would wear them around more frequently this year, and it soon became a daily thing. Not that Harry paid that much attention to Niall he just…was a good observer.

“Uh…yeah I’ll uh, I’ll be fine.” Once Niall got a good look at Harry, he all of a sudden looked nervous and scared. It made Harry’s heart sink, knowing that he was probably worried he’d punch him out. With rumours going around that Harry was the bad boy of the school, stories came with them on how he was in a gang, beat people up for money, had been to jail for six months…all stupid shit that ruined his reputation more and more.

“Look are you sure you’re okay, you hit the ground pretty hard.” When Niall had straightened himself out, now holding the shrapnel of his glasses, Harry felt like he needed to prove he wasn’t a bad person to at least one guy at this school. Niall would probably make up some story that he pushed him down, people around here would eat that right up.

“I’m sure, thank you though Harry.” Niall gave him a genuine smile, and it made Harry’s stomach do backflips.

-

Ever since that day, Niall’s face became more familiar to Harry. He didn’t know why, but they’d see each other in the hallway and give each other matching smiles, almost like the encounter they had was a secret between them.

Harry used to hate him, thought Niall was just as obnoxious as Louis was, but look at him now, falling in love.

It was probably because of how Niall acted around Harry, he wasn’t scared as soon as he asked if he was okay, almost like a switch turning on in his head and a little voice telling him 'hey, this Harry guy isn’t as bad as they say he is.’

But was Niall even gay? Did he even want to be friends with him or just a person he smiled at from time to time in the hallways as they passed each other? It was the root to Harry’s thoughts these past couple weeks, and it was starting to show by the way he’d notice Liam and Zayn exchanging glances whenever he’d stare off into space or look at Niall for too long during lunch with a frown across his face.

Today was apparently going to answer all Harry’s questions, because as he sat alone waiting for Liam and Zayn to show up, Niall came walking up the bleachers steps with that same sparkling smile across his face.

He didn’t say anything, and neither did Harry, it was a weird silence as they just stared at each other. Harry had to break the eye contact a few seconds later, occupying himself by squinting down towards the football field as the schools team did their warmups.

“I think I’ve come to a conclusion,” Niall finally spoke, pausing slightly to make sure Harry was paying attention. “It’s that you aren’t the bad boy people say you are.”

He hit the nail right on the head, just like that. Harry couldn’t help but chuckle, surprised at Niall’s answer and now an amused smile appeared across his face.

“What makes you think that?” He played it cool, leaning back against the bleachers, not ready to give Niall the satisfaction that he was more than right.

“Cause when I shoved into you, you definitely didn’t show off your bad behaviour that people say you had.” Niall shrugged as if it was nothing, now shuffling a little closer to Harry. “Everyone has told me some crazy stories about you, but I’d rather have the real Harry tell me about himself then some rumours.”

It felt like Harry’s heart had stopped and his mind had just shut down for a second because he’s never felt this much love for a human being before. This boy barely knew him and after one encounter he was now standing here striving to become his friend.

“Well I wasn’t planning on doing anything right now so if you wanna chill for a bit…” Harry trailed off, his confidence not really at it’s full level yet. But Niall looked to be happy with his offer, eagerly plopping himself down onto the seat beside him and shuffling so they were hip to hip.

And after that, they had talked for a good hour, the sound of the football team packing up their stuff and getting ready to go home was the only thing that snapped them out of their conversation. Harry could see Louis on the field rushing off after he pulled his jersey over his head and then disappearing into the change rooms.

“Lou probably wants me to come down and meet him by the car, but the team is having a game tomorrow and you should come. I’d love to have some company.” Niall stood and Harry did too, them both grabbing at their bags and heading down the bleacher steps. It was just them now, the field empty except for a lone ball that someone forgot to pick up.

Harry was ready to say his last goodbyes and plan his day tomorrow even before it would start when he was suddenly tugged into a smothering kiss, making his gasp get muffled by their clashing lips

Niall made them part a second later, but kept himself close and lips near Harry’s ear as he whispered into it. “Liam and Zayn kinda ratted you out and said you liked me so, I hope you didn’t mind that.”

He walked away right after saying that, giving Harry a wink over his shoulder before he turned into the change rooms. That was probably why Liam and Zayn didn’t show up to meet with him, and he felt absolutely no anger towards his friends as he made his way to his car.

He’d probably thank them, actually.

[brajeshupadhyay]

Bois Locker Room case underscores vital need for radical, political reimagining of an education that liberates us

In 1984, Delhi’s St. Stephen’s college was in the news for a time-honoured tradition: chick charts. Tradition is such a flexible word — making a practice sound unchangeable. In fact the college started admitting women students only in 1975 (it had been co-ed in the past, from 1928-1949). The nine years that women had been attending the college, was enough to term tradition, the frequent posting on the official college notice board, of Top 10 charts, made by male students, rating women on their breasts, butts, legs, mouths — and sometimes maybe, smiles. Smiles were what most women apparently used to mask the discomfort of the back-handed humiliation. When women are a minority, granted entrance to the worlds of men, going along with such behaviour, or being called a bad sport are often the perceived choices.

That year, the college was closed as Delhi witnessed harrowing anti-Sikh violence. Shortly after it re-opened, a “Sardines Chick Chart” came up on the notice board, sardines being slang for sardarnis. The most striking quality of quotidian violence is its wild-eyed avidity. The instinct to further leer at the women of a community that has recently been brutalised puts the violence in sex like masala films can but dream of.

The incident however, broke the uneasy acceptance of the ‘tradition’, and grew over time to become a protest that made it to the newspapers. Consequently, as the filmmaker Saba Dewan has recounted on Kafila, women students had men hissing ‘fuck off’ at them as they walked the corridors. The Girls’ Common Room was vandalised and students’ bras and panties were strewn everywhere, including furled from the college turret, just like victory flags of war. A Hen Chart was put up, making the clichéd connection between feminists and frumps, naming the most vocal members of the protest. The administration never held any men accountable, but did call in the women’s parents to complain about them.

At around the same time, the filmmaker Bela Negi was studying in Sherwood College, a posh boarding school in Nainital, which too had only recently begun to admit women. “I was the head-girl. The head boy was the principal’s son and he wasn’t much into rules. I was a bit of a goody two-shoes so I would take my job somewhat seriously,” Negi said to me. On one occasion, she crossed the head boy over something. A few days later, “when I went out in a short skirt”, a group of about 25 boys pounced on her and gave her bumps on a pile of horse dung. “I knew it was no use complaining to the administration, so I got up and walked away, refusing to give them the pleasure of knowing they’d humiliated me.”

The similarity to the Bois Locker Room incident — an Instagram group where schoolboys aged 14 to 18, rated schoolgirls’ body parts, shared their Instagram posts without consent, morphing their heads onto naked bodies — does not require over-articulation here. There’s no real difference. Bonding in private rooms, competing to trash talk women, dismembering women metaphorically, into body parts. Threatening to assault actually or metaphorically through public shaming, when called out. Traditions are what keep a society going, no?

One of the unexpected discoveries I made while writing this essay was that the niece of a close friend was one of the minors discussed in the Bois Locker Room. I had heard over the last year that she and her mother had had several conflicts over her posting very sexualised images on Instagram. “Why do you think she does it?” I’d asked my friend then. “It’s the only way for girls to be popular in their schools”. It’s a tricky path, when popularity is equal to being an aspirational object, often leading to violent responses that you’re a bitch if you aren’t attainable, and a whore if you are. Eventually you find yourself beheaded via app and discover the dehumanisations that gives these currencies of attractiveness their power — for all genders.

St. Stephen’s and Sherwood College are among the country’s elite educational institutions, grooming the rich and powerful for generations, a tradition being carried forward by the growing number of private schools today. Many students who were part of the incidents described above, as participants, or as uneasy bystanders, doubtless occupy positions of influence today — in politics, in civil services, in media, in academia, in corporate life. Many would be considered liberal leading lights. None of them, until today, have managed to create structures that naturally incorporate the point of view of anyone except elite heterosexual men — that we know of. Many of them might run the kind of organisations that yielded a bunch of #MeToo stories. Maybe on jolly social occasions, they say to women who object to their wife jokes, ‘yaar stop being such a feminist. You’re too serious’. Well, they’re just good students. They were groomed to decide what is serious and what is not on other people’s behalf. Someone married them, not expecting, or simply going along with, becoming a wife joke. Perhaps their kids go to the ‘good South Delhi schools’ everyone keeps mentioning when they express shock at the Bois Locker Room case.

It’s such a sleight of hand, ‘good’ schools, ‘good’ families, that conflates virtue with privilege. “How can an educated person do this?” people exclaim. It is precisely an educated person who does these things. Elite education is designed as it always was, barring a few cool accessories, to train elite men to dominate other people and express that domination in a variety of ways.

Education is structured to underline the importance of material success and competition at all cost, including the cost of understanding your own pleasures, relationships and emotions, which are considered distractions to be quelled, a source of weakness. Parents focus mostly on whether you are studying, when they think of your future, not about nourishing your inner life. They might notice an issue with your inner life only if you don’t do well at school. Everyone else is your competition. Everything you do requires fitting in but still, having an edge over others. The limit of learning is the exam — not the idea that you will keep learning from life. Exams are war and everyone must be an exam warrior. When we are trained to always go to war, what can we possibly know about how to go to peace?

As you go up the ladder, the self-congratulatory declarations — “it’s just business”, “I’m just being practical” — all mean that empathy and emotion have been successfully numbed, enough, that you can defend the scrapping of labour laws and can go to the government and say, “Do not send migrant labourers home. We may need them for our (just) business.”

The making of chick charts, the rating of girls, the slurs against queer and Dalit colleagues — these are all social reminders that elite, straight men are the ones entitled to define these structures, who get to grant approval and make decisions, in schools and colleges, and later in offices, governments, the internet. Your continued presence is contingent on fitting into this system and not objecting to its ‘just fun’ traditions. They are the foam in a double shot cappuccino of privilege.

Twenty five years after the incident in school, Bela Negi ran into one of her classmates at a school reunion. “He said to me ,‘remember how we gave you bumps, ha ha’. I said, ‘I can’t believe that as a grown up you’re laughing and bragging about it instead of feeling remorse or embarrassment’.” Other male classmates looked uneasy when she brought it up. Women at the party told her ‘forget it, now it’s in the past’.

But it’s not in the past, is it? It is firmly with us in the present — the sexual language used to attack women in a political disagreement online. The baying for sexual violation of Muslim and ‘sickular’ women by right wing men. The number of liberal men named in #MeToo accounts. The calling Safoora Zargar, the arrested member of the Jamia Coordination Committee, prostitute and saying ‘give her a condom’ because she is pregnant — and Muslim and politically active. It is so much with us, that the day the hashtag #boislockerroom started trending I didn’t pay attention because I thought, “it must be some new web series”.

A lot goes into maintaining the illusion that elite men are not sexually violent on a casual and intensified basis all the time. Part of this is the reigning discourse around sexual violence, which privileges the safety of women — elite women — over their freedom. The public space is painted as a dangerous one for women, where they are under threat of being attacked by ‘other’ men — read, lower caste or class, men. If elite men bother to talk about women, it is only to hold them up as emblems of purity or achievement, or to school other men for not knowing how to respect women. (In other words they don’t seem to know how to talk to women, but that’s another discussion).

Being a bro who stands up for feminism is an elite pastime across the political spectrum — sometimes they are scolding creeps in a music video, sometimes they are killing your boyfriend on Valentine’s Day. This discussion about ‘others’ is like a curtain. Behind it is the private behaviour of men — and that is never to be discussed. A man who does it is weak. A woman who brings matters private into public light, risks marginalisation and vilification. We have seen that, through domestic violence scandals and sexual harassment cases.

That is why the first responses to many such incidents is to blame women — #girlslockerroom — and then to clamp down on the freedom of women or blame them for acting as if they lived in a world where men’s violence against them is not a given. Boys will be boys, goes the platitude. As if this is an immutable condition and we must all tiptoe around them, which we are constantly, daily being trained to do, lest we provoke their boys-will-be-boys-ism.

The other response is to demand strong punitive action against perpetrators — we don’t mind if boys are boys as long as their privilege does not expose itself through an act of criminal violence. Then, we must teach them a lesson. One sometimes wants to say, but this is the lesson you have been teaching them: of supremacy. All other lessons are sitting in the pocket of that lesson.

***

Interviewed by media, one school principal expressed bewilderment that their students could be involved in the Bois Locker Room because “the school has regularly provided inputs on gender”.

At every school and college where I, or my colleagues at Agents of Ishq have done a talk or workshop, in the last two years, young women have come up to discuss, exactly the same experience of the Bois Locker Room case. They don’t know how to counter the distasteful misogyny that the cool, edgy filmmakers and forthcoming media sensations of the future subject them to. “Why don’t you say something?” I ask. “Because I don’t feel like being rude to a friend.” “Because they call me a prude or they might think I’m un-cool.” “Why do you care what they think?” I asked a young woman. She kept quiet. She knows in theory, that she need not care, but the world has not reshaped itself enough to make this automatic and there is very little conversation to help her figure out the way to do this positively, not negatively as a victim or an aggressor.

If you are a woman working in a cool corporate job, media, art films and so on, you will recognise this experience. In elite worlds where cool is a very necessary currency, you try to hold on to it tenuously, timorously. To not accept the banal misogyny and poor humour of men, marks you as un-cool. Despite being a grown woman, you must carry out an adolescent exhibitionism while talking about sex, to show you are blasé, so you may be accepted as one of the guys — and it’s simply a different version of young schoolgirls posing in particular ways, to gain importance in this world. Even my gay friends have called me a prude (and consider, I run a platform about sex) when I tell them not to bore me with misogynistic TikTok clips. If you don’t talk about sex the way men have been trained to talk about it, then you are a prude and simply not cool enough for school.

The workshops might not be useless. But they are not the real answer to finding our way out of this dystopia. Education, like patriarchy, is a structure. Just dropping new content into it doesn’t change what it does. In the structure of competitive education, those gender and sexuality workshops too can become one more competitive module you learn to ace — because your basic purpose has not altered. The same boys who are in Bois Locker Room, might easily be acing the Model UN and debating circuits, the social media conversations, saying all the right things about gender bias, toxic masculinity and inter-sectionality.

Liberal parents often show off their children’s by-rote sensitive (but not always good) writings — the passionate awareness of being a victim of gender discrimination, the performative pain of class inequity. It is not so different from saying ‘uncle ko poem sunao’.

The same by-rote politics will manifest later in ‘women-centric’ films made by men — liberal men castigating others for not knowing how to treat women. The right gestures will be made — like putting your mother’s first name as the middle name for the entire crew, in a sudden burst of born-again feminist consciousness. The catechism or rights-based discourse will be read out. And the performative mea culpas and ritualistic discussion of toxic masculinity will follow.

In a world where life is an exam — where you have to know the poem, not become it — everyone learns the right things to say, in order to win approval. And in the same way, everyone also knows what to hide.

Education and all the resources we put into it are about succeeding in public life — to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet, as TS Eliot wrote. We do not value the private sphere enough to put thought into an education for that, mostly hidden, part of life. We can be depressed but not surprised at the inability of young men to stand up for more humane relationships with women, sexuality, desire, because that has never been part of the syllabus anywhere. They have no language for it. Young women don’t have the means to recognise it — they still imagine that a man with the right terminology will also be decent. They have only been taught to think of men in terms of public attributes, not private ones. It would be hard to find the profile of a successful man in the Indian media, which mentions what kind of friend or partner he is, or asks what he feels about the world of love and emotion.

Sex is even more separated from the discussion. It is never discussed as part of life. It is a place of secrecy, shame, embarrassment and judgment, only made public through lewd jokes or lectures about violence. The only sources of sexual knowledge — in an experiential and not clinical sense — is mainstream pornography, which fragments sex into discrete acts and bodies into body parts — and online frat house culture. Mixed with a cultural universe and an educational system that emphasises hierarchy, disconnection and competitiveness, this gives us a recipe for self-hate. It leaves young people of all genders with a complete lack of resources to manage the world of desire that surges within them. The only language young people have is a second-hand one, and how can you find your own self, when you are always speaking in someone’s given language?

At the very least, Bois Locker Room may remind us that we need sex-education, which is age-appropriate — a curriculum that grows in scope along with the child — and that it should be comprehensive: looking at how health, desire, orientation, emotion, politics and culture intersect to create a sexual world.

But the task before is a more radical and political one. If education enslaves us, compelling us to be part of herds, gangs, clubs and cliques, then what does an education that liberates us look like? If education fragments us, keeping our minds, bodies and hearts separated like Science, Arts and Commerce, what is the education that integrates all these different aspects of being a person look like?

The bandying of phrases like toxic masculinity and that most Brahmanical of words, ‘problematic’, is not the road to discovering this education and this existence. The idea that boys have to be ‘fixed’ is itself a violence that does not acknowledge that every one of us lives in the patriarchy, is shaped by it and is also wounded by it. Such an attacking language only serves to harden the divisions and make the conversation inimical.

Three years ago I went to a town in Uttar Pradesh to do a workshop in a programme on masculinity. It was an all-men’s group and it was exhausting. They trotted out the politically correct self-analysis about masculinity. But probed to speak beyond it, about their emotions and relationships, about areas of doubt and experience, they congealed together into a sticky mass of resistance. They made jokes, sometimes demeaning each other and challenged the trainers by trivialising each question.

But when we recorded their narratives individually, very different behaviours emerged. There was a small percentage of absolutely intractable men I have come to categorise as Sententious Lecturers and Eternally Wounded. One kind speaks in lofty proclamations that mean very little. The other refuses to let their wound of rejection or hurt heal, and turns it into a justification for seeing numbness as strength and love and emotion as weakness. “Now I only use girls,” one said. “If I like a girl, I don’t sleep with her, because I won’t be able to give her the love she expects.” The world of emotion is expressed as an impossibility. But the majority of other men spanned the range. Some were tentative about their relationships, some confessing to hurt and inadequacy, even depression. Some laughed at their own sentimentality or discussed wanting more confidence, more love, less pressure.

Detached from the herd, and spoken to as individuals, about their emotions, they were quite different from each other and did not adhere to a fixed identity of gender and its associated behaviours. They did not have the confidence in themselves as individuals, to be themselves in front of a larger group of men.

In that they were reminiscent of the young women, who approached me in distress about the demeaning way their male friends discussed women, their conflict between seeing distasteful aspects of a friend you liked otherwise. These young women also did not have enough language to think through these contradictions.

Put very simply, we don’t give young people the means to see themselves as complex individuals — nor each other. Political language is important to identify structural issues, but in its current form where it essentially only knows how to describe a problem, it is insufficient to enable journeys of transformation and spark imaginations of change.

Education helps you to fit in with the herd to serve the larger power structures in a society. If you are very elite, you can learn the double speak of benefitting from this system, while also critiquing the system for your US college application essay.

An education which grants you immunity from the herd has to give you belief in your inner life. It has to grant importance to emotions, to desires, to pleasure, to poetry — to the ill-defined idea of personal life, an inner life — alongside the public.

I know it sounds utopian, but I don’t believe it is impossible. What it does ask from us, is to abandon the old system of report cards, to discard the traditional indicators of success and impact.

At Agents of Ishq, once we liberated ourselves from the logic of just garnering numbers for content or even working with a fixed curriculum, we began a journey that has constantly shown us new aspects of what young people need to strengthen their personal lives — they need information, they need conversation, they need a new language which fluidly incorporates love, sex, desire, attraction, lust, queerness, consent, gender identity, affection, friendship, rejection, relationality — not a language which puts all these in silos. Think of it as literacy in intimacy. Knowledge of how to relate with others on their own terms.

Perhaps all of education needs to be reimagined the way sexuality education has been reimagined. Perhaps our inner lives and our inter-dependence have to lead the way more, in redefining education. As we confront disconnection in myriad ways with pandemic isolation, we can see that we need a politics, a philosophy, a practice of relationality with others. Where the understanding that sexualness is mutually exchanged, not simply conquered and captured, is interwined with understanding that our emotional and personal worlds can be places of sustenance not weakness, to be attacked or guarded. And that is also intertwined with being able to see that resources are something to be shared for mutual survival, not hoarded, and grudgingly given or strategically taken away.

The Bois Locker Room and the crisis of our society in its current breakdown have a lot to say about each other. Both of them tell us that we have reached the limits of the system we live in. If the way out is together, then we need an education on what it means to do that.

Paromita Vohra is a filmmaker and writer whose work focuses on gender, feminism, urban life, love, desire and popular culture and spans many forms including documentary, fiction, print, video and sound installation. She is founder and creative director at Agents of Ishq.

via Blogger https://ift.tt/2YPXLWa

[hanzi83]

It’s been a while

I have not written a blog since the Trump presidency has begun, but if you follow me on social media, you know I have been active on there, periscope, and even Facebook live, spewing my conspiracy theories, ranting irrationally about my depression, while people sit idly by and pretend they actually care about other people’s mental illness, when these industry types who preach about people getting help etc sit back and watch others break down for their own amusement. If these people actually gave a fuck about mental illness, maybe start with the vultures who run your industry who help perpetuate this type of behavior and have rewarded it and in the process dumbed down an entire generation.

I don’t want to get into it in detail because I am unsure if this blog will even post. I tried to write one on New Years because again I am left alone while local people I know have been rewarded from my misery and then pretend they actually give a fuck about me, when they love taking from me and then pretending they care. Then they show up on my social media platforms under false names and start name dropping a bunch of personal things they know about me and I am stuck here useless which works to their advantage, because no one believes anything I say and even if they do, they know they can’t say a word so they play dumb about it.

I think these people want me to do something to myself so they have an excuse to take action against me. I am the victim of gang stalking because I chose to be open about how I don’t think the world is run the way it is, and now because of that, people in my life and other paid trolls have made it a mission to be transparent as fuck with what is going on and they will use my own mental illness against me.  They want to talk about how they care about me, but these cowards allow paid trolls to harass me constantly and try to bait me out and put out traps for me to fall into.

No one in the media will ever investigate this, and I am not the only one who is being gang stalked. I am not the only one who is being monitored constantly and seen as red flags. I don’t know what these people have in store for me. Even when I am writing on my lap top, in what is supposed to be my personal journal,  I know it is monitored heavily and they even move my cursor around while I am typing to make their presence known and wanting me to go crazy. The genius part about this is, no one will help, because everyone in this has been compromised.

These same people pretend they are nice family people, yet their marriages are only based off convenience because their expendable ass is only needed to have kids and then neglect them so they can watch me on my social media platforms, and if they are not doing that they are probably bombarding every hip hop site to promote their white supremacist talking points in the comment sections. These people to me are not randomly typing stuff on the internet, they are paid to do so.

They have limited me to my very core in hopes that I lose my mind and reach out for their help because they know I am supposed to be valuable to the game, yet they can’t feed me my ego yet so they want me to ask for their help so I owe them something, when they all owe me for making their lives better and my connection to the Stern Show has opened backdoor deals for all of these people to prosper. Whether its meeting celebrities, getting to contribute to movies/television,  having elaborate gatherings,  and then inviting me to the limited ones, because you can’t have me at your gathering unless you get some profit out of it. There is no other reason why these people give a fuck about me. When it comes to their agendas, they will take care of it first. No one in the media will ever investigate it because even the “good” alternate media is also controlled.  Stern can take the appropriate measures to fuck with me. By the way, these are just theories, I don’t have any proof and even if I did, it would not be allowed to be investigated because these people are all controlled and for some reason they have chosen me to fuck with and will continue to fuck with.

It is very scary what is going on. And it seems with Trump in office, even though I feel he doesn’t have the real power, the people who are controlling these situations have an excuse to fuck with people even more. I don’t know if this is on purpose,  so it becomes defeated, but someone doesn’t like that I pointed out Stern has connection to Trump, and even though he let it leak that he donated 1000 bucks to Hilary, it was meant, in my opinion, to be a distraction from the fact he donated to Trump, even as far as being shocked that he won and got upset at his staff for voting for him, and I wonder who is controlled staff takes orders from to vote for someone of Trump’s stature.

Now I am being watched and monitored constantly. I did this to myself, hoping that I could die someday but clearly these people don’t want me to leave, because it is a lot more fun to torture me mentally and emasculate for their own amusement because they hate that they are in fake marriages and have to have kids that they don’t want and then completely neglect them because they are in the closet. That’s fine, but when these cowardly types do that it’s for business purposes so they can spew racist propaganda. That’s why when someone of color says something slightly homophobic, they will generalize and say it is  a part of their community and culture, while a bunch of right wing type who are in the closet spew racist rhetoric and get away with it because people behind the scenes know they are gay, and yet you can’t make that accusation that there is a lot of racism in that community, because it would be wrong to generalize people like that, but these industry cowards get away with it and smile gleefully while  perpetuating and promoting we need more anti Muslim movies that exist

Nothing will ever stop. These people are committed to fully stalking anything I do online and organize paid harassment and these same industry cowards, who don’t make their money entertaining, it’s trolling online for side money, will ridicule people who need safe spaces, while they are the ones who need safe spaces because they would rather harass people online and not admit who they are because they have an image to stay true to. It’s fucking garbage. I fucking hate all these people who have been forced to do this and how they all take pleasure from it.

I despise that these do gooders in the industry will promote the suicide hotline after the fact that someone kills themselves, and pat themselves on the backs for it, when they could just speak out against the people who help cause this and when you point this out, they will act like someone such as myself has not taken accountability for it, while they refuse to take accountability for what they contribute to and how many lies they put out in this world and then play “I am just an entertainer” card and advocating free speech, all while ridiculing people mentally into silence.

I wish I could stay away but I never expected to be alive this long and the fact that I am, I am just filling up time. I don’t care who is getting married or who is having kids. I don’t want to be here for any of it because I don’t fit this mold that is expected of me in the world and instead of granting me my wish of letting me leave this world, they will make me stay and have to cry myself to sleep thinking about how much my own family and friends have done without me. And then I am the asshole because I want to express myself and then when I do, I will pay the price for it because that is what these people do to me. No one actually gives a fuck about me nor have they ever. People need me they said, and then leave it at those vague answers, while I think Stern and his posse organizing harassment online. Even with people seemingly believing me, it won’t do anything. No one wants to speak out about this and they will sit back and watch until something happens to me and then for their fucking fake internet points and likes, they will start showing some support or compassion. It is disgusting how selfish these pieces of shit are.

By the way they probably won’t let this one post. I remember I wrote 5-6 pages worth on New year where I wanted to bitch about people locally having such secrecy and transparency at the time and it was not allowed to post, but for some reason I was allowed to post one sentence about how my post won’t show up. I posted it 30 times and the original one did not post. So they are fucking with my speech and my movements.

People can only interact with me on fake accounts so they can tell me certain truths, name dropping food I have consumed that day to make it seem like they know, but then pretend they are nobody trolls who are just fans of mine. These people are not fans of mine. If they are, they are the worst fucking fans of existence. They will hype me up, while at the same time putting me down for even thinking I am worth more than what they present in the system. They all are now showing off their perks on their various radio shows and still have not even thanked me for contributing to it and helping it out, while they stole my ideas and my likeness.

As I type this right now, they will keep watching me and monitoring it. They will eventually have hold of my personal journal and leak it out and then blame me for writing personal stuff in there because that is what they do. They will find a way to fuck with me more. The sad part is these are people who I known since I was a little kid, and these people are also after me like no other. They won’t admit it, none of them will. They even say shit like “We can’t have you doing that, and ruin our lives” but they are okay with ruining my life and leaving me vulnerable for their own gain. It is sickening. I don’t want to be here and I wish at some point they can take me out of here and it feels like more and more they are planning my demise.

I have decided to see a therapist and even then that will be provided me by the same system that is fucking with me. They want someone to monitor what I will say so they can report it back and if I even tell them this, they will obviously deny it because officially these people can’t admit they are reporting this shit to people, but when gangstalking is involved, and you are on a monitored list, you can oversee anything and have a justified excuse to do it because to most common folk I am a danger to society, even though I am not a violent person, and I don’t have access to any weapons. I hope you people are happy with what you have accomplished in tearing another human being down  and then pretending you care about protecting people etc, all this while you make numerous people around the globe feel like they are the most mentally ill people in this world.  I would expect this blog to guilt some people, but most of them are soulless individuals and even if it affects them they will find ways to project it on to other people and make them suffer because their feelings are the ones who are fragile and can’t take any criticism because they are in the in crowd and then they show up as regular people in front of my face and act like they want to partner up for a podcast. I don’t have any interest in partnering up with any cowardly person who has harassed me online and posted lies about me online. They put out stuff like “Hanzi threatened Howard” knowing fully that I didn’t threaten anyone, but these buzzwords create a red flag and have people looking into me. That is what these other radio show hosts do as well, because most of these entertainers are working for people in these positions. This is all my opinion. Again I have no facts, and even if I did, none of you will care to believe me because none of you want to break the  system, you want it to keep flourishing with white supremacist talking points that is so embedded into the system, that’s why they fight hard for white supremacists freedom of speech, while minorities don’t even have free movement.

[brajeshupadhyay]

In 1984, Delhi’s St. Stephen’s college was in the news for a time-honoured tradition: chick charts. Tradition is such a flexible word — making a practice sound unchangeable. In fact the college started admitting women students only in 1975 (it had been co-ed in the past, from 1928-1949). The nine years that women had been attending the college, was enough to term tradition, the frequent posting on the official college notice board, of Top 10 charts, made by male students, rating women on their breasts, butts, legs, mouths — and sometimes maybe, smiles. Smiles were what most women apparently used to mask the discomfort of the back-handed humiliation. When women are a minority, granted entrance to the worlds of men, going along with such behaviour, or being called a bad sport are often the perceived choices. That year, the college was closed as Delhi witnessed harrowing anti-Sikh violence. Shortly after it re-opened, a “Sardines Chick Chart” came up on the notice board, sardines being slang for sardarnis. The most striking quality of quotidian violence is its wild-eyed avidity. The instinct to further leer at the women of a community that has recently been brutalised puts the violence in sex like masala films can but dream of. The incident however, broke the uneasy acceptance of the ‘tradition’, and grew over time to become a protest that made it to the newspapers. Consequently, as the filmmaker Saba Dewan has recounted on Kafila, women students had men hissing ‘fuck off’ at them as they walked the corridors. The Girls’ Common Room was vandalised and students’ bras and panties were strewn everywhere, including furled from the college turret, just like victory flags of war. A Hen Chart was put up, making the clichéd connection between feminists and frumps, naming the most vocal members of the protest. The administration never held any men accountable, but did call in the women’s parents to complain about them. At around the same time, the filmmaker Bela Negi was studying in Sherwood College, a posh boarding school in Nainital, which too had only recently begun to admit women. “I was the head-girl. The head boy was the principal’s son and he wasn’t much into rules. I was a bit of a goody two-shoes so I would take my job somewhat seriously,” Negi said to me. On one occasion, she crossed the head boy over something. A few days later, “when I went out in a short skirt”, a group of about 25 boys pounced on her and gave her bumps on a pile of horse dung. “I knew it was no use complaining to the administration, so I got up and walked away, refusing to give them the pleasure of knowing they’d humiliated me.” The similarity to the Bois Locker Room incident — an Instagram group where schoolboys aged 14 to 18, rated schoolgirls’ body parts, shared their Instagram posts without consent, morphing their heads onto naked bodies — does not require over-articulation here. There’s no real difference. Bonding in private rooms, competing to trash talk women, dismembering women metaphorically, into body parts. Threatening to assault actually or metaphorically through public shaming, when called out. Traditions are what keep a society going, no? One of the unexpected discoveries I made while writing this essay was that the niece of a close friend was one of the minors discussed in the Bois Locker Room. I had heard over the last year that she and her mother had had several conflicts over her posting very sexualised images on Instagram. “Why do you think she does it?” I’d asked my friend then. “It’s the only way for girls to be popular in their schools”. It’s a tricky path, when popularity is equal to being an aspirational object, often leading to violent responses that you’re a bitch if you aren’t attainable, and a whore if you are. Eventually you find yourself beheaded via app and discover the dehumanisations that gives these currencies of attractiveness their power — for all genders. St. Stephen’s and Sherwood College are among the country’s elite educational institutions, grooming the rich and powerful for generations, a tradition being carried forward by the growing number of private schools today. Many students who were part of the incidents described above, as participants, or as uneasy bystanders, doubtless occupy positions of influence today — in politics, in civil services, in media, in academia, in corporate life. Many would be considered liberal leading lights. None of them, until today, have managed to create structures that naturally incorporate the point of view of anyone except elite heterosexual men — that we know of. Many of them might run the kind of organisations that yielded a bunch of #MeToo stories. Maybe on jolly social occasions, they say to women who object to their wife jokes, ‘yaar stop being such a feminist. You’re too serious’. Well, they’re just good students. They were groomed to decide what is serious and what is not on other people’s behalf. Someone married them, not expecting, or simply going along with, becoming a wife joke. Perhaps their kids go to the ‘good South Delhi schools’ everyone keeps mentioning when they express shock at the Bois Locker Room case. It’s such a sleight of hand, ‘good’ schools, ‘good’ families, that conflates virtue with privilege. “How can an educated person do this?” people exclaim. It is precisely an educated person who does these things. Elite education is designed as it always was, barring a few cool accessories, to train elite men to dominate other people and express that domination in a variety of ways. Education is structured to underline the importance of material success and competition at all cost, including the cost of understanding your own pleasures, relationships and emotions, which are considered distractions to be quelled, a source of weakness. Parents focus mostly on whether you are studying, when they think of your future, not about nourishing your inner life. They might notice an issue with your inner life only if you don’t do well at school. Everyone else is your competition. Everything you do requires fitting in but still, having an edge over others. The limit of learning is the exam — not the idea that you will keep learning from life. Exams are war and everyone must be an exam warrior. When we are trained to always go to war, what can we possibly know about how to go to peace? As you go up the ladder, the self-congratulatory declarations — “it’s just business”, “I’m just being practical” — all mean that empathy and emotion have been successfully numbed, enough, that you can defend the scrapping of labour laws and can go to the government and say, “Do not send migrant labourers home. We may need them for our (just) business.” The making of chick charts, the rating of girls, the slurs against queer and Dalit colleagues — these are all social reminders that elite, straight men are the ones entitled to define these structures, who get to grant approval and make decisions, in schools and colleges, and later in offices, governments, the internet. Your continued presence is contingent on fitting into this system and not objecting to its ‘just fun’ traditions. They are the foam in a double shot cappuccino of privilege. Twenty five years after the incident in school, Bela Negi ran into one of her classmates at a school reunion. “He said to me ,‘remember how we gave you bumps, ha ha’. I said, ‘I can’t believe that as a grown up you’re laughing and bragging about it instead of feeling remorse or embarrassment’.” Other male classmates looked uneasy when she brought it up. Women at the party told her ‘forget it, now it’s in the past’. But it’s not in the past, is it? It is firmly with us in the present — the sexual language used to attack women in a political disagreement online. The baying for sexual violation of Muslim and ‘sickular’ women by right wing men. The number of liberal men named in #MeToo accounts. The calling Safoora Zargar, the arrested member of the Jamia Coordination Committee, prostitute and saying ‘give her a condom’ because she is pregnant — and Muslim and politically active. It is so much with us, that the day the hashtag #boislockerroom started trending I didn’t pay attention because I thought, “it must be some new web series”. A lot goes into maintaining the illusion that elite men are not sexually violent on a casual and intensified basis all the time. Part of this is the reigning discourse around sexual violence, which privileges the safety of women — elite women — over their freedom. The public space is painted as a dangerous one for women, where they are under threat of being attacked by ‘other’ men — read, lower caste or class, men. If elite men bother to talk about women, it is only to hold them up as emblems of purity or achievement, or to school other men for not knowing how to respect women. (In other words they don’t seem to know how to talk to women, but that’s another discussion). Being a bro who stands up for feminism is an elite pastime across the political spectrum — sometimes they are scolding creeps in a music video, sometimes they are killing your boyfriend on Valentine’s Day. This discussion about ‘others’ is like a curtain. Behind it is the private behaviour of men — and that is never to be discussed. A man who does it is weak. A woman who brings matters private into public light, risks marginalisation and vilification. We have seen that, through domestic violence scandals and sexual harassment cases. That is why the first responses to many such incidents is to blame women — #girlslockerroom — and then to clamp down on the freedom of women or blame them for acting as if they lived in a world where men’s violence against them is not a given. Boys will be boys, goes the platitude. As if this is an immutable condition and we must all tiptoe around them, which we are constantly, daily being trained to do, lest we provoke their boys-will-be-boys-ism. The other response is to demand strong punitive action against perpetrators — we don’t mind if boys are boys as long as their privilege does not expose itself through an act of criminal violence. Then, we must teach them a lesson. One sometimes wants to say, but this is the lesson you have been teaching them: of supremacy. All other lessons are sitting in the pocket of that lesson. *** Interviewed by media, one school principal expressed bewilderment that their students could be involved in the Bois Locker Room because “the school has regularly provided inputs on gender”. At every school and college where I, or my colleagues at Agents of Ishq have done a talk or workshop, in the last two years, young women have come up to discuss, exactly the same experience of the Bois Locker Room case. They don’t know how to counter the distasteful misogyny that the cool, edgy filmmakers and forthcoming media sensations of the future subject them to. “Why don’t you say something?” I ask. “Because I don’t feel like being rude to a friend.” “Because they call me a prude or they might think I’m un-cool.” “Why do you care what they think?” I asked a young woman. She kept quiet. She knows in theory, that she need not care, but the world has not reshaped itself enough to make this automatic and there is very little conversation to help her figure out the way to do this positively, not negatively as a victim or an aggressor. If you are a woman working in a cool corporate job, media, art films and so on, you will recognise this experience. In elite worlds where cool is a very necessary currency, you try to hold on to it tenuously, timorously. To not accept the banal misogyny and poor humour of men, marks you as un-cool. Despite being a grown woman, you must carry out an adolescent exhibitionism while talking about sex, to show you are blasé, so you may be accepted as one of the guys — and it’s simply a different version of young schoolgirls posing in particular ways, to gain importance in this world. Even my gay friends have called me a prude (and consider, I run a platform about sex) when I tell them not to bore me with misogynistic TikTok clips. If you don’t talk about sex the way men have been trained to talk about it, then you are a prude and simply not cool enough for school. The workshops might not be useless. But they are not the real answer to finding our way out of this dystopia. Education, like patriarchy, is a structure. Just dropping new content into it doesn’t change what it does. In the structure of competitive education, those gender and sexuality workshops too can become one more competitive module you learn to ace — because your basic purpose has not altered. The same boys who are in Bois Locker Room, might easily be acing the Model UN and debating circuits, the social media conversations, saying all the right things about gender bias, toxic masculinity and inter-sectionality. Liberal parents often show off their children’s by-rote sensitive (but not always good) writings — the passionate awareness of being a victim of gender discrimination, the performative pain of class inequity. It is not so different from saying ‘uncle ko poem sunao’. The same by-rote politics will manifest later in ‘women-centric’ films made by men — liberal men castigating others for not knowing how to treat women. The right gestures will be made — like putting your mother’s first name as the middle name for the entire crew, in a sudden burst of born-again feminist consciousness. The catechism or rights-based discourse will be read out. And the performative mea culpas and ritualistic discussion of toxic masculinity will follow. In a world where life is an exam — where you have to know the poem, not become it — everyone learns the right things to say, in order to win approval. And in the same way, everyone also knows what to hide. Education and all the resources we put into it are about succeeding in public life — to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet, as TS Eliot wrote. We do not value the private sphere enough to put thought into an education for that, mostly hidden, part of life. We can be depressed but not surprised at the inability of young men to stand up for more humane relationships with women, sexuality, desire, because that has never been part of the syllabus anywhere. They have no language for it. Young women don’t have the means to recognise it — they still imagine that a man with the right terminology will also be decent. They have only been taught to think of men in terms of public attributes, not private ones. It would be hard to find the profile of a successful man in the Indian media, which mentions what kind of friend or partner he is, or asks what he feels about the world of love and emotion. Sex is even more separated from the discussion. It is never discussed as part of life. It is a place of secrecy, shame, embarrassment and judgment, only made public through lewd jokes or lectures about violence. The only sources of sexual knowledge — in an experiential and not clinical sense — is mainstream pornography, which fragments sex into discrete acts and bodies into body parts — and online frat house culture. Mixed with a cultural universe and an educational system that emphasises hierarchy, disconnection and competitiveness, this gives us a recipe for self-hate. It leaves young people of all genders with a complete lack of resources to manage the world of desire that surges within them. The only language young people have is a second-hand one, and how can you find your own self, when you are always speaking in someone’s given language? At the very least, Bois Locker Room may remind us that we need sex-education, which is age-appropriate — a curriculum that grows in scope along with the child — and that it should be comprehensive: looking at how health, desire, orientation, emotion, politics and culture intersect to create a sexual world. But the task before is a more radical and political one. If education enslaves us, compelling us to be part of herds, gangs, clubs and cliques, then what does an education that liberates us look like? If education fragments us, keeping our minds, bodies and hearts separated like Science, Arts and Commerce, what is the education that integrates all these different aspects of being a person look like? The bandying of phrases like toxic masculinity and that most Brahmanical of words, ‘problematic’, is not the road to discovering this education and this existence. The idea that boys have to be ‘fixed’ is itself a violence that does not acknowledge that every one of us lives in the patriarchy, is shaped by it and is also wounded by it. Such an attacking language only serves to harden the divisions and make the conversation inimical. Three years ago I went to a town in Uttar Pradesh to do a workshop in a programme on masculinity. It was an all-men’s group and it was exhausting. They trotted out the politically correct self-analysis about masculinity. But probed to speak beyond it, about their emotions and relationships, about areas of doubt and experience, they congealed together into a sticky mass of resistance. They made jokes, sometimes demeaning each other and challenged the trainers by trivialising each question. But when we recorded their narratives individually, very different behaviours emerged. There was a small percentage of absolutely intractable men I have come to categorise as Sententious Lecturers and Eternally Wounded. One kind speaks in lofty proclamations that mean very little. The other refuses to let their wound of rejection or hurt heal, and turns it into a justification for seeing numbness as strength and love and emotion as weakness. “Now I only use girls,” one said. “If I like a girl, I don’t sleep with her, because I won’t be able to give her the love she expects.” The world of emotion is expressed as an impossibility. But the majority of other men spanned the range. Some were tentative about their relationships, some confessing to hurt and inadequacy, even depression. Some laughed at their own sentimentality or discussed wanting more confidence, more love, less pressure. Detached from the herd, and spoken to as individuals, about their emotions, they were quite different from each other and did not adhere to a fixed identity of gender and its associated behaviours. They did not have the confidence in themselves as individuals, to be themselves in front of a larger group of men. In that they were reminiscent of the young women, who approached me in distress about the demeaning way their male friends discussed women, their conflict between seeing distasteful aspects of a friend you liked otherwise. These young women also did not have enough language to think through these contradictions. Put very simply, we don’t give young people the means to see themselves as complex individuals — nor each other. Political language is important to identify structural issues, but in its current form where it essentially only knows how to describe a problem, it is insufficient to enable journeys of transformation and spark imaginations of change. Education helps you to fit in with the herd to serve the larger power structures in a society. If you are very elite, you can learn the double speak of benefitting from this system, while also critiquing the system for your US college application essay. An education which grants you immunity from the herd has to give you belief in your inner life. It has to grant importance to emotions, to desires, to pleasure, to poetry — to the ill-defined idea of personal life, an inner life — alongside the public. I know it sounds utopian, but I don’t believe it is impossible. What it does ask from us, is to abandon the old system of report cards, to discard the traditional indicators of success and impact. At Agents of Ishq, once we liberated ourselves from the logic of just garnering numbers for content or even working with a fixed curriculum, we began a journey that has constantly shown us new aspects of what young people need to strengthen their personal lives — they need information, they need conversation, they need a new language which fluidly incorporates love, sex, desire, attraction, lust, queerness, consent, gender identity, affection, friendship, rejection, relationality — not a language which puts all these in silos. Think of it as literacy in intimacy. Knowledge of how to relate with others on their own terms. Perhaps all of education needs to be reimagined the way sexuality education has been reimagined. Perhaps our inner lives and our inter-dependence have to lead the way more, in redefining education. As we confront disconnection in myriad ways with pandemic isolation, we can see that we need a politics, a philosophy, a practice of relationality with others. Where the understanding that sexualness is mutually exchanged, not simply conquered and captured, is interwined with understanding that our emotional and personal worlds can be places of sustenance not weakness, to be attacked or guarded. And that is also intertwined with being able to see that resources are something to be shared for mutual survival, not hoarded, and grudgingly given or strategically taken away. The Bois Locker Room and the crisis of our society in its current breakdown have a lot to say about each other. Both of them tell us that we have reached the limits of the system we live in. If the way out is together, then we need an education on what it means to do that. Paromita Vohra is a filmmaker and writer whose work focuses on gender, feminism, urban life, love, desire and popular culture and spans many forms including documentary, fiction, print, video and sound installation. She is founder and creative director at Agents of Ishq.

http://sansaartimes.blogspot.com/2020/05/bois-locker-room-case-underscores-vital.html