#and it’s not like we were in some codified partner relationship. but that’s how she Functioned for me. we did everything together.

[ghostzzy]

anyway i haven’t talked abt this a lot on here but i am realizing lately. that the last eight-ish months. i have been kinda going through a slow-motion breakup with the person i had been anticipating my future with for many years. which. contextualizes a lot i think. about how bad i’ve been doing.

[vivacissimx]

some course correction on visenya targaryen

Current Visenya discourses are flawed because they presuppose forms of patriarchy that didn't exist yet & project it backwards (a trick Fire & Blood actually uses itself, in fact makes it cartoonishly obvious, because that's a mechanism of creating history. Ex. 'Baelon was the natural successor to Aemon and everybody definitely agreed' only for the issue to continue being debated for years to come). So the language of 'usurpation' is used for Visenya when the story that ultimately weaves into the usurpation of a female claimant is only beginning.

The Visenya who crowned Aegon beneath their brand new family heraldic banner, who publicly took on worship of the Seven despite privately continuing to observe Valyrian rites & rituals, is part of a trio who are participating in Westerosi cultural practices so as to legitimize themselves in the eyes of their subject. We are not coming as foreigners who will threaten your ways, it purposely says. These are compromises willingly made but they do not indicate that the Conquerors viewed themselves as within the paradigm of Westeros entirely. Does that even need to be said? They were quite literally a polygamous incestuous union! Their banner is a three-headed dragon, three parts to a whole, not one single dragon to rule them all (and one dragon is what we later see Aegon II use as his banner when he usurps Rhaenyra— indicating that unlike Aegon the Conqueror, he views himself as the one king, & there are no equal partners to him least of all in the form of pesky sisters).

The Visenya who equally participated in military campaigns, lawmaking, judgement, progresses, & holding of Dragonstone/King's Landing did not view herself as being usurped. Neither did this same Visenya show interest in having children until she absolutely had to (with Rhaenys dead and one single sickly heir remaining). The equipoise of the post-Conquest pre-Rhaenys' death years seems to be that Aegon & Visenya were not too fussed about having a child together because thankfully Rhaenys existed between them, Rhaenys who was much more interested/interesting wrt the matter which kept the two elder siblings in peace. As it goes, Rhaenys' death coincides with the fracturing of the Aegon & Visenya relationship. Nonetheless after Rhaenys dies Visenya takes several steps to protect their fledgling dynasty such as military invasion of Dorne for vengeance and to discourage further rebellion, establishing the Kingsguard to protect Aegon who she viewed as perhaps less capable than her, and, yes, getting pregnant herself. When Visenya did have a child, everything she did with Maegor can be viewed in the sense that she was reproducing herself for the next generation. Like Visenya, Maegor's education was a martial one. Like Visenya, he should wield Dark Sister. Like Visenya, he should be part of the heir-apparent-structure by marrying Rhaena (later the Black Bride). Like Visenya, he must show strength when the family is weak, and be in service to their House (by making peace with the Faith by marrying Ceryse Hightower, by putting down rebellion when Aenys couldn't, by returning from exile when Aenys died). Like Visenya, he was allowed to enter a polygamous union (indeed Visenya presided over that ceremony).

[And there are points to be made regarding the Visenya archetype, how Maegor explicitly rejected it in pursuit of his father's legacy, but that's a different round-up.]

Whether Visenya initially foresaw a trio for Maegor, that he'd be a first husband for Rhaena but that perhaps Rhaena could also marry a son of Aenys, brings up a really interesting question as to the nature of plural marriage (whether polyandry was also legitimated by acceptance of Targcest, which had not yet been codified as monogamous by Jaehaerys who notably did not marry both of his sisters— and this question is subtly brought up again mockingly with Saera, more seriously with Rhaenyra). But that's not the point of this post! The point of this post is to say that the nature of the Conqueror trios roles & responsibilities was much more fluid than the language of 'usurpation' allows for. Did Visenya's positioning set the stage for what would ultimately snowball into Rhaenyra's usurpation, a process which relied on Visenya, and Rhaena, and Alysanne, and Rhaenys TQWNW, and so on's circumstances to unfold the way it did? Of course. It's a lineage. But it's an error to say 'things were always that way.' Nothing is ever so flat as that. The point is more that 'one thing led to another.'

[mask131]

As I am making my way down the Dictionary of Female Myths, I thought of sharing some articles not about the Greco-Romans for once! And since we are in summer – it means beach, water, sea – so welcome this loose translation/vague recap of an article about the myth of the Mamy Watta, written by Lilyan Kesteloot!

Kesteloot presents the myth of the Mamy Watta as being present across most of the shores and coastal areas of Africa, and as an equivalent to the myth of the mermaid in Europe. Like her, the Mamy Watta is a “lady of the waters” or a “water woman” who lives in the depths of the sea, and has an habit of seducing human men – but any further correspondence between the two legends stops there.

The several Mamy Watta (aka, “mamy water”) find their origins in the religious animism of the continent: they are first and foremost spirits and goddesses that received a worship. For example, the sea goddess Yemandja wo is present among the pantheons of the Yoruba, Ewe and Fon (Nigeria, Togo, Benin). The imagery of the rituals depicts Yemanda with long black hair contrasting with a light-colored skin ; often her half-naked body is surrounded by a long snake. She has her own priestesses, and her faithful followers: her cult and myths were transported, almost without modification, to Haiti and Brazil, due to most of the imported slaves of these countries coming from the South-Western coast of Africa. But the Mamy Watta of Africa is also found all throughout the Antilles (West Indies), under the name of “Manman di l’eau”.

On the shores of Senegal, the myth of the Water Lady is very active and linked to specific rituals. She is one of the “rab”, the genies that haunt the sacred places of the country, and to which one must make sacrifices only when they manifest. The sea-rab appears in men’s dreams and “calls” for them. The one who has been “called” during his sleep must answer this call, or face grave troubles. Usually he mut go see a specialist, a “ndeupkat”, who will reveal to him the name of his rab, how to satisfy it, and what he is forbidden to do. The man will have to regularly offer the rab milk and millet porridge, and it will become his personal protecting spirit. This alliance can however enter in conflict with the man’s human marriage, or the relationship between the man and the rab can deteriorate if there is a form of negligence. Then, the rab becomes not a protector but a tormentor, by disturbing the spirit and twisting the behavior of the “unfaithful” partner. The man will either suffer from a madness in the form of regular mental breakdowns, or from a long and deep depression. This type of rab-caused disorders are well-known among the Wolof, Lébou and Sereer. To heal the victim, one must gather specialists to organize a “Ndeup”, a ceremony which lasts from three days to a week. Its purpose is to reconcile the sick man and his rab, by sacrificing a cow, painting the man with the cow’s blood and making him drink it, then covering him with white veils. The rab is prayed to with lengthy melodies, and finally one must take the sick man take a bath in the sea – supposedly healing him and reconciling him with his “sea-bride”. To put it briefly: one can never get rid of a sea-rab, one must simply learn to live with it. The rab can sometimes appear not as a woman, but as a man – however in these cases, it always calls out to women rather than men.

Another type of Mamy Watta manifestations can be identified at the mouth of rivers. It is considered that these legends were born out of the sighting and presence of manatees/sea cows, large sea-mammals with breasts: they are perceived as the manifestations of the water-spirit in countries such as Cameroun, Gabon and Congo. The encounter with these spirit-women is not codified by religion: rather, when someone is harassed by one, it is considered as a charm or spell that must be dispelled by a healer. However, among the Douala, the “Djengu” is a key part of the initiation rituals of the Ngondo society.

Finally, sometimes the Mamy Watta can live inside the continent, in lakes and rivers. We know, for example, of Faro, the twin sister of the god Pemba, a primordial goddess of the Bambara mythology. She lives within the Niger river and commands fecundity, both human and vegetal. She is linked to the problems women must face, and to the rituals surrounding the birth of children. She has priests dedicated to her: she can appear as a woman, but usually manifests as a fish ; specific fish species, such as the catfish, are considered her companions. Further away in the Niger river, by the area of the Niamey, another water-spirit rules: Harakoy. Legend claims she was a Fulani woman who was seen naked in her bath, and out of shame she threw herself in the river, never to come out of it again. Ever since, she lives in the water: the fishermen worship her, and so do the Sonrhaï, riverside farmer, and she regularly appears by the side of other local deities. There is also Mame Coumba Lamba, who rules over the Senegal river and the city of Saint-Louis: she is said to be responsible for either the abundance or rarity of fishes, as well as the sudden floods of the river. A last example would be Mame Yungume, who haunts the mouth of the Gambie and Saloum rivers.

The presence of those water-goddesses is very prominent across the African continent, not to say almost banal – and those listed above are but a handful of them. It is notably because the myth of the Mamy Watta is still very much alive and active in Africa, unlike the legend of the mermaid in Europe. Be it individual or collective, as a long as a myth finds roots within rituals or a cult, it becomes part of the religion. Most of the legends described here are tied to local religions still in full strength today, while the sirens of Odysseus or the Little Mermaid of Andersen were reduced a long time ago to mere literary figures.

The image, or rather the very concept of the “women” that comes out of those water-ladies is not clear-cut or one-sided. If in Europe the mermaid is always a beautiful seductress who is dangerous to the sailors, in Africa the appearance and roles of the Mamy Watta are diverse. The rab described above, for example, are not particularly graceful or charming – they can even appear as old people, since they are called “Mame”, which means “grandmother”. Their manifestations are sometimes scary, and they can sport monstrous appearances. As for Faro, the main goddess of the Bambara mythology, she appears to her chosen ones as a mother rather than a wife, when she doesn’t take the shape of a giant fish.

The behavior of the Mamy Watta is ambivalent, and mankind’s alliance with them just as ambiguous. If one honors and worship the Mamy Watta, she will favorize you. But if you offend a Mamy Watta, by either transgressing a rule or neglecting a sacrifice, she will get angry and persecute you. But are they more demanding or capricious than the other spirits and gods of Africa? One cannot really claim such a thing, their role even seems to be quite positive: they do not wish the destruction of their human partners. They are rarely wicked, as long as the terms of their alliance/union are respected ; and this is unlike Mousso Koroni for example, the goddess of disasters of the Bambara cosmogony, who takes the appearance of a witch and always manifests herself with violence and destruction.

Sometimes, the Mamy Watta can be androgynous, sporting masculine traits ; other times they actually have a family of their own: Faro for example was said to have a husband, and Faro-children who stole vegetables from the gardens near the river. The Mamy Watta, whose tales are always told by moonlight, are always ambiguous, as much in their role as in their gender.

[tomwambsmilk]

if somehow shiv and tom had managed to have the open relationship convo BEFORE their actual wedding (like back in new york before they even got to europe) how do you think that would have looked like? do you think tom would have still gone along with it? would it have made their relationship better or worse

Oh, that's such an interesting question...

Fair warning that this answer is very long because I think there are a lot of contributing factors and angles that need to be explored:

First off, I think the timing of the conversation would matter. A conversation had, for instance, shortly after Thanksgiving, before anything has happened with Nate but after the idea of infidelity has been introduced, would go a lot differently than a conversation where Shiv tells Tom about Nate right before they go to Europe. (I think she would tell Tom about Nate because her desire for an open marriage is partly informed by a desire for openness and honesty; she doesn't feel capable of monogamy, and she doesn't want to be sneaking around. So, I don't think there's a world where she asks for an open marriage but hides the thing with Nate from Tom).

For her to have the conversation in advance, though, I think she'd need to be okay with the possibility that Tom would leave. I don't think she intentionally waits until their wedding night to "trap" him - although Tom clearly feels that way by 2.10 - but I do think that being married lowers the chances of him walking away simply under the sunk-cost fallacy.

I also think her desire for an open marriage is not really rooted in sexual desires but emotional ones, which is one of its significant problems. I am not at all an expert on open relationships (it's very much not something that's for me), but from what I understand, it works in situations where there's some sort of sexual disparity that's being addressed through the relationship. (I'm also distinguishing here an open relationship, which is usually just sexual, from a polyamorous one, which usually isn't just sexual and where the relationships are more complex. Again, though, I'm not an expert on either.)

I think we're meant to take at face value that Shiv has not cheated on Tom as of Thanksgiving, and I don't think we're meant to believe that infidelity has been a part of her previous relationships. There's some implication that she's had a lot of sexual partners (although a lot of that is coming from other people and in circumstances where they're trying to shame her, so I take that with a grain of salt) but never an implication that she cheated on any of them. So, I think the desire to not be exclusive is very much connected to their engagement and the prospect of marriage.

There are a couple of theories out there as to what the specific reason is; Sarah Snook said in an interview once that her belief is that Shiv has never seen a marriage that didn't feature infidelity, especially within her family, and that's why she herself feels incapable of monogamy. All of her father's marriages were characterized by cheating, and she is her father's daughter. And likely, she saw the negative impact this had on his marriages, especially on her mother. So, her solution is an open marriage. Maybe if we can codify the infidelity, we can weather the storm. Maybe if we agree in advance that this is okay, and we (I) can be honest about what's going on, it won't break us like it did my parents.

I think there's probably a lot of truth to that. I think another contributing factor is likely just a fear of intimacy, particularly emotional intimacy. I do think her affair with Nate and the open marriage is, in part, a way to create some emotional distance from Tom. She's not a person who feels safe in relationships, in general, and so I think the prospect of being married to one person, and the expectations of physical and emotional exclusivity that generally go along with that, is frightening to her, especially when coupled with that fact that marriages are theoretically supposed to be permanent. She needs some kind of ripcord for when it becomes too much, and I think that's what the open relationship is meant to do: sleeping with someone else, sharing that physical intimacy with someone else, relieves some of the emotional burdens she feels from monogamy. (She doesn't need this before the engagement because, before the engagement, she can theoretically walk away whenever she wants; while the divorce is, of course, an option, I think it's one she probably really wants to avoid, given her own upbringing, and that increases the pressure on her immensely.)

So, with all of that background - I think that if Shiv had the conversation around Thanksgiving, very clearly articulating what it is she wanted rather than hinting with the infidelity thing and hoping Tom would be okay with it...

Well. I think regardless of the timing an the circumstances, Tom's initial, gut reaction would be hurt. And part of this is because Shiv's desire for an open marriage is rooted in insecurity; I don't think she'll be able to frame that desire in a way that doesn't cause Tom to feel like he's personally lacking on some level. Like he's not enough, and this is a personal failing. And his own self-loathing tendencies mean he's going to be inclined to read it that way, even if she was able to present it in a way that was perfectly neutral.

But I think because this is how he would take the request, I don't think he'd be able to articulate his own concerns around it. Tom very much wants to be monogamous, and he isn't going to be happy in any kind of non-monogamous relationship. But - he doesn't have the personal security to be able to say that, and the timing of the conversation isn't going to change this.

So I think he would still agree, because he loves Shiv and wants her to be happy, because he hates and himself and so this makes a sort of tragic sense to him, and because he's afraid that if he loses her he's not going to find anyone else - and, if we're being honest, because walking away from that relationship is going to put his career in jeopardy. I absolutely do not believe this is his primary reason for marrying Shiv, but he's definitely aware of it, and it's just going to be another reason to try and do the "open relationship" thing.

I don't think there's any world in which this is a good thing for either of them, because of Tom's insecurity and because of Shiv's motivations. I also think that Shiv pretty clearly does have some kind of emotional connection with Nate, which means we're already looking at a relationship that sort of breaks the boundaries that get put around "open relationships" - so I just think no matter how you slice it, no matter the timing, it is going to end in disaster.

However. I think if they had this conversation around Thanksgiving, and then were able to use the intervening months as a sort of "trial run", they wouldn't have gotten married - which I think would have been the best outcome for everyone involved. I think there's decent odds Tom would have reached the breaking point of his misery before the wedding, and would have decided to cut his losses and take the career hit and move on - especially because, if they aren't yet married, there's less pressure to stay together and try to make it work. Plus, if this isn't sustainable for him there's an incentive to figure that out definitively before the wedding.

There's an alternative possibility where he goes to leave and Shiv decides to give up the open relationship so he'll stay. But I'm not actually sure she would... I think it's pretty clearly her intent through season 1 to stop sleeping with Nate or anyone else when they get married, and instead, when push comes to shove, she feels she has to ask for the open relationship. Monogamy is not something she believes is sustainable for her. Additionally, I think the open relationship would put so much strain on both of them (especially Tom) that other parts of their relationship would deteriorate as well, and it might not feel like there's much left to save.

If they have the conversation right before they leave for Europe? That's a bit more of a wildcard. Tom is clearly willing to call off the wedding if he thinks Shiv doesn't want it. Finding out about the affair is also going to be a significant emotional blow to him. I think the proximity to the wedding means it'll be hard for Shiv to make the request for an open marriage sound reasonable and well-thought-out - it's going to sound to Tom like she just wants to keep fucking Nate.

On the other hand - would Tom really call off the wedding if Shiv wanted to go through with it? I don't know. Calling off the wedding that close to the date is going to cause a lot of gossip and speculation, and again, we're looking at the career blow. Plus, he does love Shiv, and they've spent months building up to the wedding, and the closer they get to the wedding the more sunk-cost fallacy is involved. Theoretically they could postpone the wedding until they both have more certainty, but I don't think either of them would think to do that.

I've debated with people whether or not Tom believes Shiv the night before the wedding when she says she hasn't slept with anyone else. Personally, I don't think he does, but decides to go through with the marriage anyways, committing to the illusion that it's something that it isn't (monogamous). (I also think that's why he tells Shiv about the cruise documents - to create that intimacy, and to bind her to him a little more with this shared secret.) So this is where I'm torn - I think the key question is, would he call off the wedding if she was honest with him?

Ultimately? I think not. I think at that point, they would have gone through with the wedding no matter what. And maybe, in a certain sense, this would have given them a better chance, since there isn't the baggage of Tom feeling "Shanghai-ed into an open-borders free-fuck trade deal". I think they'd both still be miserable, but there would be more of a feeling on Tom's part that he consented to this misery, and that's going to change the way he approaches the relationship and Shiv. He wouldn't be able to hold it against her quite the same way he does in canon (although I think he still would resent her for it, just... quietly). It definitely wouldn't be a healthy relationship, but... maybe it would be a bit more stable.

[soulvomit]

stuff with gender anguish about not fitting in with today’s current gender constructions

From another post I made: I need to talk about 20th century gender norms at some point as a living breathing 20th century fossil and how different it was. To most straight people, being gender non conforming meant gay, trans was on the far end of the gay spectrum, and gay was associated with being socially Not Normal at a time when you had to be Normal to get a white collar job. (The whole Normalhood thing im gonna talk about is VERY connected to mid-late 20th century construction of the white middle class.) Apropos of gender specifically... I’m not sure how 90s/00s genderfluid/genderqueer map to NB, or whether they do. It’s a big reason I am weird about IDing as NB - because it seems to mean something else than my particular understanding of my identity as it was formed in the 1990s. (Another thing is my social world being more people over 45 at this point and also I’m in a hetero relationship.) Part of 90s GQ stuff was that you could identify as a man part time, a woman part time, you could contain multitudes. “Woman-identified person with a male side” was a legit identity within that, so was “man-identified person with a female side.” You could be one person in the streets and another in the sheets. You could be several people in the sheets, especially if you were aligned with kinky culture. (And for a long time... I was.) There was a greater sense in the 90s and early 00s in genderqueerness culture that you could be GQ for no other reason than wanting to be and it wasn’t assumed to be bundled with physical dysphoria or even desire to change your public social identity. Some spaces - like West Coast geek culture and goth culture - had enough flexibility baked in that we didn’t really need to go to LGBTQ culture to explore our identities, and there was a whole geek queer sensibility that was evolving alongside of the broader LGBTQ culture that was definitely its own... thing.  And while people *say* that NB doesn’t mean any one particular thing or any of these things, that’s not always the message I get when visible NBs on TV/in film are almost always at present one very specific image or “type” of person, and that doesn’t resemble me. NB representation on TV amounts to presenting NB as a third gender with very specific codified behaviors (androgynous AFAB person who binds and has body dysphoria).   The message I get is that whatever my experience is, is better described some other way. Also the discourse around relationships with NBs is that a relationship with an NB is necessarily a queer relationship yet having been in relationships in and out of LGBTQ culture, I’m not really sure how to distinguish “a queer relationship.” My relationship is non-traditional in lots of ways and we’re both gender non-conforming in lots of ways though it doesn’t parse to most people because it’s along the lines of stuff that shouldn’t have ever been gendered in the first place. What my partner does not ever question however is his actual gender identity.  The thing is, actually publicly identifying as anything but a woman would create weird problems in my life in terms of social dynamics, and other stuff, and probably an unpredictable series of ripple effects downstream. But - that... just means I’m closeted, right? And closeted doesn’t mean your identity doesn’t exist or isn’t as unreal as someone who isn’t? And what if - as a “shapeshifter” - my relationship to myself within my relationship *is* part of that shapeshifting?  One of the things is that I’m in a heterosexual relationship. My relationship *is* one of my few spots where I’m happy in my skin, let alone happy in the world and I have no complaints with how I’m perceived in this relationship, and part of it is that practically every assumption about my gender is true, or has been true at some point, including the fact that I’m fine with being seen as a woman in the context of my relationship.  It’s in other spaces besides the intimate, that gender stuff makes my skin crawl. My deep interior gender identity is “pixels floating in the ether, which can assume any shape or form.” My gender identity among other people in non sexual friend spaces is “friend.” My partner identifies as a cis het man. I don’t feel like my relationship has any special quality that’s different from queer relationships I’ve been in, other than identities people have. If my partner doesn’t feel our relationship is queer then I don’t feel it is, either... though it’s not exactly *traditional.*  I don’t feel like our relationship is different from our hetero neighbors’ relationships regardless of whatever history I have. I have no way of knowing what my ostensibly-female ostensibly-heterosexual neighbors’ interior identities really are, or what their history is. And because we’re monogamous, it just never ever comes up. Our social world is about half queer and half not so nothing has changed. After decades of only dating people who had LGBTQ identities, and having a particular social world, now I’m with a cis het man from that same social world and nothing really has changed about the shape of my life.   I’ve moved between different spaces my entire life, sometimes I perceived myself as a boy in a girl’s body, but sometimes I didn’t, and don’t. And gender is one of the spaces in which I feel like a chameleon. There seem to be a ton of gender expression based communities that disappeared since the 90s that either disappeared or were erased from discourse and that makes this weirder/harder to talk about.  Another thing is that a lot of the discourse around pronouns (if pushed I’ll say I’m she/they but I am literally comfortable in anything, depending upon context) makes me really uncomfortable. Even in LGBTQ spaces it makes me uncomfortable. There’s the me that my friends know, and some of my family knows, and it’s a big enough world to contain that part of me at this point. I would rather not put my identity under a microscope in any space that matters. It’s weird but I wish I could just be “they” in the work, creative, etc, spaces, without the loading of what “they” means. I wish it meant nothing about the people who love me, or who I love, or how I love, or how I live my life, besides what pronoun I use. But it doesn’t mean nothing. That is why I hope more cis identified people will actually identify as they in the public sphere. There are plenty of spaces in the public sphere that I don’t think should be gendered at ALL. My wanting to be a “they” is in some ways more about wanting public anonymity and having formed my sense of self - at a tender time - online, than about my gender identity. Which means I’d be potentially appropriating “they” from people for whom it IS a deep identity, and yet... haven’t I spent half of my blog talking about how I’m not exactly the gender identity I advertise?? Haven’t I spent a long time up to now advocating for “they?” Isn’t feeling like a they, evidence that I’m a they?  And the thing is, this is such a YMMV issue and the problem is that EVERYONE has competing access needs with EVERYONE ELSE. Anything one queer person wants or needs seems to oppress some other queer person, and it sucks. But sometimes I wonder if I even need to just recognize how cis het passing my life is and acknowledge my privilege. The thing is though at that point... is it how much oppression we’ve experienced or are currently experiencing, that alone makes our identity? That’s as silly an idea as saying I’m less of a Jew because I haven’t personally experienced a hate crime. And yes there’s a lot to shared oppression experiences forming group identities, but I’m not talking about group identity. I’m talking about personal feelings of identity.

[brockadoodles]

Heartbreak and a New Tattoo - w. nylander

AN: Uhhhhhhhh. Definitely didn’t intend on posting a fic tonight but, cranked this out. It started off as meaning to be fluffy and cute but uh, my angsty cold heart said no? I’m trying to be better about writing shorter stuff, so let me know what you think! I’m gonna tag @broadstbroskis​ and @jasondickinsonss​ since they’re my resident willy pals. 

Word Count: 2653

Warnings: Angst, happy ending though. 

No one warned you that you would lose a piece of yourself when you fell in love. They didn’t caution you about how for every good moment, the ones that make your head spin and your heart race, there would be a chip of your own sense of person falling away. They didn’t tell you that after four years with someone, you slip into their habits, nestling tightly into their life. So much so that you aren’t even sure what direction you’re facing, because everything around you was built by him. It wasn’t that William did anything wrong. In fact, he did everything a partner should. His life was logistically a chaotic nightmare, each step felt like he was balancing on a rope, trying to get to the other side. But he was good at it, he always prioritized you, even when it was hard. The only problem was that he didn’t know the very rope he was stuck on was fraying. 

It had started small, the cracks between you. The calls during road trips became shorter, less engaged. By the time either of you realized what was happening, it was just two people who once aligned into one breathing on a deadline out of obligation because it felt like that was what you were supposed to do. By the time you realized that the person you thought you were, wasn’t anyone recognizable without William by your side, you irresponsibly thought that it was time to let go. So, you let go of the visions of marriage and a family, of the house you dreamed of building together once things settled down, of the thoughts of the holidays spent together, each one more special than the last. You let it all go, taking a seam ripper to the last bits of thread connecting your souls. You couldn’t decide what hurt worse, the demise of what you thought was forever, or the fact that William didn’t put up a fight as you packed your things and left. 

William didn’t know what hit him when you muttered that you were leaving. He was so sure it had to be a mistake, that there had to be some piece of information missing that would fix everything. He felt his chest caving in, the weight of you packing your bags codifying a new language into his head, one that didn’t include you. He spent weeks circling through the last few months before you ended it. Writing down and analyzing every fight, every night spent without talking to each other when he was gone, trying to piece together what moment made you leave. What he could have done to save the very thing that was destined to fall apart no matter how much super glue he tried to stick to it. You needed to find yourself again, and no matter how badly he longed to help you, he needed to let you go. 

When William came back into Toronto in September, he was incessantly telling himself that he was doing better, that the fresh season would throw him back into a familiar enough routine that he could finally adjust to life without you. But familiarity breeds nostalgia, and nostalgia controlled the heartbreak he had spent the last few months trying to let go of. It wasn’t until he was back in the apartment that you shared that the resentment stage of his grief had tucked into his heart. 

The resentment was the worst part of the breakup. Because he didn’t want to resent anything about you. He had gotten four years to love you as best as he could, and he didn’t want to replace all of the memories of love with a feeling of regret. He didn’t regret loving you, even if it ended the way that it had. He didn’t regret thinking he was going to marry you, and when he finally moved on from the resentment stage of grief, he realized that sometimes you can put your all into someone and they simply might not be able to give you all of it back. He was slowly starting to thread the foundation of a new rope, he was starting to move on. But when he saw you standing there in your dark blue dress, your hair a bit shorter than the last time he had seen you, talking to Steph, he dropped the newly constructed rope off the ledge. 

You on the other hand were spending your summer trying to piece together the remaining fragments of your own being, the person who you were before you met William. You were doing okay, as okay as someone could be when they had just ended a four-year relationship with the person that they assumed would be the one. You spent months lying to yourself about being okay. You spent months trying to convince yourself that you didn’t make a mistake, that you didn’t leave because you couldn’t handle being honest with him about how you were feeling. 

It was October and you knew he was back in the city. Hockey had started which meant that his presence was now one you actively had to avoid. You took the long way into the city and back home most days, actively avoiding the arena, knowing that being there would be too much. This half-hearted way of living in the city you called home was manageable, until December when you finally had the courage to unpack the remaining boxes from the home you shared together. 

You were going through a notebook when it fell out, Mitch and Steph’s wedding invitation from over a year ago now. You picked up the card, eyes welling with the tears you had shoved down for the last six months as you remembered that weekend. The weekend you realized Will was your person. 

“I can’t believe you and Mitch are finally getting married.” You hummed to Steph as you slid off your heels and collapsed onto the hotel bed. You had always admired Mitch and Steph, their relationship was one that was the definition of two people who fit together seamlessly, and made the choice to make it work between them. It wasn’t a fairytale or a whirlwind, it was real and raw and you couldn’t be happier as you laid in that hotel bed, dress and makeup still on, half-drunk from the overpriced cocktails that the boys kept flowing after they crashed the bachelorette party, that two of your closest friends were getting married in just two days. 

“God, I know. Is it weird I’m not nervous about it at all?” Steph called from around the corner. You stood up, your feet slightly throbbing from being in heels all night and your mind feeling a bit fuzzy from the drinks as you rounded the corner and saw her taking off her makeup in the mirror. 

“No, you and Mitch are just right, ya know? It works.” You looked at her hand, eyes shifting to the diamond sitting perfectly on her ring finger, sparkly and bright and perfect for her. You grabbed your phone from the counter where you had left it earlier in the evening, not wanting to bring it out with you while you and the girls celebrated with Steph. You looked at the home screen, a small notification catching your eye as you unlocked the phone and hit play on the voicemail. Steph grabbed the phone from your hand, a knowing smile on her face as she turned the volume on the speaker up, William’s voice filling the small hallway before you had the chance to stop it. 

“Hey baby, you’re probably back in the room by now. I just wanted to say that you looked amazing tonight, and I know we can’t be together tonight because of the traditions and all that, but I love you and will be thinking of you.” 

Steph handed you the phone back, a stupid smirk evident on her face that you were pretending to ignore. You went back toward your suitcase, sliding the dress off of your body and throwing on one of Willy’s old sweatshirts and a pair of shorts. You sat on the bed, fingers hovering over your phone as you thought of a message to type back to your boyfriend, a smile lingering on your cheeks from his message. 

“You know what he said to me the night he met you? Granted, he was shitfaced, but I still think it’s relevant.” Steph smirked as she came around the corner, crawling onto the other side of the bed and turning to face you. You rolled your eyes at her and set your phone down, ignoring her slightly as she started speaking again,

“He told me ‘I’m gonna marry her one day Stephanie, just wait.’” 

You let yourself cry over that memory, and for the first time since the breakup, you realized that you were worse off without him, that you had ended something entirely too good for reasons you didn’t understand. You picked up the phone to call more times than you could count, only to set it back down again, torturing yourself with the idea that you had made your decision, and you needed to lay with it.

You were in such a daze when he walked up to you, nerves settling into your stomach at the sight of him. He didn’t look like your Willy anymore, he looked like a hollow version of the man you still were hopelessly in love with, the one that you ultimately played the biggest hand in breaking. You followed him without a word when he asked you if you could talk because the truth was that you would follow William anywhere if it meant that maybe you could get a piece of him back. 

It was awkward for a few moments, both of you riddled with nerves, wondering who was going to dare to break first and say what they were truly thinking about. It was agonizing, being so close to him for the first time in such a long time, and it only made your own doubts about leaving him to come back to your chest in full force. William grabbed your hand quickly, threading his fingers through yours before finally speaking, being the first one to crack the eggshells that you were both walking on. 

“Do you sleep well without me? Because I don’t. I don’t think I’ve slept since June when you left.” He said, head hanging down as if the words he was speaking were in some way shameful. Your heart wanted to break for him because you had been in the same situation for so long, nights feeling long and empty without him there. But part of you was almost feeling some weird sense of satisfaction at knowing he was hurting just as badly as you. You weren’t surprised he dove right in, head first. It was what he always did. He had known you for so long, there wasn’t a point in dancing around saying he missed you now that he had the chance to tell you so, he had already been doing enough to push it away on his own. He didn’t want to keep pushing something that he was starting to realize wasn’t meant to go away. 

“No, willy. I haven’t slept well since we broke up.” You shook your head, opting to tell the truth because up until this point, lying to pretend you were fine had only left you empty, with a broken heart that you didn’t know how to heal. 

“I stayed up until 6 am just because at least then if I called you might be awake. I felt like I was watching myself just get worse and worse, and all I wanted was you. I’m not supposed to want you anymore, William.” 

“I would have answered, I would always answer.” 

“It’s not the same, you know it’s not.” William sighed softly at your words as he let them run in tedious circles through his head. He had spent the better part of the last six months missing you and replaying the events from the summer wondering if you were both wrong for what had happened. Your love story had been like a journey by train, exciting when you’re young and tiring when you get older. It was great until one of you, who could even remember who at this point, had gotten off during a stop and the other one continued on the journey alone and by the time you both reached the final destination, the two different trips couldn’t merge into one anymore. But the problem was that maybe the final destination was all wrong, maybe you were supposed to get off the train because now you could come back together and start a different trip together, one that isn’t tiring when you’re older. 

He looked over at you quickly and let his eyes linger on the features of your face, the ones he used to have memorized hidden by the obvious toll the breakup had taken on you, too. He couldn’t help but think about how if he were to take one look in a mirror that he had been avoiding for the past six months, he probably wouldn’t recognize himself either. 

“I tried to call you,” he started, voice tentative and unsure as you turned to look at him. Your eyes were blurry, and your mind nearly blacked out at the five words he just spoke. Five words that maybe could change everything, or perhaps they would have if you had seen the call in the first place. You tilted your head softly as William ran his hand through his hair. 

“But, your voicemail was full.” You looked away from him, the pain in your chest creeping back in as you took in his second set of five words. Your voicemail, the one that had been filled with messages from him, from times where you were happy, and from drunken nights after the breakup where he sometimes would call and all you would hear on the other end was silence. 

“I couldn’t bring myself to delete them, I just wanted a place where I would be able to hear your voice and have it be just for me,” you smiled sadly, letting the tears blur your vision as you stood up. You didn’t know what to do, this all felt suffocating and overwhelming and yet definitive at the same time. This was it, you were either getting William back, or you were letting him go forever. The choice should have been a simple one and yet it was almost more complicated than the initial choice to breakup had been because at least when you did that, you both thought it was what you wanted. Now you were presented with either putting your heart out in the open, tossing it carefully to the person you had known for so long and putting your trust in him to catch it, or you were running the risk of him dropping it and leaving you crumbled on the floor as you tried to pick up the remnants of whatever would be left after a fumble that big. 

“I spent Christmas without you, please don’t make me spend New Years without you, too.” 

“I don’t want to spend any day without you again.” You whispered, resting your hand on his cheek. William smiled at you and pulled you close into his chest. He tilted your head up and connected his lips to yours, something that you both had spent the last six months missing. You settled into him, feeling your fears melt with each moment that passed. The breakup had left heartache in both of you, but it was necessary to put your real love into permanent ink on both of your chests. A new start, one without heartbreak and with a new tattoo. 

[shimakaze-revivalism]

alright.

i made dawn's acquaintance shortly before leaving on a trip to visit my longtime girlfriend sybil and my girlfriend jackie, who at the time i'd known for less than two months. i had been very isolated, both before this time and during it. at sybil’s prompting, i had recently joined a server run by bryn, the first community i had been a part of in a very long time. i met jackie there, and she had been the first person i'd talked to at length besides sybil for about two years. i first messaged dawn to clarify something i'd seen her say:

"Which deaths matter: Those killed by their partners, or those dying alone in garages full of carbon monoxide, with nooses around their necks, with excess drugs in their systems?

Of course all kinds of transfeminine people are at risk of both kinds of death, but we know that the proportions between demographics differ. We also know who makes the news and who dies alone."

this was a patently ridiculous thing to say. i knew that at the time, and her noncommittal yet revealing explanations further confirmed it. she went on to map out her trans-lesbianism-moralizing stance, implicitly, evasively equating nonwhite death by transmisogynistic violence with white transmisogyny-fuelled suicide, blah blah. i let it pass, valuing interpersonal civility as i did at the time, and hoping to make friends by default.

i mention this because it would set the tone for our dealings from then on.

we developed a fairly active friendship. beginning from early on in our relationship, dawn took great care to emphasize the existential gulf between our embodiments, never quite laying it bare, but making it clear that she was uniquely disadvantaged as compared to myself, who was, in turn, uniquely privileged over her. i should state plainly and crudely for clarity's sake that i am a mentally ill chinese trans woman dropout, who was, at the time, underweight and extremely isolated. i would continue to be those things, sometimes increasingly, throughout the course of our relationship. dawn is white and transfeminine.

also beginning from early on in our relationship was her insistence that i never make reference to jackie's and my relationship, which she also applied to jackie. this was enforced through negative reaction (harshly scolding me, blocking me for days, then acting as if nothing had happened). this was, ostensibly, due to her unreciprocated desire for jackie to be her girlfriend. i would say that it is a very irresponsible rule to impose upon someone who spoke regularly to 3 people in the world. it's worth noting that dawn did not impose this same rule upon bryn regarding her relationship with jackie, for reasons unclear to me.

dawn would often voice her grievances with jackie; her erratic availability for commitments, irregular response times to messages, refusal to enter into a codified romantic relationship; once, the fact that jackie had failed to do something sexual when dawn wanted her to. my girlfriend became an entity i couldn't fawn over, save for platonically, but one who i must always be ready to accept criticism of. you can imagine that this was not conducive to the honeymoon period of a young relationship, not that i would fault dawn for this particular action, in isolation.

along the way, i started wanting a codified romantic relationship with dawn. this made it difficult for me when dawn would constantly talk about how attractive various people in her life were and how virtuously they conducted themselves interpersonally and sexually. of course these are natural and normally innocuous things to talk about, but the frequency was very high, often coincided with vulnerable periods for me, and often felt pointed. once i said something to dawn about how i cared about her and was worried that i was a diversion to her. she chose to tell me that she had just got done having the same conversation with someone else.

dawn bemoaned her lack of partner(s). the fact that i was partnered, as most of her friends were, was something i was made to feel a lot of guilt over. my relationship status was one of the things that she made clear set us apart, made us unequal. i heavily internalised the message: dawn was a traumatized, mentally ill, isolated, alienated, pitiable girl (and i wasn't).

in july of 2019, i had been flippant about the difficulty for the game master in balancing the mechanics of the tabletop rpg monster of the week, and responded excessively flippantly to her explanations. (consulting the logs to write this post filled me with anger on behalf of the girl that i was at the time; an anger she didn’t know she was entitled to). i won’t claim that it wasn’t wrong for me to behave that way, i will just say that i apologised as soon as she expressed that i had upset her. she took the chance to re-emphasize how i was a hurtful, maladjusted person, and responded to my apology by once again defining me into the category that her abusers and oppressors occupied. 

two weeks after that, i was in the middle of an involved babysitting session which i couldn't feasibly take a break from when dawn told me that she had decided to sever ties. we had a short, nominally-civil discussion. i swallowed everything, apologized to the end for whatever infinite wrongdoing i was guilty of. i couldn't process what was happening quickly enough. before i could absorb it, we'd said goodbye and i had been rather unceremoniously blocked on discord. i needed so badly to cry, to scream and clutch myself. but, like i said, babysitting. less than 3 hours after this happened, after I'd had some time to myself to absorb it, i sent her a single tumblr ask; a parting shot that i’d been denied. a desperate, manic attempt to feel real, to feel like i was my own person, she would smugly make her smoking gun of my boundary violating behaviour. that was the last i ever contacted her. 

after her severing ties, my isolation was heightened, particularly within the shared space of bryn’s server. i stopped participating, and soon left. how could i act normally and joke about video games when i shared a space with someone i wasn’t supposed to be around? would it be a violation of boundaries to riff off something she said? to express affection for my girlfriend who she still talked to? and what was the point? i didn’t know anyone else particularly well, and these were some of the women who i was so much less interesting and virtuous than. 

i never talked about dawn to anyone besides sybil or jackie until now, when she made a post featuring screenshots of my blog and then publicizing my 8 month old tumblr ask. such was the extent of my poisoning her friends against her. bryn and her girlfriend took issue with dawn’s mistreatment of them for reasons entirely separate from myself, and certainly not at my prompting.

for my part, seeing friends of jackie’s reblog from dawn and seeing them in the notes of her posts about me has been intensely paranoia-inducing, primarily due to the escalating severity and danger of the charges that she began to lay against me in these posts.

that’s about it. thanks.

--

tldr, dawn is a white transfem and i’m a chinese transfem. we were both very isolated and new to bryn’s server, began a friendship during which she positioned me as being essentially different and more privileged than her, grouped me with her oppressors and abusers, and undermined my relationships, including with my girlfriend who i’d only recently met. after the relationship ended, she effectively barred me from the only community i had, and later started alluding to me being a predator.

also check out these excerpts, both from the same post she made:

[theorynexus]

The 30th One: In Which ROMANCE Is Discussed

That is an interesting effect that I have not heard of happening in real life~

This is definitely a conversation that I thought they’d have had before, but I guess those three just like repeating stuff, based on what’s been said before. I am not opposed to some useful exposition to the audience about things that we have missed for the sake of also demonstrating that Jade is constantly pushing for the development of their romance, which had been said but not shown, earlier~

And yet trolls have been talking about this with humans nearly as far back as their formal reveal (I don’t want to pinpoint the exact moment it began, considering all the skipping around from different temporal perspectives that was going around at the time), and humans in real life have been discussing troll romance+using it as a way to discuss romance in other series/franchises from nearly the point it was properly explained. Be a big boy, Karkat, and don’t treat these guys as if they don’t already know possibly far too much about the topic. (Not to mention the fact that I’m sure that you know that they know about it, you derp head!)

I do quite appreciate the idea of them being special enough to each other that it goes beyond the norms and/or labels of traditional romance in either culture, considering the lore relating to the Ancestor Trolls (particularly the Signless, and his own suppose matesprit). Karkat being Dave’s Karkat, and Dave being Karkat’s Dave sort of works toward that logic being fulfilled. On the other hand, I feel somewhat conflicted insofar as this could suggest that Dave still has a bit in the way of hangups concerning perceived “homosexual behavior,” which I thought that he had gotten over by this point. As such, this could be interpreted as character regression.   I, personally, think that it seems pretty natural: while a character might have epiphanies, sometimes it is hard to put what one mentally realizes at one point into practice, and therefor to so cement it in one’s mind and being. It’s also quite rational if one or both of them feared potentially hurting their relationship by pushing things too far.  Most importantly, though: they don’t have to push things into a more physical direction if they don’t have to. Relationships between loving and consenting individuals don’t necessarily have to be restricted/oriented to societal norms/expectations. If they are fine with bonding in other ways, then that is fine. Jade does not necessarily overstep by bringing up these sorts of questions, though, especially considering what she’s feeling, and how things are between them. It makes a great deal of sense for someone in her situation to question and see if things can be properly laid out/codified/disambiguated. 

I do like that Karkat brings that line of thought up. Also, I would just like to say: friendship does not necessarily need to stop at the borders of romance. Romantic partners, optimally, should have been friends to begin with, and that friendship should continue after the beginning of a relationship that extends into romantic territory. (On a related note: Before the scientific drives that humans began exhibiting in earnest around the mid 1800s took hold, friendships had a capacity to be much deeper than they often are today, as well, to the point that it was quite normal and even expected that a person would have a bond deeper than the one that would be shared with one’s sexual partner [read: husband/wife, in most circumstances, for having lovers outside of marriage was not anywhere near as accepted at the time, with the exception of kings/queens and perhaps the higher tiers of nobility-- because it pays to be powerful, I guess] with one or more of the dearest companions that one possessed. It is honestly sort of a shame that sexual drives and fulfilling them have become such a big part of modern culture. Honestly, that may detract from the formation of deeper and more fulfilling relationships.) Honestly, I really do understand Karkat’s frustration, here. He comes from a society where intimate relationships are not related to or restricted by gender/sex at all, so it remaining a bit confusing that the concept of “gay” keeps being brought up (even if it does not necessarily persist as something that is relevant on that planet; I am not certain: it’s left as ambiguous whether this is sortof a hang-up that Jade has, or if it continues to be used in society at large) is something to be expected.  I’m sure that part of the reason they are “Dave and Karkat” is as a sort of compromise. The two of them likely don’t want to have to deal with labeling what they are, in order to avoid the perceived weird interactions between human and troll notions of romance.

Oh, she was still wearing glasses. For some reason, “lenses” made me think of contact lenses. Must be a bit too early in the morning. 

Hey, you can have a whole lot of fun staying in. Regardless:  I guess I sortof understand what Jade means, there. She wanted to potentially experience what it might be like, even if she couldn’t get Karkat and Dave to make the dive with her. It makes it out like she was using the two chess people as stand-ins, which is rather cruel, honestly, but at the same time, I know that people who are desperate can potentially do things that otherwise might not seem too rational (such as pursuing a relationship outside of the one she really wants). It’s not too crazy, and I’m quite surprised that Karkat seems surprised by this. I guess maybe he convinced himself that that meant Jade had given up, for a while.

I do wonder if this is meant to suggest if Karkat is entirely uncomfortable with a polyamorous relationship (which could be a little weird to some extent, considering a troll being involved in one is honestly rather normal, though I guess it’s not necessarily super common, given the difficulties in balancing relationships that were associated with such an arrangement?), or if it’s just that he’s worried that Jade is a bit too flaky, and needs more experience being in a stable relationship before he’s comfortable “risking things” by including her. ... Oh, and Dave using flash step to dodge his wrist being grabbed was pretty hilarious.

I thought the expected limit was four. Hmm.  That said: accidentally, huh?  Heh. I wonder how much this is intended as continued flirtation on Jade’s part. I’m sure she understands the concepts of kismesisitude quite well enough to put that kind of effort/pressure into things (particularly under the lens that she seems to be interpreting the two of them as being flushed, rather than pale in relations, meaning that having a third person as a pitched partner could be considered optimal, assuming a set of three was all that was included, here).

A very valid question!   And also one that is very funny to see the reaction to.

***laughs hysterically***    (On a random note:  Dog hormones were previously mentioned as being a thing that she deals with.  This makes me question if she is in fact in heat right at the moment... which is a really weird thing to be bringing up in analysis of someone who at least used to be a human being, but, really, is made somewhat necessary here. I don’t even know how to begin properly guessing whether or not that’s the case, though, so I guess this is probably about where the inquiry must stop: wondering.)

This is an extremely strange and silly conversation. ***wonders if this is about to cause mention of the Sufferer, or if the obvious comparison and possible in-story inspiration for/with Jesus is going to be ignored***

***begins to laugh like Karkat, especially as a result of the Problem Sleuth reference***

[drkoestersmithrpg]

This SHOULD be what I post tomorrow.  Perils

Inside the shower there was little talking.  Not that Tony was distant, he was just as affectionate in the shower as always.  Affectionate, and exhausted.  At one point he dropped the bar of soap and looked around for it, baffled, without actually looking down.

“Tony, when was the last time you slept?”

Giving up on the soap, Tony stood under the spray, looking up to think as he rinsed off.  “I was pushing 20 hours when I got on the plane.  I was working – I figured I’d sleep when I got home.  But then I got your note.”

“But that was last night…oh god….”

Peter picked up the soap and finished lathering up the man, then rinsed him off.   Then shampooed his hair and rinsed that off too.  Tony allowed it all with an amused but gentle look. Finally Peter was satisfied and led him out of the shower to towel him off.  Tony smiled silently, appreciative.  Still, the silence worried Peter.  Now they talked during sex, and that was good.  But did that mean they wouldn’t talk after?

They dried off in the absurdly large bathroom, then Tony took Peter by the hand and led him back to the bed.  He gently pushed Peter to lay down on his with a solid hand in the center of his chest.  Then he laid beside him, hand still on his chest, and looked into his face.

“You scare the absolute shit out of me, Peter Parker,” he whispered.  

“I…what?  What does that mean?”

“You wanted me to keep my mouth closed during sex – so I was safe then.  But then you wanted me to talk when I went down on you but mostly I couldn’t say more than yes or no because my mouth was full.  But now you want me to talk when my mouth isn’t full and that’s just dangerous.  Very very dangerous.”

“I don’t understand.  What…what are you going to say?  Where are you going?”

Tony was sitting up and looking very alarmed.  

“Tony, what’s wrong?”

“Oh shit.  Oh god.” His eyes were wide and he was looking around the room in horror.  “I messed up, I sat up to go drink.  You’re usually asleep by now.  Oh god this is it, is this it?  This is it, isn’t it?”

“This is…what?  Tony you’re not making any sense.”

“This is when I say the thing, and you leave.”

“The thing?  Tony…”

The man was sitting, completely naked, on the side of the bed, his feet on the floor, and his shoulders were beginning to rise and fall as his breath quickened.  Peter scooted up to him, slipping both legs and around him and wrapping an arm around the shaking man’s body, and combing fingers through his hair.  

“Your sleep deprivation is disrupting the connection between your amygdala and your medial prefrontal cortex…I appreciate that it’s making you very open right now but you’re also talking crazy.  What “thing” are you going to say to me to make me leave?  I know all your secrets.

“I know your Secret Identity; the whole world knows.

“And I know you like guys.  And you like bottoming sometimes – so hot times for me.  What do you think…hey…”  But Tony was standing and walking, unsteadily out the door.

“You have got to stop saying cryptic things and leaving the room!”  Peter demanded as he followed him, again, into the bathroom.  There he found Tony sitting on the love seat, gripping the edge with his hands, eyes wide.

“For godssakes what is this terrible confession??  Are you seeing someone else?”

Tony looked up him suddenly, so disgusted that Peter immediately apologized.  He climbed into Tony’s lap, linked his hands around the back of his neck, and spoke gently.

“Ok…ok.  You… have a crazy wife hidden somewhere in the penthouse and that’s why we can’t get married…no?  Your crazy first wife IS dead, but your equally-crazy MAID wants me to believe she’s still alive and in the last act she’ll burn the house down.  Soylent Green is people?  Come on, throw me a bone…I’m out of movies here Tony.”

Tony opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

“Ok, ok, ok.”  Peter racked his brain, tried to think about what parts of Tony’s life he didn’t know about. “Do you have an illegitimate son my age?” he ventured.

“Oh my god are you my father?  No, no, you’re right, that’s too Star Wars.  Ok, I’m out.  Please tell me what the thing is so we can just get some sleep.”

“How can you have dated me for a year and still not figure this out yet?” Tony shouted, or tried to shout.  His voice was breathless and broken.  “You want me to take off my armor and strip away the sarcasm and the humor and what’s left?  There’s nothing here but me.  And I’m not good enough for you!  You are the best thing that’s ever happened to me and I’m going to screw it up some day and say the one thing that makes you leave and there’s nothing I can do to stop that, and I’m an utter coward and I can’t live like this much longer Pete!”

He had Peter by the waist and had lifted him up, or tried to, and was now gesturing by shaking Peter’s body, weakly, back and forth. Peter easily broke away from his grip and pulled him close, stroking his head.  (Tony struggled, but what was he going to do?  He was sitting naked in his bathroom with a lapful of the Strongest Avenger.)

“So…wait…the thing you’re afraid of saying is…”

“The last straw.  I won’t know what it is until I say it.  But I will say it, Pete, I’ll say it and you’ll walk out on me and that will be the end of me.”

“Oh god.  This is just…existential angst?  Oh Tony, everyone has that.  Well, I imagine yours is epic…you could never do anything halfway.”  He kissed Tony’s head before he let go.

“Ok, I get it,” he said as gently as possible, stroking the man’s hair away from his face.  “You’re a superhero with super-sized angst.  I’ll give you that.  But you’re not a coward.  No more than I am.  I’ve spent all night trying to work up the nerve to…actually I’ve been working up the nerve for months to tell you this…”

Peter let his hands drop to his thighs.  He leaned back (as far as he could, sitting on Tony’s lap) and took a deep breath.

“Tony, we’ve got to stop trying to read each other’s minds.  Because we both suck at it.  I mean we do it great on the training fields at the compound and, ok, we do it really well in the lab together but wow, when we try to do it in this relationship?  We suck.

“You’re afraid to say the one thing that makes me leave and I can’t work up the gumption to ask you for anything, your eyes get angry and your nose does this little sniffle thing when you’re about to get really mad and suddenly I shut up for fear for getting kicked out the tower and never being asked back.  Do you realize in all this time we’ve never had an argument, ever?  We’ve never even had angrysex.  You’re right, this isn’t sustainable.  We need to make a decision.

“I had a very elaborate plan to get into your pants and it worked.  But I had no plans after that.  I had no idea you’d invite me back, or keep inviting me.  But it’s been nearly a year, Tony.  I need to know.  Are we…a thing?  Are you my boyfriend —partner -- significant-hero – whatever?  

“Because, if we are, Tony, then we can argue. You can say ‘the thing’ that pisses me off and I’ll get mad and yell at you, and then I’ll come back.  Like a couple.  The way couples do.”

“But what if you don’t?  No, baby, no.  It’s too much to risk…”

“Excuse me?

“Anthony Stark, the very weekend I announced that I was 20 years old and Gay was the same weekend of the Capture the Flag game. Do you remember?  You said my team won because I was pretending the flag was a giant dildo – in the shape of Fury’s penis.  

“Do you really think you can say something that would piss me off more than that?!

“Tony, Nat told me that dating you would be hard work, and she was right.  It is hard work, but it is worth it.  But we need to be working on it together and we can’t do that if we don’t admit that it’s happening!  If we are together, if we are a couple, if we are our own 2-Man Superfriends team…then you can say ‘the thing’ and, yes, it might piss me off but I’ll still be back.

“No, I mean it, I’ll prove it,” he said in a gentler tone. He took Tony’s face and leaned it back to look up into his.  “Open your mouth right now and say the most offensive thing you can think of, and I’ll prove to you it won’t make me leave.”

Tony blinked up into his face.  He looked stunned and helpless and fearful.  But all he said is “Your generation is too sensitive and you make it impossible to joke about anything.”

Peter’s lifted his eyes to the ceiling as he considered the statement.  Then he nodded.

“Ok.  Well,”

He patted Tony’s cheeks.  Then he squeezed his face a little between his hands as he said “And your generation was so homophobic you codified it so deeply into your language you don’t even realize when you’re being horrible, so I guess we’re even.

“Now that’s it – we’re official.  We are a couple, and we can officially get into fights now.

“Besides – that way we can have makeup sex.”

He kissed Tony firmly on the forehead and then sat back on Tony’s lap, smiling, proud of himself and what he had said out loud.

But his pride was somewhat dampened when he saw Tony’s pained face.   “I’m toasting self destruction but I have no scotch which is too bad because this is going to be legendary,” Tony whispered, and Peter’s shoulders sank.

“Oh god.  You’re so sleep deprived you’re incoherent.  Are you even going to remember this conversation in the morning?”

“I have no idea,” Tony said quietly, looking around the room as if he had never seen it before.  “Wait, c’mere.  I want to tell you something.”

Tony pushed himself free of Peter’s body and stood, taking him by the hand and leading him back to the bed.  This time he had Peter sit up in the bed with his back against the headboard.  Tony lay himself lengthwise alongside the headboard, his head in Peter’s lap.  Once he got comfortable he started to speak.

“A famous man once said, "We create our own demons.”  Do you know who said that?”

“No.  But let me get my phone and I’ll look it up.  Or you could just ask FRIDAY.”

“Nevermind.  I’m going to tell you a story.  It started in Burns Switzerland in 1999, Christ were you even born yet?  The good old days.   I never thought they'd come back to bite me.”

* * * * * * * * * * * *

 He talked for two hours.  It would have been less but Peter asked many questions (but not as many as he wanted.  He put aside a dozen topics he was planning on googling later.)  He had heard many versions of the story, of how Dr. Killian had been the American behind the Mandarin attacks and the destruction of Tony’s house in Malibu, but he had never heard the story from Tony himself.

They changed positions many times, from the Psychiatrist-Couch position to spooning to sitting up on the bed to back to the Psychiatrist-Couch position (but reversed.)  Tony was just getting to the part where War Machine had saved the life of the Vice President when Peter stood, brought him a pair of boxer shorts, donned a pair himself, took him by the hand and led him to the kitchen.

“It’s 5 in the morning,” he announced.  “Time for breakfast.  If I get some food into you maybe I can get you to sleep.  But not until you finish your story.  I’m still trying to figure out how dissing a nerd in an elevator at a New Years Eve party made YOU to blame when he refrigerated your personal assistant.”

“Well…she was my girlfriend at the time.”

“That makes it better, not worse Tony.  We’re making omelets now.”

Tony obeyed.  “What does ‘refrigerate’ mean?” he asked, his head in the fridge.

“I’ll explain later.  I appreciate the connections you’re trying to make here, Tony, I do, but I don’t think this is as circular as you think it is.  Lots of rich people didn’t invest in AIM’s screwed-up think tank. He didn’t torture all their girlfriends.”

“But it was…it is.  Circular.  I made the demons myself…”

“No, sorry, not buying it.  I Was Rejected By Tony Stark In An Elevator?

“Worst.  Villain. Backstory.  Ever.”

“You know, I told this story, all of it, to Bruce,” Tony later admitted as they ate their omelets.  “He fell asleep early on.”

“Bruce?  The guy who had to be a hermit is as his main survival skill for, like, ages?  Bruce is a good man, but he’s not a good friend. I just mean he has a lot of guilt and pain in his life.  Not much room to invest in someone else’s.”

They discussed Bruce and the other Avengers as they moved the dishes into the sink.  But before they headed back to bed Tony pulled Peter into his arms and held him close.

“You’re the only one on the planet, now, who knows this story,” he whispered.

“Well, yeah, that makes sense,” Peter said with a tired grin.

“I am your boyfriend.”

[veridium]

Writer’s note on “A Detour, pt 2″ and Sex Matters

Hello demons, it’s me, ya boy femme goblin!

As I’m hoping some of you have noticed, the chapter wherein #Theiaphine goes to a new level of intimacy has gone live. As I was originally writing it, I spent a lot of time contemplating how I wanted to write and express this particular moment in their relationship. Indeed, when I first started writing them in the first place, one of my first creative questions for myself was how I was going to go about the “sex” thing.

In the process, I decided it would be best to accompany the posting of the chapter with a little blurb from me, and how my personal experiences have helped shape this fic. It’s a lot of my rambling on about my personal outlook on writing wlw and/or queer head canons, fictions, etc. so, be warned lol.

CW: discussion of sex, intimacy, queer experiences, etc.

When I did my first couple play-throughs of DA:I and I romanced Josephine, it occurred to me just how much fans’ adage that she was the “Disney Princess” of the universe was true. Her LI plotline was endearing, safe (by that I mean in comparison to the more perilous and complicated LI plotlines, a la a certain elf apostate). It was also very docile, and pretty PG in scope, save for one dialogue option you have in the Arbor Wilds where you suggest to her in passing that your Inquisitor and her will have some “private celebration” of victory later.

All-in-all, I am happy with how Josephine is constructed as a character, and just how much she brings to the table in terms of dimensions of the women in Thedas. I love her very much, as I’m sure you’ve gathered by my excessive exploration of a romance head canon between her and my f!Inquisitor Trevelyan.

That being said, when writing an explicit romance fic, I was kind of overwhelmed at just how to play the “sex” thing, given that it had been systematically dodged in the canon of the game. How would she react to the suggestion of intimacy with another woman? How would she adjust and change with the progression of a courtship into that space? Also, who was my character, and how would she handle all that alongside her?

For help, I spent some time reflecting on my own life experiences and those my friends have discussed with me. I identify as a genderqueer femme (she/her/they/them), but when I came out many years ago, I identified as a cis woman who was attracted to other women.

The one thing I did know for sure was, there was no way in hell their first sexual encounter was going to be perfect, or other-worldly, or seamless. I wanted it to be lovely and reflect the passion they have, but, not through perfection.

My first sexual experience with another woman was with one who shared my anatomy, and even though we had that commonality, I quickly learned just how daunting it is to love someone else sexually when your whole life has been groomed to be palatable to the “opposite” sex. I was raised to anticipate being deflowered and passive, and not to engage in egalitarian exchanges of needs, wants, and desires.

It was during that time that I realized just how little I knew about my own body, my own tastes, and what gratified me. I was a stranger to my own body, my own sexual proclivities, with the goal of being malleable to someone else -- a cishet man, preferably.

In writing Theiaphine, I injected some of that resentment and clarity into Theia, as she realizes she has no experience with intimacy. She feels overwhelmed and insecure, but as time goes on that inner anger she feels at her situation propels her forward into the great unknown. She doesn’t have a clue, but that won’t stop her. She also experiences life as a rebel Mage, and before that one in a captive Circle, and there are few opportunities for a traditional upbringing through puberty -- she does not learn of it from a doting mother, or a caring older sister. She learns via the scorned and resolute wisdom of other women in the Circle, who satiate themselves as a way of preserving some sense of control over their own bodies.

This juxtaposes Josephine, a noble woman who is sophisticated and groomed all her life to be a hallmark of class and virtue. She is not the archetypal virgin -- very few women, if any, are in the universe of Thedas -- but she does not akin her sexuality to controversial survival in the way Theia does. 

Instead, she reflects another side of who I felt I was, and indeed who many of my friends were in their initial years of being out, wherein you save face and look like you know what you’re doing, and wait for the situation to become trustworthy enough to divulge your lack of knowledge. She spends the initial time they share being enamored and self-preserving, keeping the dynamic within a premise she feels confident in: persuasive politics, tactful rhetoric, exchanges of wit. Theia’s personality is complimentary to this, which is why it is a successful convergence at first.

But Josephine takes that mindset and codifies sexual intimacy as a point of no return in many respects, even as she is has a hard time coming to terms with it. This mentality reflects her lifelong training in judging, controlling, and interpreting exchanges of power between people. Brokering her goals along with her emotions proves very difficult for her, and Theia does not relate. For Theia, a relationship is a relationship, but for Josephine it is a collaboration of agency and independence.

You’re probably wondering why this all is involved in a discussion of smut fanfic. To me, though, writing wlw stories, or queer storylines -- not to say they are intrinsically queer, but rather that they are constructed by queer creators -- means that you have to parlay the consequences of what you’re working with in order to write what you want people to see, feel, and observe within your narrative. I know I sound like I’m taking it way too seriously, but as someone who has hungered for so long to see narratives that I can relate to and feel affirmed by, (only to be sent into distress by queerbaiting, bury-your-gays tropes, and heartbreaking fallouts) I can proudly say that I do, in fact, taking creating these stories quite seriously and without apology.

Which brings me to my next and final point about this particular Episode. In the midst of their embrace, Theia offers to show Josephine quite literally how she would be most gratified. She takes the opportunity to do something that I have personally experienced with other sexual partners: a learning experience, a collaboration between two bodies that are eager to understand one another. Thinking about those encounters, I have realized just how invaluable they are for these primary (but not only) reasons:

1. Synchronicity in sex is so important, and when you have bodies that society tells you do not belong to you first and foremost, an expression of agency and self-awareness is a vital act of reclamation. Even in Thedas, were formally gender is not a dichotomous relationship of power, there are underpinnings of social norms wherein women are taken advantage of, used, and resented for their power and autonomy. 

2. Sex for the first time is not perfect, seamless, and without missteps. There, I said it. You’re awkward, you’re self-conscious, and you slide some limbs into some weird positions and you get over-eager. One of my biggest pet peeves with people who write books professionally is when they write their characters with this universal intuition about sex and their first encounter with an LI just seems to go SO PERFECTLY WELL AND EVERYONE ORGASMS AND DOES NOT FEEL WEIRD AT ALL. 

I wish more people would realize just how valuable it can be to depict characters who don’t know what they are doing, or are out of their element, or don’t directly accomplish what they want so badly to do. It adds nuance to the character’s traits and goals, to have them fumble or backtrack out of pivotal life experiences at first.

Also, as someone with a clitoris and a labia -- those things are sensitive. And by sensitive, I mean: cold hands, rough nail edges, dry and calloused skin, pointing a finger instead of pressing, multiple or one finger, WHICH finger, level of arousal, level of lubrication, humidity in the air -- these are ALL factors I have had to contend with and my peers with them can back me up on many, if not all, of them as well.

3. One of the most prevalent things I see in writing wlw and/or queer sex is the immediate designation of who is top and who is bottom. Now, I am all for people having these dynamics and getting gratification from them. That being said, it’s also okay to be playful with it as a trope, which is codified in heteronormative sex roles in a lot of writing. I think in Josephine’s characterization specifically, we all kind of assume “bottom, wayyy bottom, bottomless pit of bottom.” She’s a lady, she’s poised, she’s feminine. Theia wears pants and drinks ale = top? Okay, but no. We need to rethink what character markers we put into place when we designate top/bottom dynamics.

Is Josephine’s overt femininity enough to make her a bottom? Yes, and no.

Is Theia’s assertiveness and extroverted nature enough to make her a top? Yes, and no.

The point is that you have to give characters the imbued agency to decide that, and not to simply be in sync with the trope you’re utilizing. Theia is assertive in bed, but she’s also bashful and insecure, and she is very focused on making Josephine feel comfortable. Why not tell that story, instead of showing a heavy-handed top trope? Josephine is sensitive and compassionate, but she is also very driven and spirited. Why not show how she tries to make sense of it while exposing a side of herself for the first time ever, instead of showing a heavy-handed bottom trope?

Instead of signifying top/bottom as a binary, I see it as a collaborative exchange of action and trust. When Theia invites Josephine to sit on top of her, I feel like she defies the momentum built around her assertiveness on the surface level, because even as I wrote it I was like “there’s no way in hell Theia will not want to top.” But, that desire cannot overlook what Josephine wants or who she is. Josephine is her equal, her peer, her colleague, her advisor -- to merely relegate her to a trope of benign femininity is a disservice. Theia defers to her as much as she seeks to protect her.

So, TL;DR: writing this chapter was incredibly important to me because it represents my outlook on the potential for writing wlw storylines and/or queer storylines, not as replications of the tropes we are held against in real life, but for illuminating just how much we inhabit grey areas in our everyday lives. Our characters are created from us, from our minds, and thus they are irrevocably connected to our material and emotional conditions. There is great joy to be had in bending the rules, exploring “what if’s,” and showing another dimension to a trope or stereotype.

I also want to make clear: my perspective is not the pinnacle, nor universal experience of all people with vaginas/queer people/sexual people, etc. This is from my sole experience and what I have chosen to invest of myself into my own writing. I welcome and celebrate other opinions and experiences, and hope that instead of refining “the truth,” we expand its possibilities.

Thank you for reading my very long and arbitrary rant, and I hope you are doing well. Love and Light,

K

[jefferyryanlong]

Fresh Listen - Aura Bora, Was (Bandcamp, 2017)

(Some pieces of recorded music operate more like organisms than records. They live, they breathe, they reproduce. Fresh Listen is a periodic review of recently and not-so-recently released albums that crawl among us like radioactive spiders, gifting us with superpowers from their stingers.)

It takes a particular kind of genius to compose a great rock lyric. It doesn’t require a great lyricist, per se. Dylan could certainly toss off a snappy non-sequitur once in a while (See “From a Buick 6″), but mostly had the tendency to spiral into dreamscape, or invoke the meter and imagery of the Bible. And sometimes he would just goof off on “I love you, you love me, goin’ down the sugar tree” pop song dumbness. 

Paul Simon’s words, on the other hand, seem sweated from the self-consciousness of an English Lit “A” student with a subscription to The New Yorker and an obsession with figuring crossword puzzles form the Times. Joni Mitchell is too great a Poet in the big “P” sense of the word, too mellifluous and refined, to lumped in with inane and insignificant rock music-word writers, though after a joint or two she might let her hair down and “wreck her stockings in some jukebox dive.” 

Even Chuck Berry, who more or less codified the aesthetics of a great rock and roll lyric, was perhaps too evolved a wordsmith for the genre he helped invent. Even though, for presumably commercial reasons, he became fixated on the afternoon minutiae of teenage hi-jinks, his great songs are truly great, by any genre’s measuring cup. “Memphis, Tennessee” is essentially a short story with an unexpected and heartbreaking twist at the end, and “The Promised Land” transforms geography into poetry in a way the Beats attempted but never so successfully (also slipping in a subtle commentary on the racism embedded in this country, in some places more dangerously so than others).

Great rock lyrics don’t aim high. But they cut deep. They don’t purport to be anything more than they are, a tossed off evocation of frustration or longing or dismissiveness (or all three together), a conscious Freudian tumble. For that reason, they threaten a kind of senselessness, if you peer too deeply into them. And you never should peer too deeply into them, unlike, as you might, “Court and Spark.” Their value is face-value only, and if a rock lyric doesn’t strike you once and hard, it might as well pass you by altogether. Jim Hendrix: “Acting funny, but I don’t know why / ‘Scuse me while I kiss the sky.” The Strokes: “Leaving just in time / Staying for a while / Rolling in the ocean / Trying to catch your eye.” Television: “I was listening, listening to the rain / I was hearing, hearing something else.” Hinds: “The satisfaction of / The inundation of / When you ring my bell / And I want to be ready for your smell.” These lyrics suggest and allude to much, but nothing more significant than what the words themselves are, and how they are sung.

By some melding of sympathetic creative minds, the former (they go away so fast) Hawai‘i rock band Aura Bora tapped into a metaphysical Rosetta Stone to translate their primitive heart-wishes into some of most compelling and seemingly effortless rock lyrics I’ve heard from any band, local or otherwise. Was, their 2017 album of eleven songs (two of them covers), is yet another example of how so many talented Hawai‘i-based bands move on from projects that must have squeezed so much time and emotion and embittered love from them (see Linus). Not only did Aura Bora rock hard with a skewed feel for rock riffs and melody, they were able to, with a jeweler’s eye for the brilliance just beyond the blemished surface, universally encapsulate what it meant to be a hard-drinking, band-playing, insecure scenester, beautifully over-analyzing relationships and flitting skittishly around the things they love for fear of the inevitable crushing. 

Was (an apt title from a group that posted its music on Bandcamp after disbanding) kicks off with a song that firmly establishes Aura Bora’s sonic profile. apart from an uncharacteristically restrained vocal from singer-guitarist Jhune Liwanag. In fact, the sound of the album and its arrangements and aural inspirations, are consistent throughout all the songs, reminiscent of the best first rock records (Please Please Me, Is This It, to name a couple). Joey Green’s drums are competent and energetic all the way through--perhaps to a fault, as there were a couple opportunities in which subtlety and variation might have better suited the material. 

That said, the music doesn’t suffer from the overly competent and loud drums. On that first track, “Whatever,” the one idiosyncrasy is Jhune’s disaffected vocal, adapted per the sentiment of the song. In all other performances, Jhune squeezes an evolving galaxy of rage, lust, anxiety, diffidence, and even affection (though guardedly so) from her singular vocal cords. “Whatever” is a kind of let-down doo-wop in which Caleb Hartsfield lays out the jagged, discordant harmonies through his consistently stunning lead guitar.

Caleb shares a vocal on the duet “Sour Skittles,” notable mostly for the guitarist’s unintelligible shouting. I get that we’re talking punk rock here, but I wish the band would have invested more truth-value into the song, with Caleb attempting tunefulness instead of burying the composition in meaningless emoting (vocals are best left to Jhune).

But Caleb’s contributions to Aura Bora far outweigh his deficiencies. The disappointed “No Good” wrecks his sympatico fills against Jhune’s lines, echoing a kind of lovelorn impatience. And on “Band-Aid,” he locks big into mystifying punk guitar, a sound that is not supposed to make sense but does, the riffs so off as to raise  a middle finger to classic rock tropes, rhythmic but unbalanced, dizzied by youthful ferocity. “Band-Aid,” begins as a kiss-off a la “Positively 4th Street” (”You’re not dressed up the way you used to / You’re hair is fading and unkempt / It’s hard to come home from vacation / When you can barely pay the rent”) but, as if buoyed by it’s own relentless energy, the band pushes through toward optimism: “You’ve got some love to give, you just need some direction.” One paper it may come off as a tad twee, but in the context of the song it mixes a strong antidote to alleviate the negativity.

The first of the album’s stand-out tracks is “Gross,” which, if rearranged only slightly, could have been a hit for one of those street-toughened girl-groups of the early 1960s. “Would you like to take a walk with me off the pier of uncertainty?” Jhune sings with a defiance that almost preempts a response in the negative. “I think we share a common goal, the constant struggle to feel whole,” is just one of the lovable couplets in this abrasive seduction she lays on the presumably indifferent recipient of her affections: “I hope my voice gets stuck inside your brain.”

“Getting emotional / There’s danger in writing songs about the people you know” sets “Emotional” up as biography, or the use of art to reconcile and make meaningful the monumental banalities of our life episodes. Less a melody than a screed, June hashes out her memories in an effort to move toward an expression that she herself can own, that is not co-opted or underwritten by the sometimes bad intentions of partners of the past.

I wouldn’t have taken the time to write this post, or to delve as deeply into the music of Aura Bora, if not for “Ghibli Tears,” the extended masterpiece following bassist Will Adair’s otherwise undistinguished “Ghibli Beers.” “If you could hear my inner monologue / You’d be enamored of my thoughts / Are you still with that guy who told you not to smile?” Jhune sings, in one of the more tender tonalities on the human spectrum. But the power with which Jhune swings her emotional fist--as a singer-guitarist as well as a songwriter--is that she refuses to play a character in someone else’s story. Her thrust is in defining herself and her state of mind, not abdicating that authority out of need or desire.  When Jhune declares, “To be honest, I’d rather be feared than liked / I won’t say yes if you ask me to spend the night / But I’ll take saccharine over nothing,” she reclaims a narrative that initially presents her a vulnerable. On “Ghibli Tears,” and throughout Was, the persona Jhune creates is so compelling--despite the ridiculousness and hypocrisies inherent in coupling up she remains, just past the exterior hardened by a string of unworthy and memorable-only-in-their-badness affairs, open to love and hope and the struggle to, as she puts it, “feel whole.” “Ghibli Tears” is more than a song, it is six or so minutes of that buried lonesomeness that resounds when, despite all that it is around us, we recognize that there is, undeniably, something missing against which the evocation of loneliness can resound.

The covers (”Falling Out of Love With You” and “We Are the Crystal Gems”) are fun and would have added levity, I’m sure, to Aura Bora’s live repertoire.

Like so much I write about on Fresh Listen, I’d like to see this record float, hopefully to some distant shore, to a new tribe of listeners that hear themselves as I hear versions of myself in these songs. The tragedy would be to let them sink under the tide of digital sonic trash widely available over the Internet. In the plainest lyrical terms, and with their indefatigable musical arrangements, Aura Bora documents, with a wicked sense of humor and hope, how hard it is sometimes: the human condition. 

[millievfence]

On r/nonmonogamy: “My long distance girlfriend talked about having other, “equal” partners, and she was against it.  She just told me this other guy she’s been seeing, who wants to pretend they’re mono, is her boyfriend too.”

One person links to Franklin Veaux’s anti-poly-rules essay.  I have two semi contradictory opinions on that.

I agree with him that making rules is not a guarantee no one will ever leave you, or even that they will be followed.  Marriage doesn’t prevent you from breaking up either.  What it does is lock you in to a break up procedure that, while not exactly predictable, is way more predictable than the alternative.  It also locks you in to the mutual expectation that you will use that procedure, which is valuable.

Rules are also useful tripwires.  It can be really hard to tell if something is genuinely going wrong or you’re just feeling nerves (especially if you have an anxiety disorder, which approximately 130% of people I know do).  Right when I was originally reading More Than Two the book I had a primary relationship with a partner whose dating behavior I was really uncomfortable with.  Driven in part by reading MTT, I didn’t set hard rules.  We discussed what his plans were, I thought we were on the same page in terms of values and trade offs, and writing out a list of specific physical boundaries just seemed dumb.  He blew past the expectations we set, every time, by a lot.  And if I complained the defense was always “but you didn’t set a rule.”

[Which is why I have it out for that book/website in particular.  It’s not that I ever consciously thought it was correct, but I still felt shamed from pursuing what I needed.]

Setting a rule wouldn’t have helped, of course.  Even if he followed the letter, he was incapable of following the spirit, in part because of character flaws on his part and in part because of incompatibilities that are nobodies fault, and that would have been fatal even if we were monogamous.  But the process that eventually led to me leaving him didn’t kick off until he violated a genuine bright line rule, and then failed to keep the promises he made to make it up to me.  

So if people are getting a sense of safety from rules because they think the rules will never be violated, that’s incorrect.  If they’re getting a sense of safety because the rules haven’t been violated, that may be quite correct.  That’s not an optimal way to do it, of course.  So why might people think it was necessary?

That same post was cross-posted to r/polyamory, where the top rated comment is “Did you have a rule  boundary about upgrading partners without talking about it?  Well you shouldn’t have assumed.”

Even if they had explicitly agreed they wouldn’t discuss upgrading other partners, the guy is hurting and needs to be able to talk to his partner about why and what they are going to do about it.  He’s probably wondering what it means for their relationship that she is in a Relationship with a guy who has actively pushed her to break up with him.  But he didn’t think to explicitly codify their discussion about how much she disliked the idea of equal partners so... too late now, I guess?

I realize that the person who posted that comment is not the same as the person who posted the anti-rules thing.  But I only ever see pushback against the concept of rules when it’s a person mad that their partner violated them.  It’s never in situations like this, where the lack of a rule is being used to invalidate someone’s complaint.  Anti-rules people, if you want me to take you seriously this is what you need to do work.  Make it true that you don’t need rules to feel safe by making it easy to bring up negative feelings about things you didn’t explicitly ban ahead of time.  

In that shitty relationship and also some other better but not perfect ones, I really embraced Communicating My Needs.  This is a good thing of course, but what it eventually became was I’m Not Allowed To Be Disappointed Or Upset Unless I Explicitly Warned Him Ahead of Time, which became constantly running a simulation of “how might he disappoint me?  what do I need to say to prevent it/have the right to be upset about it?”  I didn’t realize how exhausting and miserable this was until about 4 weeks into my current relationship, where I realized I didn’t need to do it.  

So I think I may actually agree with Veaux that rules always indicate a problem.  But 1.  that problem may be “anxiety disorder”, in which case they may still be the best solution and 2. the solution is to create environments where people don’t need rules, and the common implementation of his advice is often actively counter to that.  

[lewdladylily]

You said rituals are very important to you, can you give some examples of what you mean with rituals?

Of course! This is a good question, it occurs to me now that lots of people might not know what I mean by that. Thank you.

So ritualistic behavior are behaviors that are performed the same way every time and have more significance than the practical result of the action. Rituals are what we call established ritualistic behavior. The most common recognized rituals are religious or spiritual rituals because their significance is usually almost completely non practical - for example, being baptized is not about getting wet, it has specific spiritual meaning. However, rituals do not have to be spiritual in nature, or even having that sort of connotation. Some examples of common rituals can be things like how a person prepares their coffee every morning, the way life partners greet each other when they both get home for the day, that sort of thing. Often rituals start as a practical interaction but take on more significance over time as we settle into patterns.

For example, most nights I spend about a minute helping my wife get her blankets arranged so they are straight and comfortable. It’s a small way to show I love her, a call back to something I did when we first got married. I often get up in the middle of the night for the bathroom or something and I would notice that my wife’s feet had come uncovered, so I would very carefully move her blankets to cover her feet so she wouldn’t get cold. After doing this for several months my wife finally confessed that she would sometimes wake up too warm in the night and intentionally uncover her feet to help her cool down. She didn’t want to tell me that though because she loved that I was being so thoughtful and it made her feel really good that I cared enough to notice and try to help. Of course I stopped after that, there was no reason to continue, but it was a bit sad that I didn’t get to show my love for her and she didn’t get to feel loved in that way anymore. When we started sleeping in our own beds I would sometimes help her get her blankets arranged as a call back to when I would cover her feet. Eventually it became a good night ritual when my wife goes to bed (she goes to bed much earlier than me) as a way to show how I care for her.

In my relationship with Raven (and my bdsm play in general) there are similar rituals, though often more heavily codified as tends to be the case with bdsm. Each morning I greet Raven the same way via text message, and each night I say good night in the same way if I stay up longer. When she says certain things to me I will respond consistently (”What is your purpose?” “To server my betters ma’am.”). The process of how I am punished follows specific patterns, I put on my collar as a sign that I am hers until she gives me permission to remove it, how I apologize and mark down my mistakes when I need to be punished. Lots of ritual behaviors, some that were established explicitly and some that sort of just evolved naturally, all of them helping me get into the mindset of being submissive and helping Raven get in the mindset of being dominant. Lots of BDSM is about evoking certain emotions, and one of the most effective methods of doing this is consistent rituals and rules.

[uncle-ak]

African c, DO BETTER!!!

Aunty, you are the primary enabler of the predatory behaviors that are perpetuated by “Uncles”. You are the gatekeeper of the toxicity that allows for your daughters to continue in the sick cycle of abuse. You raise your sons to think that they are entitled to women’s bodies; meanwhile, you raise your daughters to think that they have no control over their bodies. You fail to teach your daughters about their sexual reproductive health and provide them with zero knowledge on how to care for their reproductive system. You victim blame and victim shame them because they are female. You tell them to change clothes when a certain “Uncle” enters the house, instead of refusing to allow such “Uncle” into your home. You turn a blind eye when things like rape, abuse, and sexual assault happen and in doing so, you play into toxic masculinity. For that, we ask you to DO BETTER!!

The title “Aunty” is a very prestigious title in the African community because it holds with its power and prestige. Being called an Aunty means you are respected; it also validates your authoritative position in the community. Some attributes of an African Aunties are that aunties are motivating, nurturing, inspiring, and strong. 

As African women, we are conditioned to adhere to one specific type of strength, it is a strength that glorifies suffering in silence. This type of strength conditions us to endure hardship and ignore our mental, physical, and emotional health. This unhealthy idea of strength serves as the pathway into solidifying our [African women’s] womanhood. Women are also raised to shoulder the burden without complaint, “My dear, as a woman you have to endure.” Endure because somehow your strength as a woman is measured by how much you can take and for how long you are able to deal with it.

Well, Aunties, we are here to educate you about a second type of strength which allows for a woman to leave unhealthy relationships without being ridiculed by the community. This strength does not deem a woman unfit when she chooses to create her own path. This type of strength allows you to stand up for your daughters, fight for their right of autonomy, and give them a voice. It allows you to validate their existence by introducing them to healthier types of strength. 

It is safe to say that many Aunties have experienced abuse as they were growing up. They were taught by their mothers to “be silent; they were taught to forget about it”; they were called “liars”; they were told “Ashia”; they were told to just move on! No consequences befell their perpetrators. Some of them even dealt with abuse in their homes daily and some of it was again reinforced by the women in their lives. African women often found themselves and still do find themselves in the toxic cycle of going through abuse as children and then growing up to raise men that are unaccountable for their actions. They codify the behavior in their partners, and they instill it in their sons. 

In the African community, you also see a pattern of behavior in which African Aunties rate themselves based on how much pain and suffering they can withstand. That shows other women and young girls that endurance is the name of the game; “oh you want a successful marriage and a successful home? My dear, you’ll have to persevere through the beatings, the lies, the cheating, and the blatant disrespect…” 

There is also a habit of teaching young girls from a very young age to cower into themselves. “You have to act like a lady, be meek, be meager, and be respectful.” Women are discouraged from exploring their personalities; instead, they are expected to fall in line and again act like a lady. 

The reality is that, as adults, we constantly must learn and unlearn patterns of behavior. If we want to end the cycle of abuse, we as African women and future aunties will have to unlearn those patterns of behavior of NOT holding some men accountable for their predatory behavior. Furthermore, we must raise sons that understand boundaries, consent, and the idea of treating women with equal respect.

Notwithstanding, we do want to take the time out to shout out the Aunties that are creating safe spaces for young women. We applaud the Aunties that are allowing young girls/women to share their experiences of growing into womanhood as well as their traumas from growing up. We commend you for not giving into societal pressure and taking the step towards liberating women. We want to shout out the Aunties that are taking the time to educate their daughters about recognizing and reporting abuse. We also would like to embrace the African Aunties that are allowing young women/girls to grow into themselves without the added societal boundaries. We see you; We appreciate you; We love you! Thank you for doing better! 

In the end, we ask that all African women come together as a united front in order to combat toxic masculinity. Much Love!

[biofunmy]

A Graffiti Museum Where the Writers Are in Charge

MIAMI — When Alan Ket was a teenager growing up in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn in the 1980s, he fell hard for the graffiti that still decorated New York City trains. Sometimes he was the one painting, but more often, he was a detective, figuring out the best locations to snap pictures of the art. On weekends, he’d meet up with friends at a one-hour photo shop on Canal St. to trade negatives and prints of the graffiti photos they’d taken that week.

Preservation was the key. “So many beautiful works of art were being destroyed every week,” he said recently. “It was horrifying.”

At the time, he would cut school to spend afternoons at the studio of Henry Chalfant, who had been the crucial documentarian of 1970s train graffiti. Mr. Chalfant had largely stopped photographing trains, and he implored Mr. Ket and his friends to pick up the baton: “He told us it was up to us to document our own movement.”

Mr. Ket (born Alain Maridueña) took that mandate seriously, and built a life on it, culminating in the opening Thursday of the Museum of Graffiti, in the Wynwood section of Miami, the first institution devoted to telling the art form’s history, as well as documenting its stylistic developments with a curator’s eye for detail.

“We have to be our own authorities,” Mr. Ket, who is the museum’s co-founder, said.

Some graffiti artists of the early era made the transition to galleries, others into commercial design. But for a vernacular art that has seeped widely into popular culture, graffiti — especially as represented by the early pioneers — has made few permanent inroads into established museums. Perhaps that owes to its oppositional nature, and perhaps to its evanescence.

Mr. Ket — known simply as Ket — has no patience for that argument. “Is it key to the essence or is it a response to circumstance?” he asked. “I don’t know. I think all the guys that painted wanted everything to last forever.”

Forever is what he hopes to give them, by way of codifying and organizing the art’s history, with a special emphasis on technique. Too often, graffiti is explained primarily through a sociopolitical lens, so the Museum of Graffiti’s inaugural exhibition, “Style Masters: The Birth of the Graffiti Art Movement,” focuses on first principles — letters as artistic building blocks.

The very first wall is a history lesson on the development of letter-writing styles, accompanied by a photo array of train art from 1972-6 to demonstrate how rapidly the form was changing. (Since there was little documentation within the community, many of the photographs come from journalists who were assigned to capture the emerging art form.)

The rest of the 3,200-square-foot space offers a deeply condensed history of the form, from the early moments in which graffiti writers were applying their talents to canvases — on display is the first painting Lady Pink ever did, from her personal collection — up through the ways graffiti has been used on clothing, skateboards, album covers and more.

The graffiti aesthetic may be widespread now, but Mr. Ket’s read is that of a purist. He has a ferocious zeal to protect the legacy of the underrecognized pioneers, especially as street art — which borrows some of graffiti’s immediacy with little of its charm or technique — becomes more widely known and collected, destabilizing the marketplace and public perception.

That intense historical fanaticism — “a desire to regulate, to keep some kind of stability among the chaos, also to keep a standard of quality,” he said — is, in essence, no different from a formal curatorial approach. For this exhibition, there are no nods to Keith Haring or Jean-Michel Basquiat, widely known graffiti-adjacent artists who Mr. Ket believes are not part of the form’s true history. He has even received pushback from PHASE 2, a 1970s pioneer, who believes graffiti is “a derogatory word,” Mr. Ket said.

Ket respects the disagreement, but moved forward anyhow. “I’m sorry that I’m going to write about you and tell your story and talk about your historical relevancy and your value,” he explained. ��I have a responsibility bigger than the individual artist.”

A Marriage of Two Rolodexes

Before moving to Miami two years ago, to manage a gallery connected to the Wynwood Walls, a mural park around the corner from the Museum of Graffiti, Mr. Ket had been a graffiti archivist and advocate in various forms. In the 1990s, he published and edited Stress, a hip-hop and graffiti magazine; he consulted for art exhibitions, and he wrote monographs on important artists.

For decades he’d maintained a personal graffiti archive, and had begun to wonder whether it might be better served at an established institution. “But what good is it if you give it to the Smithsonian and it sits in their warehouse for the next 40 years?” Mr. Ket said. “More people see it at my house.” (Graffiti has appeared at the Smithsonian, but sparingly.)

Bringing the museum to fruition became a full-time preoccupation about a year and a half ago. He met his business partner, Allison Freidin, formerly a prosecutor with the state attorney’s office, as she was doing legal advocacy for graffiti writers. She is his sole outside investor — he holds the majority stake — and quit her job to focus on the birth of the museum.

“Ket is really being called on to tell the story properly. I’m also being called on to make sure that we’re treated properly by everybody,” Ms. Freidin said. Mr. Ket is well-connected among graffiti writers, and Ms. Freidin has extensive relationships in Miami’s art and civic communities. “The marriage of those two Rolodexes is what made this possible,” she said.

A Museum of Living History

One afternoon last month, the exhibition was about halfway installed, and Ms. Freidin had just returned from a meeting with the local review board, looking to address concerns about the museum’s sign. Wynwood comes with built-in tourist traffic, thanks to the Wynwood Walls, but it is not especially known for graffiti, at least not anymore.

In the mid-1980s, graffiti writers flocked to the area. Eventually, the more established art scene followed. “They saved this part of town,” Ms. Freidin said. But now, their work, sanctioned or otherwise, competes with corporate-commission murals, and the industrial spaces that gave way to art galleries are now ceding to clothing stores and luxury dessert spots.

Many local graffiti artists view Wynwood with skepticism, Mr. Ket said. They may also view his project as a kind of carpetbagging. To mitigate those concerns, there is a section of the museum given over to Miami’s graffiti history. “We’ve invited everybody back,” he said.

But Mr. Ket is also counting on the way the graffiti community looks after its own, something he experienced firsthand when in 2007, he was arrested and charged with 14 criminal counts, including trespass, criminal mischief and making graffiti. He eventually pleaded guilty to three counts of criminal mischief and paid $15,000 in fines and restitution. Shepard Fairey, Jose Parla, Futura and others donated art to sell to pay for his defense.

At the museum, he looked around at the people bringing the space to life and noted that the electrician and various maintenance workers are all graffiti writers. He likened it to El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem, founded in 1969 by Puerto Rican educators, artists, and community activists: “I think of those guys and think, we’re doing that, we have to do it for ourselves.” He’s also brought in a full-time curator, Carlos (Mare 139) Rodriguez, to focus on future exhibitions.

“We want to try to keep adding value not just to history, but to living history,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “ That part of this is the advocacy part, right? How do you create value for the art and the byproducts of this art, and also for the artists?”

Given the museum’s focus on the founding generations, “you’re gonna learn about artists that have no fine art career, like zero,” Mr. Ket said, noting that there might be a ripple effect. “It’s not my intention to affect the marketplace, but if that’s the result, I welcome it.”

The Museum of Graffiti just took on its first corporate sponsors: Levi’s and Charlotte’s Web, a CBD company. Stein Paint Company, a local firm, has offered donations of materials for murals.

The museum will generate three revenue streams — ticket fees, the gift shop, and a gallery that will feature new work from a rotating cast of artists who straddle graffiti and fine art. (The first one is Shoe — Neils Meulman — from Amsterdam, who’s developed a style he calls calligraffiti.) There are also 13 new murals, on the museum exterior as well as on nearby walls.

Last month, the graffiti writer turned fine artist JonOne was painting one across the street from the museum, applying layers of pastel blobs to create a festive abstraction. Mr. Ket first encountered his work in 1986, when JonOne was painting train cars with brushes (in addition to aerosol) — “he was the king of the trains,” Mr. Ket said.

JonOne — John Perello — still uses graffiti lettering as the foundation for his work, even as he pushes it toward increasingly abstract ends.

The museum, he said, had a personal meaning as great as its historical meaning: “We’re trying to make sense of all this madness, everything that went on. We’re doing our own little therapy within ourselves.

“It’s like we’re repossessing our history and our culture,” JonOne added. “Finally giving it its just value.”

The Museum of Graffiti opens Dec. 5 at 299 NW 25th Street, Miami; (786) 580-4678; museumofgraffiti.com.

Sahred From Source link Arts

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[theconservativebrief]

Hillary Benton is hatching a plan to stay in bed.

“Starting a new lifestyle blog called Diet Coke and Klonopin where I will share secrets on how to minimize your time spent out of bed,” the 26-year-old Brooklyn-based marketing professional tweeted in August.

Some tips she shared in advance of the proposed blog launch included stowing all morning and evening skincare products in a nightstand basket, setting up a coffee making station within reach, and avoiding the shower. “Showering requires being upright, as well as being SPRAYED with WATER!” she points out. “You can lay down in the bath, throw some bubbles in, almost as good as bed.”

Later, over the phone, Benton says she was joking about starting the blog, but serious about everything else. “Staying in bed is something I feel very strongly about.”

Benton is not alone — she’s part of a big and profitable demographic of young women who sleep. Or, more broadly, stay home, in bed, acting as the center of what we can call the homebody economy. The hit novel of the summer was Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, a story about a beautiful 26-year-old New Yorker who comes up with a plan to spend only 40 hours awake in a four-month period. The plan is mostly drugs, but her goal is to emerge refreshed and renewed, “bolstered by the bliss and serenity [she had] accumulated.”

“The narrator — relatably enough — is passionate only about sleeping,” Jia Tolentino wrote in her review for The New Yorker. “There is something in this liberatory solipsism that feels akin to what is commonly peddled today as wellness.”

“Staying in bed is something I feel very strongly about.”

A January analysis using 10 years worth of the American Time Use Surveys conducted annually by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that millennials spent 70 percent more time at home than the general population. As with everything millennials do or don’t do, this is annoying to some people, and the New York Post ran a headline in June 2016 announcing “Millennials don’t deserve NYC.”

But it’s an opportunity for others. Younger Americans who are ensconced in their homes and uncharmed by nightlife, with all its associated “effort,” are also spending more money on food delivery than they are in restaurants and talking about self-care in terms of the products that it involves.

They’re the reason that nascent alcohol courier apps in limited markets can partner with Netflix, and the reason that the fiercest and dirtiest brand rivalries are now between mattress-in-a-box companies. They’re responsible for the boom of Korean skincare in the United States, which is why K-beauty e-commerce site Peach and Lily now has a line of its own face masks available at its Target mini-shop, which sold out their first day.

The economy built around it is made up of clothes and homegoods and streaming services and courier apps and millennial-friendly zero percent APR financing on a set of luxury sheets.

Obviously anyone who makes a living via the delivering of things benefits from the homebody. It would be inefficient to run through them all, but just know that Postmates makes $1 billion worth of sales annually, GrubHub (which owns Seamless) was valued at $2 billion when it went public in 2014, and there is a ridiculous number of alcohol delivery startups that essentially all have a cutesy name that sounds like a euphemism for peeing or sexual harassment. (Thirstie, Drizly, Tipsy, and so on.)

Saucey (gross), an LA-based alcohol courier app that will also bring you cigarettes, ice cream, and Doritos — all in 30 minutes or less — launched in 2014 and has since raised $10.2 million in funding and expanded throughout California and into Chicago. “The new going out is staying in,” marketing director Danielle Silveira tells me. “Why go out and wait in a line? Sit back and chill on your couch with Netflix … or Hulu or Amazon or any streaming service.”

Nobody wants to drive to a grocery store in LA, she argues. Especially during a heatwave. And now that Saucey is in Chicago, it’s relevant to point out that nobody wants to go outside when it’s cold. Basically, nobody wants to go outside.

The bulk of Saucey’s weeknight customers are ordering small quantities of wine and beer, around 7 PM, a trend that competitor Minibar has also noticed. Co-founder Lindsey Andrews tells me that more than 50 percent of Minibar’s sales are wine, and most orders are for one or two bottles. She says it’s also been “the year of spiked seltzers,” and other lower-alcohol drinks — cider, rose, Ketel One’s new line of vodka that comes in flavors like Grapefruit Rose and Cucumber Mint — that people can drink slowly, and are more popular with women.

Minibar often partners with Netflix to create tie-in promotions — tweeting an emoji of a wine bottle while you’re binge-watching a popular show can lead to a free bottle of pinot noir at your door. The New York-based startup raised $5 million in funding last summer.

Netflix loves the stay-at-home, drink, watch Netflix crowd — see these wine-themed socks that will turn off your TV when you fall asleep — even though it has reportedly explicitly asked people to stop saying “binge-watch,” because it sounds tacky and has connotations related to alcoholism and junk food.

You know who else loves a stay-at-home millennial? Everyone who makes things that are comfortable to sit or lie on. A handful of warring but wildly successful mattress-in-a-box companies have sprung up in the last few years, all chasing the “urban professional” millennial market.

There’s Casper, with its subway ads and its rent-by-the-hour nap pods. There’s Brooklinen, which offers financing plans for $129 sheet sets and has 75,000 followers on its tangentially related lifestyle Instagram. There’s Burrow, a couch-in-a-box company that has recently taken over vacant New York storefronts and filled them with elaborate dioramas of laziness, captioned with the tagline “Good for nothing.”

“Wellness trends and self-care trends — going out doesn’t align with people’s goals in that regard. The drinking. The eating out. Everything in the world makes us want to stay home.”

There’s Walmart sub-brand Allswell, which carries only two mattresses and explicitly markets the “Firmer” option as ideal for sitting, working, and watching TV in an “Instagram-worthy dream bed.” President Arlyn Davich tells me it is much more popular than the classic design.

She also says, when I ask if she loves the napping millennials, “It’s fun to stay home. And it’s scary out there, with the political environment. Wellness trends and self-care trends — going out doesn’t align with people’s goals in that regard. The drinking. The eating out. Everything in the world makes us want to stay home.” That’s nice for Allswell because people who stay in all the time will spend more on things for inside, like a new mattress or a $70 decorative pillow.

“People are spending more time in bed, so they’re asking not just how good are these for sleeping, but how good are they for doing all the things I do in bed,” she says. “You’re seeing people spend more time, and wanting to make sure it’s a beautiful environment.”

Moshfegh’s anti-heroine in My Year of Rest and Relaxation sleeps in part as a response to a wealth-obsessed culture she finds noxious. And Malcolm Harris, author of last year’s Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials, says the broader homebody culture is a response to something too: “I think it’s basically just a happy face on declining living standards,” he tells me. “Like how we all supposedly love tiny houses. We don’t love staying home; we’re tired and anxious and alienated and have a historically low stock of free time and public, common spaces.”

Gen X may have been known as the Slacker Generation, but brands didn’t see them as people who loved to stay in bed. Coming into their 20s at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, they were young during the height of American wealth culture — the (first) Trump years, the Hilton years. This is when Kim Kardashian was hosting vodka launches, not narrating her at-home remedies for psoriasis on Instagram behind a four-foot thick brick wall in Calabasas.

And before them? Baby boomers helped T.G.I. Fridays open 100 locations in the United States in 10 years — becoming the first bar to come up with the idea of “ladies night” (and potato skins!), and the first restaurant chain to codify the notion of happy hour, kicking off an entire era of reasonably-priced frozen cocktails and an expectation of making out in public places. It launched in tandem with birth control; it went public via Goldman Sachs in 1983.

Brand imagery for Allswell’s sheet sets. Allswell

What young people buy isn’t the best way to understand them, Harris argues, since they don’t control what’s for sale. What’s more pertinent is their relationship to labor, which is “a bad one.”

Millennials are ordering from Postmates and they’re the ones doing delivery for Postmates, Harris points out. Service work constitutes a higher percentage of American labor than it has in the past, which means more “affective labor, the work of feelings,” is required of today’s workers. “That can be a strain on your ability to perform socially.”

“Wages are down, exploitation is up,” he says. “A heavy divergence between productivity and the wage rate is what characterizes the millennial experience more than anything. Being exploited, that’s going to make you want to stay home.”

If you haven’t heard, this generation is into self-care. This is not just face masks, but it is partly face masks.

“The Korean beauty routine has so many different layers,” Peach and Lily co-founder Alicia Yoon tells me. “That plays into this moment of self-care.” She’s noticed customers gravitating toward sheet masks because they have a longer application period — “You’re empowered to focus on yourself and connect with yourself.”

Along with a sheet mask, you can also pick up T-shirts at Target that read “Naps and snacks,” “Namast’ay in bed,” and “I want it all and I want it delivered,” designed by a brand run out of the Chico, California, airport that boasts licensing rights for Marvel, Coca-Cola, and MTV, among other big names. Fifth Sun, started by former civil engineer Dan Gonzalez in the early ’90s, is one of the largest graphic T-shirt manufacturers in the United States and sells its mass appeal products via every other major retailer you can think of — Walmart, K-Mart, Macy’s, Kohl’s, etc. (Asked to comment for this story Gonzalez replied, “no thx.” Why should he! The proof is in the pudding.)

You can find the same “Namast’ay in Bed” untrademark-able nonsense phrase on over 1,300 items on Etsy (yoga sweaters, doormats, pillowcases, coffee mugs, wall decals, mason jars, hand-stamped mimosa spoons), and you can find people who live off of that.

Namast’ay in bed mimosa spoon. SycamoreHill Etsy store

Courtney Lovenberg, a 27-year-old nurse from Lake Hopatcong, New Jersey, says she makes about 20 percent of her income from the Etsy store where she sells slogan-based T-shirts — a side gig that takes about 10 hours of her time per week. She started the shop when she got engaged two years ago, focusing on designs that pertained to being a fiancée or a bride. But since she’s settled into married life in the last year, she’s noticed that she’s hanging out at home more, and making shirts that reflect that.

“Sometimes I feel like ‘I don’t know if people are going to relate to this,’ but then you realize how many other introverted, ‘I just want to be lazy on a Friday night’ women are out there,” she says. “I’ve had tons of repeat customers.”

Top-sellers like “Homebody,” “I just want to stay home with my dog,” and “Introverted AF,” are each ordered about 10 times per month from her modestly sized shop.

The “Homebody” shirts that Courtney sells are negligibly different than the ones that 27-year-old Wooster, Ohio. mother Emily Weckesser sells in the Etsy shop she runs with her husband Brad — a project they started seven years ago and which now provides their primary household income. Their shop is mostly sets of graphic tees designed to be worn by babies, or parents and their babies, or parents who are not coordinating outfits with their babies at present but do still want you to know that they have a baby, and that they and the baby are both homebodies.

“We’re introverts and work from home,” Emily says. “Our designs reflect that and we treasure that. I think introverts are reclaiming their spot in the world and not being ashamed to own up to it. We love our home and we love our kids. At this stage, we’re curled up on the couch.”

In the era of Instagram, curling up on the couch makes for — by some measures — as productive a night as going out in a stellar outfit.

Just ask an influencer: Hélène Heath is a fashion and beauty writer and consultant based in New York, with a moderate Instagram following and a popular lifestyle blog. Last summer, the Chill Times (the editorial arm of SoHo cafe and spa Chillhouse) paid her to pose with the Public Hotel’s digital manager Shelby Eastman and Instagram influencer Tesa Pesic, wearing Morgan and Lane silk pajamas, feeding each other cheeseburgers ordered via Postmates, braiding each other’s hair, sipping out of gold champagne flutes and pink mugs that read “Literally Can’t Even,” then cuddling up in the same bed, under a loose-knit blanket.

“Smart brands today understand that it’s about creating moments of social shareability,” she told Vox in an email. “Think of last year’s hygge trend, or how a lot of candle brands are popping up and gaining momentum thanks to Instagram, or how masking has become a huge trend.”

Don’t just stay home — stay home beautifully. The hundreds of available and nearly identical homebody-themed graphic t-shirts exist because they’re perfect for Instagram, she points out, making being alone still-shareable. “We are undoubtedly not done with derivative products in my opinion … especially as we head into winter cocooning season!”

The original concept of a girls’ night is a pop culture trope as old as women being permitted to appear in groups in cinema, and at least partially explains why the homebody economy is directed more explicitly at women, who were already having sleepovers and spending their discretionary income on each other and on their homes.

What is somewhat new is the affiliation of “girls night in” and true luxury products. Suddenly, it’s everywhere. Lenny Letter — the email-based media company founded by Lena Dunham and her producing partner Jenni Konner in 2015 — is currently offering readers a chance to win a three-day “BFF” trip to Mexico. A lucky pair of buds will go to Mexico and then … stay inside: In addition to the resort comps, the winners receive a “girls’ night in pack” that includes designer candles, expensive moisture-wicking underwear, and two “vibes” from Dame (“the Glossier of female vibrators”). So, everything they need for a chill night in a hotel room in Juluchuca, ignoring the landscapes and masturbating together, which I’ll admit would bring two pals a lot closer.

Girls Night In is also the name of Alisha Ramos’s successful lifestyle brand and recommendation newsletter. (Ramos was previously a design director at Vox Media, Vox’s parent company.) Girls Night In is explicitly about self-care, illustrated by Instagram posts in which women in charcoal masks read fake newspapers. The philosophy it espouses is big on going to bed early, saying no to plans, taking a bath, and reading Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking to get into a “magical thinking” mood on a Monday morning. (For the record, that book is literally about mourning the surprise deaths of your husband and only child.)

The idea is that you shouldn’t have to go anywhere if you don’t want to — and you shouldn’t! — but if you’re going to stay home there is some stuff you should probably buy.

Girls Night In partners with Penguin Random House, Outdoor Voices, Girlboss, Sweetgreen, and Madewell, to name a few listed on its website, and sells merchandise that says, can you guess? “Homebody.”

Moshfegh’s narrator does leave the house periodically. For example, she buys a new VCR at Best Buy so she can tape the news coverage of the attacks on the World Trade Center, which she watches “over and over” to “soothe” herself.

The novel is satirical, viciously pulling apart New York City’s vapid culture of wealth and image-obsession at the turn of the millennium, but there are a few thoughts that flit through the sociopathic narrator’s head that feel true enough: “It was too much to consider in all, stretching out, a circular planet covered in creatures and things growing, all of it spinning slowly on an axis created by what — some freak accident?”

“Implicit in the introvert, stay-at-home discourse is the idea that life is increasingly bad”

Probably all of the homebodies have one good reason or another for doing what they’re doing — lying around. And one of those reasons is that it sucks to be outside in the terrible world.

It’s not a ridiculous question: If you can do everything at home — including date and drink and eat and live-stream Coachella — why wouldn’t you? Millennials get shamed nonstop no matter what, but having pizza and wine delivered via some apps instead of going out to a fancy restaurant or any bar can have explanations beyond laziness and misanthropy.

As the generation that will never pay off its student loans or own homes or retire, we are also just working more and for less — it’s at least partly as simple as being physically tired and not making very much money.

“Going out into the world and enjoying it and spending money to be in public and have fun is a pretty standard way to measure well-being and your ability to enjoy things,” Harris says. “Or it has been in the United States. We have less of that, which means life is worse. Implicit in the introvert, stay-at-home discourse is the idea that life is increasingly bad.”

So if you would prefer to celebrate namast’aying in bed rather than admit that it’s basically your only option … okay, sure, why not? Urban Outfitters launched its own beauty line this week and all of the creams are called “Have a moment.” They’re a mere $10; I will buy them.

It pays to never leave the house. I mean, it doesn’t pay you but it pays someone.

Original Source -> The homebody economy, explained

via The Conservative Brief