#and was also seeing a lot of articles and stuff about men raping their girlfriends

[ningningkittie]

🦨💭

[thelittlehansy]

How many things Hans share with domestic abusers ?

I just cant count the number time i read that hans remind them of their toxic abusive ex. Hans has already be link to "domestic abuser " in fanfic.  in some modern AU fanfic  i read Hans beats anna because you know...he is the villain. I also saw that there was some fanfic where Hans rapes anna and elsa 🤢 because you know....he didnt even kiss anna but he would totally do it because yeah....he is the villain.

And just people imagine the worst about what if hans succeed into marrying anna.  So lets back to one of my favorite things.

List 🤓🤓

This times how many signs hans share with abuser in the movie ? i took an article on the web about the subject.

1-CHARMING.

“Initially, he showers his woman with praise, adoration, and attention. His courtship is sweet and intense filled with phrases such as, “I can’t live without you.” He quickly pushes for an exclusive relationship or engagement.”

Yes he is charming ! There was love at first sight this is  very much possible hans said things describe above maybe he even means some of them because again...that scene when he is alone smile smitten  by anna under the boat. The only difference is that there was specific reasons about the fact that he ask quickly Anna to marry him he didn't have times the gates were going to be closed and he could said goodbye to his key to the throne this is why he propose so fast to anna. So the comparison with abusive relationship and what is describe above dont seems really honest as they was an explication to his behavior if he could have times to seduce her during a long time ,  he would have done it  i think (?) one the thing we know about him is that he is a very very patient person.

2. JEALOUS.

“He views other men as a threat to the relationship and accuses you of flirting with everyone from his brother to the mailman. “I know you are looking at him.” The irony is that he often is the one who is cheating.”

Behavior never show in the movie we dont know how he would have reacted to kristoff presence. when his show his "true colors" hans show us that he dont cares about anna and that   she is last of his worries.

X

3. MANIPULATIVE.

“This man is very intelligent. He knows how to detect your weak spots, and he uses your vulnerability and past pain to his advantage. “You were abused as a kid because you are so ugly.”

He never said such an horrible thing like what is described above but...he is smart he us manipulative he did use others people vulnerability ! So very much positive !

but again there is still these problem  about hans being manipulative ? ..who put totally in question hans manipulation in the movie toward anna and seriously put doubt about how much he actually manipulate anna.

 His smitten smile when she left also present in kids book who tell “ hans is smitten by the princess”  the fact that anna called him lunatic and not a liar in the book a  frozen of shadow. and hims admitted he did not manipulate her at all in a frozen heart

4. CONTROLLING.

He wants to know where you are going and who you are with at all times. He may check the mileage on your car or follow you to the grocery store. He often refuses to allow you to work because you might “meet someone.”

Behavior never show in the movie again once hans reveal his true colors he show us that he dont give a damn about anna.

X

5. A VICTIM.

“His poor choices are everyone else’s fault. When he loses his job, gets into a fight, or a business deal falls through, it’s always because of the other person. He is never at fault. “You make me hit you.””

Behavior never show in the movie when he reveal his true colors we dont know.

X

6. NARCISSISTIC.

“The whole world revolves around him. As the “little woman who is beneath him,” it is your job to meet his every need. He is the master; you are the unworthy slave. It’s invigorating for him to know that everyone around him “walks on eggshells.””

Behavior never show in the movie with anna or with the others people  also we dont know.

X

7. INCONSISTENT.

“Mood swings are a common trait for an abuser. One minute he seems happy and sweet, the next he is pounding his fist.”

Honestly i will not say behavior not show in the movie but more contradictory behavior hans really knows how to stay calm , tolerate frustration and Someone like that would have never succeeded  to did what hans did. I think He will act more like the duke of weselton if he had mood swings.

X

8. CRITICAL.

“No matter how hard you try you will never be able to satisfy this kind of man. He thinks nothing of degrading and verbally assaulting you. “You are a stupid, fat, disgusting tramp. You can never leave me. No other man would have you.””

Behavior not show in the movie at all.we dont know if we cant satisfy hans or if he degrade others people and verbally assault them. Then  again he left anna at the end he didnt tell her "no man expect me would want you" but the contrary he break her heart and leave her.

he said to anna that she was desperate for love and was willing to marry him just like that which was true and also an opinion shared by both Kristoff and Elsa and the audience.

the part when he said “you are not a match for elsa” he was responding to anna.

So thats left us with only one thing the “ oh anna if only there was someone out there who loved you”. and trying to deduce that from  this line Hans will said to anna the kind of stuff describe above is....extremely exaggerated. Behavior not show in the movie

not enough evidence.

X

9. DISCONNECTED.

His main goal is to isolate his victim from family and friends so that you are totally dependant on him. “Your family causes too much trouble for us. I don’t want you seeing them anymore.”

Again behavior not show in the movie he never tried to isolated anna when he show his true colors hans dont give a damn about anna anymore. Even the argument between the sisters was not intentional on his part anna arguing with elsa was far from being his goal since him what he wanted was elsa benediction and anna behavior was the last thing that he needed and just the fact that he wants to kill elsa as we all know is in order to be king not to isolated anna from her family. 

X

10. HYPERSENSITIVE.

The slightest offense sends him ranting. Everyone is out to “get him.”

Behavior never show in the movie  there was the moment with the duke of weselton  but the duke was not even criticized Hans but anna and Hans reaction was to assure his plan.

so we only have hans responding to anna that not this is her that is a not a match for elsa during his betrayal scene. So again based yourself on that and deduce “omg he is hypersensitive” is...exaggerated. We need more evidence. So in the end we just dont know again !

X

11. VICIOUS AND CRUEL.

A significant number of abusers harm children and animals as well as a partner. Inflicting pain and intimidating others is what gives him power. “I’ll kill you before I’ll let you go. If I can’t have you, no one will.”

Behavior not show in the movie he is able to show kindness to animals as he show it with Anna horse. We dont know about hans relationship with children and his whole relationship with animals. 

X

12. INSINCERELY REPENTANT.

He will swear to never “hit you again.” But unless he receives professional help and strong accountability it’s very unlikely that he will change.

Behavior never show in the movie the betrayal scene.

X

IN CONCLUSION : , we dont know. we just dont know if Hans had a behavior similar to domestic abuser with their girlfriend/spouse and if Anna would end up in a abusive relationship with him. 

honestly (that’s  only my opinion ) but judging by his behavior in the movie , his plans , his desire i think Hans would not have been an abusive Husband but an Absent Husband only interest by his job and not his queen since the start even if he liked Anna at some point his big dream to be king is what is the most important to him.

So  again  the only thing he has in common with domestic abuser is that he is manipulative but even that...hans manipulation on anna...is put in question everywhere in the beginning of the movie...books...vidéo games where it say he has a crush on her.All of the rest we just dont know or he saw contradictory behavior.

Hans never show us to be jealous , controlling, possessive, physically abusive , oversensitive , blame others and play the victim , oR inconsistent.  and even based on the movie we just cant affirm that hans is someone that verbally insult person since he never show that behavior again in the movie.

So hans acting like a domestic abuser is as true as a headcanon for someone who will like the idea of him being one. 

We just dont know how would have been his marriage with anna. All of this assumptions about hans characters to me really as based on the fact that we compare abusing someone and someone trust and put them in the same case.  This is not any better but this is believe  are two very different things. 

 i also have read lot of time woman said " hans was nice to anna and then show his true colors" then they compare that to abusive domestic relationship. But the thing is that an abuser once he show you his true colors he began to be controlling, jealous, physical abusive , emotionally abusive. Hans once he show his true colors. he leave anna he abandon her the comparaison is not very great here since in the end Anna yes would have trust issues but did not  suffer of abusive relationship victims suffer. 

We also learn think about Hans in his backstory in the frozen Franchise so yeah we dont have confirmation this is canon to the movie but this is very much canon to the frozen franchise and officially publish and approve by disney : He was not an abusive child.  he never abuse people on the contrary he was abuse by his father and brothers both physically and emotionally.  (the majority of people dont reproduce this behavior once adult but reject it) he Hates violence and is someone peaceful. He is not controlling over person but situation. He has all his life being bully because he is not cruel  and hates his father view on social darwinism and how he treat their citizens. He is used to criticized and be called a disappointment. He also dont play the victim. again the only thing confirm by his backstory is that he can be manipulative.

so i m gonna finish that post with that gif who show us that Anna is not scared of Hans. something again that rarely or just  dont have in domestic abusive relationship in real life.

[warmbeebosoftbeebo]

wanted to pick your brain to some q’s about this situation. don’t mean to play 20 questions w you but I would rather read an intelligent and thought out answer than listen to the insufferable trolls on twitter.

- do you think this decision has been coming or was it made recently?

- do you think zck was blindsided by the demotion because he had always gotten away with stuff before?

- why do you think z was only was only demoted instead of being fired/terminated?

- will it affect b/sarah’s friendship with kala/z? (maybe not because they were just together for kala’s birthday)

- how difficult do you think the decision/conversation w zck was for b?

- do you think this will weaken b/zck friendship?

- will b ever realize how toxic this friendship is and walk away? or will they always have a friendship in some form?

i think it’s been in the works a while.

i bet he’s surprised that he got consequences.

he’s been b’s friend for 15 years, (a) best friend even for much of that time, and i think he’s one of the guys that b changes who he is around to the point where parts of that become him (the mask, at some point, becomes who you are). i also think b really rebels against being told what to do, as he’s said before, so anything that goes against that mormon upbringing, he runs towards, and zack generally represents the antitheses of it to him (it being forbidden by the church, makes it desirable to him). (the false but omnipresent dichotomy, esp in the states, of religiosity vs hints of the vegas strip as a kid/porn/liberalism, a particular view of sexual and other freedom based in snubbing one’s nose at religion when said view of sex is actually based on/dependent on religion’s vision, paring down and definition of sex is related heavily to this and plays out with b i think eg porn must be good because it’s a fuck you to religion, when really, porn looks as it does precisely because of religion.)

kala, zack, b, and sarah are all friends and that would make things even more awkward if they fired him outright to boot. 

there’s been posts on nicole’s, kala’s, etc instagram of them still hanging with him through this summer so... i’m not sure it did. it’s hard because there is a massive rumour mill going around with diff celebs this summer and so i think it reached the point where there’s automatic distrust for anonymous drive-by and delete allegations (which frankly, should be subject to factchecking were possible and not automatically believed if anon shortlived accounts are all/almost all there is). there’s also the massive pileon on b that started about a month after firezackhall/dismisszackhall did, which was mostly taking things out of context, very very implausible sexual assault & harassment allegations, & as things went on, more and more flat out false or made up out of nothing (there’s been several accusations that i have no idea where they come from eg that ggb is about him wanting to “turn” a lesbian straight, him using the word dyke as a slur, forcible rape, regularly exposing his genitals on stage, etc)

with zack, it mostly wasn’t anonymous, but it was still more obscure twitter accounts (eg we don’t know the real life person behind the account even if it is an account that’s been around a while), aside from breezy, dallon, and in recent days, ian (and his sister, two ex girlfriends also said their experiences with zack were unpleasant to him being insulting about ian to sexist/harassing of them). i got the niggling feeling that b’s stream brushed aside b, d and i’s disclosures (focused clearly on fan disclosures/experiences), but that may have been because he’s addressing them privately/in person/one on one.

i think it was really difficult for him. i also think some of the things brought in weren’t... bad and i think muddled the process too (eg him pushing the girl that was running full tilt at b was justified imo and shouldn't have been used to say he should be fired, even how the one where b and zack were mobbed at the airport while b had a panic attack was used... inappropriately?, some of the stuff was just his brusque humor and not bigoted, i thought what he said about taylor swift was ok and not this big predatory “he’s a danger to her how could b let him be in the same room with her” thing, the fact he said that fan drawing wasn’t good but could only get better was fine by me not him being this big meanie).

i also think that second society article from nov 2 was really unethical and gross. and i don’t like zack overall (breezy, zack, ian, some of his tweets eg the drawing saying that girls control males from toddlerhood through our vaginas/vulvas, his use of nonconsensual porn inc screenshotting fans nudes on instagram and turning them into nonconsensual porn by saving them and reposting them/making the wallpaper, calling that poor girl blow job girl not just once, but telling others and calling her it again). but it was a hit piece and really inappropriately used his criminal past of over 20 years ago, including when he was a homeless teenager, most of which were poverty-driven crimes (theft, larceny, break and enter, driving violations, he’s also admitted to drug dealing/consumption, and he also drove/bodyguarded women in escort prostitution, although based on what he said, this wasn’t pimping aka taking a large portion eg 40% plus of their earnings) and not directly violent against others. there is one assault charge that we know of, from over 20 years ago, and we don’t know the context. shameful even of them to use his past like that.i would also like to remind people going after zack for this past and thinking it reveals something dreadful and evil about him that *brendon* used to not only use (hard drugs too), but be the delivery boy for weed, and later deal drugs (eg percocets). (b’s talked about this for years, most recently on twitch, and zack’s discussed his past on kala’s podcast.)

most of what zack’s done and been accused of (as in, while with panic, the sexual harassment, mocking disabled people, sexualized misogny, etc) is within the realm of normalized, widespread male behaviour. finding fault with his behaviour with/treatment of others would mean finding fault with most men and aggregate (average/overall) male behaviour. including in what some of what b has done (some of which is speculative on my part, some of which is known eg violent sex comments, misogynist slurs, online porn consumption). 

i don’t know the inner workings of their relationship, and am only going on some hints. what breezy said in that comment months ago (that zack is a bad influence on b, has cost b good friendships) says a lot to me and she liked a post recently where another expressed shock/anger at b still being friends with zack. but i don’t know if i would consider b a victim of zack  he does seem to be gaslighting him to a degree, although it also has to do with what i said above about it being in the realm of normal and him being drawn to what zack is and represents (rebelling against shoulds and oughts and mustn’ts... eg swearing is bad according to the parents and church, so all "bad words” must really be good/desirable/said). he’s also got anxiety, depression disorders which play into fears, isolation, plus the covid lockdown of this year which isolates him even further. i do believe the four of them (b, zack, sarah, kala) are living together now with the lockdown? correct me if i’m wrong; i’d have to rewatch lockdown streams. 

the fact ian also came out about zack on top of breezy and dallon has me wondering why b was and is such good friends with him. why does he like him so much? i admit, i used to like him a lot of the time in streams even when he was an acquired taste (eg he jokes around a lot, is rarely serious, a lot of sarcasm, being sardonic, deadpan, honesty and not lying but to the point where it can be a little much), some of his twitter but considering what those three alone have said... does he feel that isolated without him? the fact zack is bisexual may also play a role in their friendship (eg he has other nonstraight male friends, esp when he was younger i don’t think b had many straight male friends and had more female friends), but that’s speculative and i don’t think that’d play a big role. 

i’m not sure what b has taken in/seen, what he knows from before, what he knows now, what he knows to be true, what people have told him directly and is credible, so i don’t know if this will change things/make him see him in a different light. like what did he know about zack’s dynamic with and treatment of dallon and breezy before? what did he think of it then? what does he know now? what did breezy and dallon tell him at the time? did they tell him anything recently? show him?

[grindskull]

Shit that fucks me up #1 - Toxic Masculinity and being a “man”

Gotta have some way to organize my random thoughts here. I’m going with the obvious thing - Shit that fucks me up (STFMU). This is about me and my experiences. It is not my intention to discredit or question other human experiences. Sharing in the hopes of connecting with others who may have feel similar in their own skin. There are things here that others may define as triggers so read at your own risk (rape, abuse, and this fucking world). ---

Here is me being vulnerable.  I am putting myself out there by discussing masculinity and how I often do not identify with the larger concept of “being a man” in any positive way. You can call it toxic masculinity if you prefer. It’s acceptable shorthand for something that is just as nuanced and difficult to wade through as anything gender related.  I read this article on The Atlantic yesterday and there were some things that really resonated with me and my experience as a man/male (he/his/him). You can read it here (sorry there is a pay wall if you read more than 4 articles a month) but I will also be quoting some of the article below.  If you have time to read the article I’ll wait. It’s a bit long (many articles on The Atlantic are) and kind of academic at times. It’s okay if you don’t agree with everything in the article. Just read it.  Done? Okay let me set the stage a bit for how this shit fucks me up. ---

I’m male. I have always identified as a male/boy/man in my life. Unfortunately my experience with other males/boys/men has been mostly negative. It started at an early age when I had a hard time connecting with other boys my age. I was not interested in typical “male” interests like sports, violence, competition, and achievement. I had few (usually 1 or 2) friends at any one time and they typically had some kind of unhealthy power dynamic over me where I was subservient to my “friend” in some way.  I have some thoughts on reasons why this happened. The short version is I lived in poverty (often extreme) and I was searching for help and support in order to survive. At home I had abuse (mental, physical, verbal), drugs, addiction, and neglect. It was not a safe place to be so I did whatever I could to not be there. It was not unusual for me to eat maybe one meal during the day (typically what I could get from others at school or their home). Winter was the worst as we often did not have heat. Some of my “friends” used this as a way to hold power over me and make demands of my personality, time, and attention. Imagine finding yourself in this situation - you have to actively work to not be yourself in order to appease others for your very survival. Of course as a youth I didn’t identify it this way - my “friends” were just bossy or demanding. All of my male role models were basically assholes who did not give a fuck about anyone except themselves. This was a huge part of the 80′s zeitgeist in popular culture at the time as well. In some ways nothing has really changed. “... when asked to describe the attributes of “the ideal guy,” those same boys appeared to be harking back to 1955. Dominance. Aggression. Rugged good looks (with an emphasis on height). Sexual prowess. Stoicism. Athleticism. Wealth (at least some day).“ Under this common definition of “masculinity” I do not see myself. I am loyal, honest, caring, and sweet (to those I love). I love my body though I am non-athletic and have been most of my life. I am an attentive and talented lover but I have had very few sexual partners in my life and never saw them as moments of “conquest”. I was dirt poor most of my life but now live comfortably in my own home with my long term partner. So while not “wealthy” it is far beyond anything I could have imagined I would have in my life as a boy. Stoicism I have down. That one was easy. For me it’s just a nice way of saying “I have completely disconnected from my emotions and not having feelings or emotions is the best way to be a man”. I believed that for a very long time - it’s only in the past 2-3 years I have begun the work of breaking that down and reconnecting with my own emotions. It’s all tied up in trauma, depression, and anxiety so it takes a bit of fucking work but it’s very much worth it. If you are a man/male who thinks it is normal to not have emotions (or that emotions make you feminine/weak) please listen to me - THAT IS BULLSHIT. YOU OWE IT TO YOURSELF TO HAVE EMOTIONS.

“... young men described just one narrow route to successful masculinity. One-third said they felt compelled to suppress their feelings, to “suck it up” or “be a man” when they were sad or scared, and more than 40 percent said that when they were angry, society expected them to be combative.“

Emotions are not weakness. You are not weak for having them, feeling them, or connecting with them. There is great strength in connecting with yourself and understanding your emotions. Don’t let anyone tell you different. They are delusional at best and actively trying to harm you at worst.

“While following the conventional script may still bring social and professional rewards to boys and men, research shows that those who rigidly adhere to certain masculine norms are not only more likely to harass and bully others but to themselves be victims of verbal or physical violence. They’re more prone to binge-drinking, risky sexual behavior, and getting in car accidents. They are also less happy than other guys, with higher depression rates and fewer friends in whom they can confide.”

---

How did we get here!? Have men always been this way? What about the good ole masculinity of ye olden times? It was a simple time where men were men right? A man’s man? “According to Andrew Smiler, a psychologist who has studied the history of Western masculinity, the ideal late-19th-century man was compassionate, a caretaker, but such qualities lost favor as paid labor moved from homes to factories during industrialization. In fact, the Boy Scouts, whose creed urges its members to be loyal, friendly, courteous, and kind, was founded in 1910 in part to counter that dehumanizing trend. Smiler attributes further distortions in masculinity to a century-long backlash against women’s rights. During World War I, women proved that they could keep the economy humming on their own, and soon afterward they secured the vote. Instead of embracing gender equality, he says, the country’s leaders “doubled down” on the inalienable male right to power, emphasizing men’s supposedly more logical and less emotional nature as a prerequisite for leadership.”

Take a minute to read that and really take it in. Like many things in the US (and the world) the effects of industrialization and war shaped our current version of accepted masculinity. More specifically the leaders of this country (and leaders in other countries) used their positions of power to strengthen men and this new masculinity in our institutions. Then we were taught that this was the “right way” to “be a man”. FUCK. THIS. SHIT.

“Today many parents are unsure of how to raise a boy, what sort of masculinity to encourage in their sons. But as I learned from talking with boys themselves, the culture of adolescence, which fuses hyper-rationality with domination, sexual conquest, and a glorification of male violence, fills the void.“

Here we have the core of what I experience as a man when it comes to the current socially accepted version of masculinity and why it fucks me up. I don’t identify with any of this shit! It does not feed me. It does not make me feel fulfilled and happy. It doesn’t make the world better for anyone it simply dehumanizes us all. 

“In a classic study, adults shown a video of an infant startled by a jack-in-the-box were more likely to presume the baby was “angry” if they were first told the child was male. Mothers of young children have repeatedly been found to talk more to their girls and to employ a broader, richer emotional vocabulary with them; with their sons, again, they tend to linger on anger. As for fathers, they speak with less emotional nuance than mothers regardless of their child’s sex. Despite that, according to Judy Y. Chu, a human-biology lecturer at Stanford who conducted a study of boys from pre-K through first grade, little boys have a keen understanding of emotions and a desire for close relationships. But by age 5 or 6, they’ve learned to knock that stuff off, at least in public: to disconnect from feelings of weakness, reject friendships with girls (or take them underground, outside of school), and become more hierarchical in their behavior.“

I’m not going to get into the topic of my own father (that’s another post in this series for sure) too deeply but I will say I completely identify with these ideas. Emotional distance, only expressing anger, telling me having emotions was weak. This was reinforced societal norms throughout my youth through today. Don’t talk about your problems or feelings. Ball them up inside. Wall yourself off from the world. Connections = weakness that others will exploit. You must control every situation and hold power over others. FUCK. THIS. SHIT.

---

So when did I wake up? When did I start to see through this shit in some way? When my younger sister was born. It was really obvious to me that she was treated in a different way and expectations of her as a girl/woman were not the same as the expectations others had for me. Mostly I just saw the negatives in this. It took me time (and lots of communication and experiences with my partner and others) to recognize the root of this was more fucked up socialization. 

“Girlfriends, mothers, and in some cases sisters were the most common confidants of the boys I met. While it’s wonderful to know they have someone to talk to—and I’m sure mothers, in particular, savor the role—teaching boys that women are responsible for emotional labor, for processing men’s emotional lives in ways that would be emasculating for them to do themselves, comes at a price for both sexes. Among other things, that dependence can leave men unable to identify or express their own emotions, and ill-equipped to form caring, lasting adult relationships.”

Read this carefully. Nobody is responsible for your emotional well being but you. If you are a male/man this is especially true - females/women are not responsible for managing your emotions and your reliance on them to take care of this is a form of abuse. They are not responsible for your emotions. YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR OWN EMOTIONS.

It can be really hard to see this. It was a blind spot for me for way too long. Don’t let it be one for you. Connecting with and taking responsibility for your emotions is one of the biggest things you can do to improve yourself as a human being. If you are sad you can cry. If you are happy you can laugh. You have a wide range of emotions and they don’t all lead to frustration or anger.

“As someone who, by virtue of my sex, has always had permission to weep, I didn’t initially understand this. Only after multiple interviews did I realize that when boys confided in me about crying—or, even more so, when they teared up right in front of me—they were taking a risk, trusting me with something private and precious: evidence of vulnerability, or a desire for it.“

---

Okay so putting aside all of the reinforcement we get from our parents and institutions and our lack of emotional vulnerability why do we all buy into this dumb shit? Who convinced us all this is what masculinity is? And why do we listen?

“What the longtime sportswriter Robert Lipsyte calls “jock culture” (or what the boys I talked with more often referred to as “bro culture”) is the dark underbelly of male-dominated enclaves, whether or not they formally involve athletics: all-boys’ schools, fraternity houses, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, the military. Even as such groups promote bonding, even as they preach honor, pride, and integrity, they tend to condition young men to treat anyone who is not “on the team” as the enemy (the only women who ordinarily make the cut are blood relatives— bros before hos!), justifying any hostility toward them. Loyalty is paramount, and masculinity is habitually established through misogynist language and homophobia.”

Sounds familiar right guys? Don’t kid yourself. This is what being a man looks like in almost all situations in which we feel “safe” to express our self right? You are either with us or against us. Anything different or anyone questioning this behavior must be “othered” as they are clearly not “on the team”. FUCK. THIS. SHIT.

This was my entire experience as a youth. As someone who did not fit into this group (nor wanted to) I was immediately “othered” and deemed a “pussy” or “fag” or “homo” or “weirdo”. My friend group reflected this - mostly others who also were “not on the team” like women, gays and lesbians, and men who also did not identify with this version of masculinity. Which just made it easier to group us all together and identify us as the enemy. 

“Just because some young men now draw the line at referring to someone who is openly gay as a fag doesn’t mean, by the way, that gay men (or men with traits that read as gay) are suddenly safe. If anything, the gay guys I met were more conscious of the rules of manhood than their straight peers were. They had to be—and because of that, they were like spies in the house of hypermasculinity.” Without the ability to connect with and express my emotions I often reacted in anger. I started fights. I got violent (with words and writing mostly). I returned this “othering” and treated them all as the enemy. I had other reasons for this (being abused by men as a boy) but at the crux of the issue I had no trust for men. This helped me connect with women and my gay friends as they also experienced this distrust in similar (and different) ways. 

Years later I found myself in a job where I managed a group of men (100 or more at any time) working as a team (video game industry) and totally unable to connect with any of them as a human let alone a man. It was at this time that I realized this was a problem beyond my own experiences and when I started to understand my own participation in this system. 

I tried to question things as they came up. I tried to hear my teammates and help them navigate this murky sea of masculinity to find their own place in it. Most people didn’t want to participate. They learned to keep their mouth shut if I was within earshot of their typical “bro talk”. They learned to act differently around me so as not to incur my wrath (using my anger and position of power to punish them for being sexist, racist, or intolerant). I felt powerful and I tricked myself into thinking I was making a difference. I was wrong. 

---

“Recently, Pascoe turned her attention to no homo, a phrase that gained traction in the 1990s. She sifted through more than 1,000 tweets, primarily by young men, that included the phrase. Most were expressing a positive emotion, sometimes as innocuous as “I love chocolate ice cream, #nohomo” or “I loved the movie The Day After Tomorrow, #nohomo.” “A lot of times they were saying things like ‘I miss you’ to a friend or ‘We should hang out soon,’ ” she said. “Just normal expressions of joy or connection.” No homo is a form of inoculation against insults from other guys, Pascoe concluded, a “shield that allows boys to be fully human.”

It wasn’t long before my “making a difference” spread into our hiring, training, and management of the team. I brought in women who wanted to work in the game industry. I tried to shut down any of the bro culture bullshit that came up and used it as an opportunity to teach other men why it was fucked up. It worked for some (maybe 5-6 people out of hundreds) but the majority either quit or tried to get me fired. Most did not change their behavior in any way. 

The women said they knew what they were getting into. I don’t believe they knew what it was like to actually be in the middle of the situation. I assume women in the military probably have a lot of experience like this. In short - it’s fucking toxic and disgusting. Like other males/men they too have to fall in line and “become one of the boys” or risk being antagonized and ostracized for being “different”. It’s Lord of the Flies. It’s fucking mob mentality. It’s masculinity at it’s absolute worst. And this was in a “progressive” creative city working for a small company with a woman CEO. Men simply don’t give a fuck and it’s almost always easier to go with the flow. FUCK. THIS. SHIT.

My first experience with a trans individual in a work setting occurred was while I was managing this team. One of our long term employees made the transition and I had to watch how they were treated by the “bros’. Jokes were made, memes were shared, snickering and fucked up behavior was rampant. I had to talk to, discipline, and fire many individuals. These were men I thought were “on the team” and working to be good examples of masculinity. I should have known that was just part of the act - their way of surviving and showing subservience to me as a man in a position of power over them. My trust was further eroded in masculinity. 

Putting yourself over others is not power. It is dehumanization and it stems from hate. We can be different without being better or worse than someone else regardless of who they are. Not everything has to be a competition. It took me way too long to undo the damage done to me by these ideal of toxic masculinity. You can do it too - you just have to start today. 

---

Beyond the negative effects this version of masculinity has on us as males/men it also fucks up our interaction with women and sexual partners and it’s certainly done so to me. I’m actively working on unfucking my fucking and aware that many of my heterosexual ideals of sex stem from the same shit I have been actively fighting against most of my life. Connecting emotionally with your sexual partner takes things to a completely different level.

“It’s not like I imagined boys would gush about making sweet, sweet love to the ladies, but why was their language so weaponized ? The answer, I came to believe, was that locker-room talk isn’t about sex at all, which is why guys were ashamed to discuss it openly with me. The (often clearly exaggerated) stories boys tell are really about power: using aggression toward women to connect and to validate one another as heterosexual, or to claim top spots in the adolescent sexual hierarchy. Dismissing that as “banter” denies the ways that language can desensitize—abrade boys’ ability to see girls as people deserving of respect and dignity in sexual encounters.”  

This is the first thing that comes to my mind when I hear the term “rape culture”. As men we are taught that to be masculine is to claim “wins” in sexual conquest. Sex is property and we can collect it. Even if it’s with our long term partners or spouses. Ever tried talking to men about this? Ever questioned others on how it’s fucked up? You probably heard about how it’s all in jest. Just a joke! I’m just joking!  “When called out, boys typically claim that they thought they were just being “funny.” And in a way that makes sense—when left unexamined, such “humor” may seem like an extension of the gross-out comedy of childhood. Little boys are famous for their fart jokes, booger jokes, poop jokes. It’s how they test boundaries, understand the human body, gain a little cred among their peers. But, as can happen with sports, their glee in that can both enable and camouflage sexism. The boy who, at age 10, asks his friends the difference between a dead baby and a bowling ball may or may not find it equally uproarious, at 16, to share what a woman and a bowling ball have in common (you can Google it). He may or may not post ever-escalating “jokes” about women, or African Americans, or homosexuals, or disabled people on a group Snapchat. He may or may not send “funny” texts to friends about “girls who need to be raped,” or think it’s hysterical to surprise a buddy with a meme in which a woman is being gagged by a penis, her mascara mixed with her tears. He may or may not, at 18, scrawl the names of his hookups on a wall in his all-male dorm, as part of a year-long competition to see who can “pull” the most. Perfectly nice, bright, polite boys I interviewed had done one or another of these things.”

Let me be clear in case you are confused. This shit isn’t funny. Laughing at other people’s misfortune is a long standing human tradition yes - and it still dehumanizes everyone involved. That doesn’t make me laugh but maybe you are still amused? Why?

“At the most disturbing end of the continuum, “funny” and “hilarious” become a defense against charges of sexual harassment or assault. To cite just one example, a boy from Steubenville, Ohio, was captured on video joking about the repeated violation of an unconscious girl at a party by a couple of high-school football players. “She is so raped,” he said, laughing. “They raped her quicker than Mike Tyson.” When someone off camera suggested that rape wasn’t funny, he retorted, “It isn’t funny—it’s hilarious!”

The classic toxic masculinity force field present in my life has been the “just joking” phrase with the ultimate no consequence phrase “it’s hilarious!”. Say something you don’t want to manage the consequences for? Just a joke! People still question you or your morals after saying some heinous shit? No.. it’s cool... it’s hilarious! You just gotta laugh! FUCK. THIS. SHIT.

“Hilarious” is another way, under the pretext of horseplay or group bonding, that boys learn to disregard others’ feelings as well as their own. “Hilarious” is a haven, offering distance when something is inappropriate, confusing, depressing, unnerving, or horrifying; when something defies boys’ ethics. It allows them to subvert a more compassionate response that could be read as unmasculine—and makes sexism and misogyny feel transgressive rather than supportive of an age-old status quo. Boys may know when something is wrong; they may even know that true manhood—or maybe just common decency—compels them to speak up. Yet, too often, they fear that if they do, they’ll be marginalized or, worse, themselves become the target of derision from other boys. Masculinity, then, becomes not only about what boys do say, but about what they don’t—or won’t, or can’t—say, even when they wish they could. The psychologists Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson, the authors of Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys, have pointed out that silence in the face of cruelty or sexism is how too many boys become men. 

I feel like I may have already gone too far into this dark hole of shit that fucks me up around toxic masculinity. I hope I didn’t lose you. I hope you have questions and thoughts about how this impacts your life. Perhaps ways that you make a change today to fight against this bullshit. You may be asking yourself “what can we do!?” At the end of the day its up to males/men to change this culture. It’s not about self-hate or self-abuse. We gotta name this and own it. We need more men to step up and say ‘It doesn’t have to be like this”. Our collective mental health requires us to be more flexible and connected to ourselves and emotions. We need to find ways to deal with our anger, frustration, and desires in ways that don’t hurt ourselves and others. We need to teach ourselves (especially youth) that it isn’t enough to only talk about things we shouldn’t (and hopefully won’t) do. 

If this shit fucks you too you can do something about it. Start with yourself. Question these things when they come up. And not only when you feel “safe” to do so. Do it consistently in ways that are non-confrontational (they will probably lead to confrontations with most men anyway - sorry). Be okay with not always “winning’ in these situations. You’ll be surprised who you might connect with in the process. Hopefully one of those people will be yourself. 

[gaijinschoollibrarian]

Manga and Women: Buying Manga for School Libraries in the #MeToo Era

When I talk to other school librarians about manga and anime, many of them voice a similar concern: the manga they see has horrible treatment of women. These are not invalid concerns, especially as school librarians are working to make their collections more inclusive and affirming. And when students are requesting series that depict sexual harassment and assault as comedic occurrences (I'm looking at you, Seven Deadly Sins), or at the very least, series which treat women solely as sexual or romantic beings, I can't blame my colleagues for their hesitation.

That said, there's a lot to unpack with this debate. There are elements of Japanese society that are inherently different from American society. Many school librarians also know nothing of the distinctions between genres of manga, or have only heard of what's most popular among their patrons. Manga is often seen as the way to get boys reading, and so masculine titles tend to be extremely popular for purchasing. What I'm going to do is try to unpack these things, piece by piece, to try and provide some context- and maybe show my peers that the stereotypes of shōnen manga are not all there is out there to purchase.

Societal Differences in the Perception of Gender

If we all work from the supposition that gender is a social construct, then perhaps it might be easier to understand that Japan's constructs are similar and different to Western constructs. Japanese media can come across as being both freer and stricter with gender roles. Here are a few things you need to understand about Japan in relation to women:

Japan is ranked 110 out of 144 countries on the World Economic Forum's annual report on gender equality.

There is only one female member of the Japanese Cabinet.

As of 2017, only 3.4% of executives in Japan were women.

The ratio of female-to-male physicians in Japan is 21%.

Japan has been trying to improve the standing of women in society, but it's been difficult.

Japan has a long history of having a traditional gender balance of labor wherein women are expected to raise children and take care of housekeeping, while men are expected to work. Japanese society generally has a very heavy line down the center in this division, much more so than there currently is in the West. Since 1986, the Equal Employment Opportunity Law has been in place to try and provide more gender equity in the workplace in Japan, but it's been a struggle. Part of the problem is that there was no penalty for employers who did not adhere to the changes.

Japan, also, has a serious problem with the way it handles and reports sexual harassment and assault. Certain occurrences which Western women consider assault are not necessarily seen as such by Japanese women. In her article, "Shifting attitudes toward sexual violence in Japan", Masami Ito describes her experiences:

When I was in junior high school, a young man who lived in the same apartment building flashed me in an elevator, blocking the entrance as he did so.

When I was in college, a middle-aged man cornered me in the box seat on a train and masturbated in front of me.

When I was in my mid-20s, a man pressed himself against me in the aisle of a convenience store and then followed me home. I had to call my father for help that time.

And, of course, I have been groped on trains many, many times.

Until recently, I never considered these incidents to be sexual assaults, nor did I ever view myself as a victim. I told myself that such things happened all the time and I was never physically hurt. I compared my experiences to those of other women and I considered myself lucky.

In Japan, there's even a word for men who grope women on crowded trains: chikan. Tokyo's Metropolitan Police Department reported 1,750 cases of groping on the trains. (I attempted to find figures on this particular crime in NYC from the same year, but was unable to find any exact report of figures.) It's such a common occurrence, it's often a plot point in manga. In My Love Story!! the protagonist meets his future girlfriend by stopping a man from groping her.

I want to be clear, and maybe the panels of My Love Story!! do something to show this, that the problems of sexual harassment in Japan are seen as problems by people in the country. There are Japanese feminists and citizens who want things to change. Last year, the BBC released a documentary titled Japan's Secret Shame, which went into the experiences of three different women who were raped in Japan. It's not available at the moment, but if you can find a way to see it, it may give insight into the issue if you want to know more.

Shōnen, Shōjo, and So Much More

The complaints I hear the most are in relation to what is known as shōnen manga. Shōnen is geared toward boys between ages 12 and 18. There's a reason this stuff flies off the shelf with our male-identifying patrons: it's literally made for them. The longest running series in Japan are shōnen manga, and are household names here in the West (you've probably heard of Dragonball Z, I presume). Typically, these are high-action, hyper-masculine stories. And while there are exceptions, such as My Hero Academia, there's a large history of "fan service" in shōnen. There's also some pretty big issues with some of the creators of shōnen titles.

For example, the author of Rurouni Kenshin was found with an enormous backlog of child pornography DVDs. Not only did he have this material, he admitted his attraction to young girls. His manga is currently still in publication, after he paid a fine of only ¥200,000 (about $1,800 USD). No, I am not joking.

I don't want you to come away from this thinking shōnen manga is evil, by the way. What I want is for fellow school librarians to know that what they're seeing is just a fraction of what manga has to offer. Some shōnen has female protagonists (Yotsuba&! features a mostly female cast with little to no fan service, as its main character is a child). And a lot of women and girls read shōnen.

Shōjo manga is the counterpart to shōnen: manga written for girls between the ages of 12 and 18. Honestly, shōjo can have its own issues. Some titles feature girls whose identities revolve solely around romance or a desire to get married and make babies. Kidnapping and threats of sexual assault can be normal (the idea being that these girls need to be saved by their boyfriends, who frequently are much older than them). There's a whole slew of manga revolving around schoolgirls having romantic relationships with their teachers. So, I also don't want you to think that being labeled shōjo makes the content automatically appropriate for students.

I recently reread a manga I loved as a teen, Ayashi no Ceres. It featured multiple rather explicit sex scenes and the main character dropping out of school to have a baby. It was an easy decision to select other series over that one, although I still consider it a classic. I leave it to students to select series with those sort of themes at their own pace through alternate pathways such as the public library, bookstores, or manga apps.

However, I do want to point out that shōjo manga is a category in which feminine fantasy and identity is often at the forefront. And while this is the case, there are many shōjo manga which widely appeal to boys. Titles which spring to mind are Escaflowne and Magic Knight Rayearth.

There are other categories as well: seinan (for adult men), josei (for adult women), kodomo (for children), and gekiga (for adults, with a more "artistic" and "literary" reputation). The differentiation between adults and teens has more to do with the difficulty of the Japanese than the content or target demographic. Gekiga is probably the most "different", because it strives to be taken more seriously. (I have a plan to talk more in-depth about each category in their own posts).

Look For Women

When purchasing, if you are looking to move away from the pure moe that is popular among certain titles, I'd suggest looking for women who are mangaka. The likelihood that problematic behavior will be present is lower, and honestly, women creators can always use the boost. Series that are beloved by boys are written by women: Fullmetal Alchemist, Inu-Yasha, and Ranma 1/2 are examples (admittedly, the latter two were both written by Takahashi Rumiko).

Note: I kept this fairly pared down, so if you'd like to know more or have any questions, please don't hesitate to comment. If you would like me to go more in depth on any topic, please let me know, and I will do an expansion in a future blog. I have some deeper dives planned, but if I know of a direction people specifically want me to go, I’ll tackle it.

[mrs-nate-humphrey]

Hey, I don’t usually reblog stuff to debunk it, and I haven’t read this all the way (I refuse to, to be honest) but the radfem rhetoric in this chills me to the bone. I stopped reading after this bit about the Sheppard Wedding: 

It is made clear over and over that she (Serena) would never, ever have done it sober, but the event is so intensely romanticized and eroticized that it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that Nate had raped her. He may also have been intoxicated, but he's the one with male privilege, which gives him power that Serena does not have.

Read that again. “Nate had raped her. He may also have been intoxicated, but he’s the one with male privilege” .... ??? 

There are situations irl when consent is blurry, and of course, that’s not great, but it’s important to understand that in some situations, you cannot clearly define an abuser/victim dichotomy, because there are lines that are blurred. I’m gonna rewrite this same paragraph absolving Nate & demonising Serena: 

Nate, however, has a girlfriend he’s been dating more or less from childhood, and the worst part is that she is Serena’s best friend. We see, such as in the flashback scene in “Blair Waldorf Must Pie!” instances of Nate feeling attraction towards Serena, but making the conscious decision not to act on it. It is therefore notable that the first time Nate has sex with Serena is when he is obviously drunk. Serena’s actions are inherently exploitative; if he would’ve refused sober, but accepted drunk, we can clearly say that Serena raped Nate.

Is this an accurate read of the situation? FUCK NO. I typed it out to prove that it’s ridiculous. But is everything I’ve said just as canonical as the ‘Nate raped Serena’ bullshit from the meta? It is, isn’t it? 

This upsets me a lot, personally, because Nate is pretty much canonically a rape survivor, even if the narrative never acknowledges that. His entire affair with Catherine - being coerced into sex for money because he needs the money so badly, Catherine knowing where his dad is and having the power to blackmail him if he tries to refuse the money and the sex (the way she blackmailed Vanessa).... the way Catherine holds immense power over Nate, socially speaking (she’s a duchess and he’s more or less impoverished at this point in the season).... There is a lot that Nate does canonically that can be criticised (such as watching Chuck be predatory and doing nothing). But sleeping with his best friend when they were both equally drunk? No. I’m sorry, no.

Maybe that essay gets better as you progress and read more, but just from this definition of consent I’m not inclined to give the author much of my time. I do agree that the GG writers have a terrible understanding of consent. But as a male survivor who has seen the way radical feminism hurts disadvantaged men firsthand, I would pretty much say that the writer of that article doesn’t have a good understanding of consent, either.

hi i found a great read that discusses gossip girl and it's writers' horrifyingly bad understanding of consent

much of the blog post talks about jenny (since she is, assaulted more than once throughout her short time on the show)

[reactingtosomething]

Reacting to Sweet/Vicious (cont’d)

Part II: CAN THE POWERS THAT BE KNOCK WHATEVER THIS IS THE FUCK OFF?

The Setup: Find the first part of our Sweet/Vicious Reaction here. As our conversation progressed, we branched off into talking about the things Sweet/Vicious itself is about, but we did bring it back around to the show.

MARCHAE: again it’s oddly addictive for me

LIZ: why oddly

MARCHAE: yeah like i said it feels weird having counseled young women (and men) about this stuff and watching it from a dramatic/ comedic perspective

LIZ: I wish I could be a bad ass rapist attacking vigilante

MARCHAE: my brain catches up with it after the fact usually

LIZ: but my cover has been blown since this will be on the internet

MIRI: I think the intertwining of the comedy and drama are so necessary. The comedy keeps it from getting too heavy to endure and the drama keeps the soul of it

Or is that the perfect cover, Lemon?

MARCHAE: yes and for it to be not law and order special victims

LIZ: It would feel more like The Handmaids Tale if it weren’t funny and I love the tone because these are young girls and they should be allowed some weed humor and what not

KRIS: The care they give to exploring the institutional problems is really gratifying

MARCHAE: it is a good show * i just come to it with baggage*

MIRI: Well the fact that it still keeps you hooked says a lot then

LIZ: I feel like it was cancelled under pressure from like.. bad sources that don’t like female empowerment or exposing rape culture..

I mean we probably all come to it with baggage

MIRI: It didn’t get much in the way of ratings

LIZ: that is why it is real

MARCHAE: i did read an article that said the numbers were super low

KRIS: I don’t come to it with baggage, exactly, but student sexual assault awareness activism was my real gateway to feminism so this show really grabbed me

LIZ: NIELSEN CAN FUCK RIGHT OFF

MIRI: And it is somewhat at odds with the rest of MTV’s programming

LIZ: and that is why we ❤️ kris

KRIS: But it’s MTV and they patted themselves on the back SO HARD for their gender-neutral acting award and all that

MIRI: I also think it was hard to market

LIZ: I don’t know what else MTV is up to

MIRI: Yeah, I wish they had kept it for the critical awareness!

MARCHAE: yeah i mostly aged out of MTV about a dozen years ago

LIZ: but TOSH.O has been on the air for however long.. and this is brilliant

MARCHAE: so this was definitely refreshing

LIZ: and ONE SEASON

MIRI: If it had gotten awards they may have (a la CW with Crazy Ex Girlfriend)

KRIS: So I like, don’t fucking care if the numbers were that bad, you know you have an audience and a major cultural hook so re-evaluate your marketing strategy

MIRI: Preach

MARCHAE: **CLAPS**

LIZ: YESSSSS

🙌🏽

KRIS: The producers made a point of consulting with EROC and RAINN so you’d think those were connections MTV brass could have cultivated for outreach

I guess this is where we offer a disclaimer that we’re not experts in this side of the industry

LIZ: I have a reaction.. or question.. or both

KRIS: But whatever

LIZ: yeah but we also don’t spell check ourselves so don’t take us that seriously

MIRI: hahahahahahhahaa

MARCHAE: BWHAHAHAHAHHA

MIRI: We demand to be taken seriously!

LIZ: not to you, to people who might mistake us for pretending to know what the hell we are talking about

WHAT ABOUT TYLER

MIRI:  Which one is Tyler?

KRIS: ...go on

MARCHAE: oh my gerd

KRIS: Jules’s guy

LIZ: WHY ARE YOU TRYING TO DATE THE BROTHER OF SOME DUDE THAT TRIED TO KILL YOU THAT YOU JUST BURIED!?

MIRI: thank you

IT’S NOT A GOOD CHOICE

MARCHAE: YESSSSSSSSSSS

KRIS: Chemistry? I don’t know

LIZ: Sweet kid, but girl, keep that distance!

MIRI: Jules makes some not good choices

MARCHAE: CHEMISTRY LOLOLOL

LIZ: I mean, who does in college, but that seems real cut and dry

MIRI: They do somewhat justify it with the thing of this being the first time she’s interested in a guy since her rape

LIZ: yeah

MIRI: I think she may have thought that would never happen again

MARCHAE: yeah but would she really be interested in the brother of the guy she helped off?

LIZ: I feel her physical anxiety and pain when she clams up around Nate and at Tylers very innocent knee touch

MIRI: And it has and he’s sweet and everything goes really haywire/fast from there

MARCHAE: oh joy!

LIZ: I think it’s important that she semi liked tyler before she knew of his connection to the dead guy

MARCHAE: i would quickly semi-unlike him

MIRI: She was already into him before that happened and I don’t think she knows how to emotionally reverse course

MARCHAE: she cut his hands off and plucked his teeth out

MIRI: Jules is not the most in touch with her emotions

MARCHAE: MIRI SHE HELPED MURDER A HUMAN

MIRI: She is not the most self aware

I KNOW THAT

MARCHAE: i mean it’s like being wasted and then stubbing your knee

LIZ: SHE SAWED THOSED HANDS RIGHT OFF

MARCHAE: you sober up real fast

RIGHT

like SAWED OFF

MIRI: Except that you don’t

KRIS: “super chill that you know that”

MARCHAE: teeth PLUCKED OUT

MIRI: You just think you do

Nothing sobers you up but time

MARCHAE: LOLOL

and a stubbed knee

MIRI: JULES IS THE MASTER OF COMPARTMENTALIZING

KRIS: That’s not how biology works, Marchae

MARCHAE: Jules needs to get her freaking life

MIRI: It does not, you’re still just as impaired!

LIZ: I am not going to discuss the appropriate ways to be in touch with emotions because I am at her level as far as compartmentalizing goes so I get that. but murder might stop me in ma tracks

MIRI: Take a 7th grade Health class, they’ll tell you all about it

MARCHAE: **SIDE EYE TO YOU BOTH AND SUDDENLY QUESTIONING OUR FRIENDSHIP**

MIRI: HOW DARE

KRIS: HA

MARCHAE: LIZ LOL

LIZ: hahaha

MIRI: We can all agree that Jules is making some questionable choices and needs all the therapy

MARCHAE: what comes after all?

that’s what she needs

LIZ: at least she goes to victim support group

MARCHAE: She does

LIZ: i was surprised she went to that

MARCHAE: isn’t that how they help the one girl

LIZ: yeah at least her

MARCHAE: who was assaulted by tazer in crotch guy

MIRI: Yes, Jules knows her from group

MARCHAE: ok

i was happy to see that scene

LIZ: me too

MIRI: I love that they make sure she sees him and has his name

MARCHAE: YES!

MIRI: It’s just the right amount of vicious/vindictive

LIZ: but i don’t like that everyone is like “oh man all of these upstanding douchey fucking assholes are being attacked.. its not right”

but like.. it is

MIRI: It’s outside the system, but it has to be because of how badly the system has failed

Welllllll

KRIS: And that the look on the girl’s face is sort of grimly satisfied and not a smile, which would’ve been too much

MIRI: I can’t actually endorse vigilante justice in the real world

LIZ: why not miri

and yeah i smiled at home but get why she didnt

MIRI: Because if any one person has the moral say to hurt/murder people that’s dangerous

They could be wrong

or morally bankrupt

LIZ: Yeah, murder is not cool

MIRI: or unduly influenced

We have a legal system with accountability to combat that

LIZ: but how many dudes are just raping willy nilly with no consequences

MIRI: and that system is DEEPLY DEEPLY flawed

KRIS: And it’s potentially dangerous for the vigilante, and bystanders/other third parties

LIZ: while these victims are ruined and mostly have ptsd and drop out of schoool

MIRI: but the reasons to have it in place are still valid

LIZ: right it was dangerous for Jules, she was almost killed

MIRI: So I LOVE this as a show and a social commentary, but I don’t think it’s something to endorse in the real world

KRIS: And the show balances all of these ideas so so well

MIRI: YES

LIZ: well can we prosecute rape on college campuses then?

KRIS: I think

MIRI: They genuinely go into the questions of vigilante justice throughout the season and I love it

Liz, of course I think we should!

We need to

KRIS: And the problems both on and off campus

LIZ: i mean i know you guys think that

MARCHAE: i’ll be interested to see what the show does with those ideas

LIZ: but CAN THE POWERS THAT BE KNOCK WHATEVER THIS IS THE FUCK OFF?  ASLKDJFALKDJFAL;SKJF;LASDF;LAKJF;AS

MIRI: Seconded

MARCHAE: because sometimes (lately...often) i question the justice system and it’s ability to effectively protect the innocent

the show does a good job of providing escape and fantasy

LIZ: the issues on campus are the problems with colleges burying the crime stats and silencing victims and that the environment is so perfect for a person with predatory behavior

MARCHAE: and it’s been going on for years...i’ve been out of student affairs for about a decade and we were talking about appropriately reporting clery (sp) states then

KRIS: yeah it’s Clery

MIRI: Yeah, the way schools are often able to bury things that happen on their grounds is a huge flaw

MARCHAE: the problem also is the fact that people do not feel safe coming forward

MIRI: What’s Clery?

MARCHAE: again the things i could share but won’t

LIZ: I think social media and smart phones are bringing the bright light of day to this issue but its probably been going on forever

MARCHAE: its an act that mandates that campuses report crimes on campus to provide transparency

it was (if I remember correctly) named after a young woman named either jean or janine after she was harmed on her campus

jeanne*

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clery_Act

not the best citation of source (you know i do not like wikipedia- but it will give you the details quickly)

KRIS: Our very small readership is probably already relatively in the know, but I feel like we should also shout out to resources for campus sexual assault survivors like End Rape On Campus; Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network; Know Your IX; and Callisto

MARCHAE: YES!

LIZ: Does it help when people are kind of told to second guess reporting the incident? I think a lot of people are talked out of it

MARCHAE: but these were conversations happening years go (that this show addresses)

MIRI: I honestly cannot wait til you guys finish the show

LIZ: yeah you’re right we aren’t experts and we should get back to the show

MARCHAE: or questioned “why now are you reporting”

MIRI: because it does SO MUCH so well

MARCHAE: thats the one that makes me want to VOMIT

and PUNCH THINGS

LIZ: my current .. not sleeping thing.. is good for catching up on stuff

MIRI: No I’m not trying to steer you back to the show!

KRIS: It’s hard (as a non-expert) to know what to tell people -- reporting is the only way any of this gets better, but basically no one treats people right when they come to report

LIZ: ok show show show show

MIRI: But they use some of this reality really well down the line

KRIS: Definitely read up on Callisto if you get a chance

MARCHAE: and check out the clery act

LIZ: If  I did halloween anymore and thought anyone would get it. I’d be Ophelia and make Aaron dress up as Jules

MIRI: I learned that until really recently that in NY (I think it was NY) the victim had to return every 6 months or something to petition to keep the rape kit from being destroyed 

while waiting for further investigation/trial

KRIS: There is SO MUCH infuriating stuff about how rape kits are handled

MARCHAE: smh

MIRI: Liz, please please please do that I need to see it

LIZ: Mariska (SVU lady) has been a huge advocate for dealing with the back log of rape kits

but she’s just one tv star

MARCHAE: I am literally trying not to kick things right now

MIRI: She does a ton!

MARCHAE: the backlogs are INSANE

LIZ: yeah she is bad ass

Miri, I dress the dogs up, not myself these days 😉

KRIS: Quick nod to the producers and casting department -- even though most of the series regulars are white, lots of POC among the supporting cast and extras

MIRI: DRESS THE DOGS UP AS JULES AND OPHELIA

LIZ: true

KRIS: I assume budget reasons are why Aisha Dee is always credited as a guest star

LIZ: and omg nobody at the pet parade would get it and we are going for FIRST PLACE

like the grandpa in gilmore girls

KRIS: Addie [left] is definitely Ophelia right?

MIRI: It doesn’t have to be for the pet parade! Just sometime

MARCHAE: Kris this callisto resource is great

sorry guys i had to take a gander

KRIS: Yeah!

a short video on Callisto, with founder and CEO Jessica Ladd

LIZ: Ha yeah Addie would be ophelia

MARCHAE: there is a ted talk about it!

LIZ: This show does think of kind of so many things that I had questions about (besides the ninja and hacker skills.. i am just gonna believe that those are legit).. like the fact that they get the wrong guy

and that cat fishing is happening

MARCHAE: it makes you question your life choices

KRIS: Yeah that was such a great twist!

LIZ: but I will say.. Jule’s sorority is especially big brothery about her whereabouts

KRIS: It pays off

MIRI: Oh can we address the fact that JULES PUSHED OPHELIA DOWN THE STAIRS

KRIS: Mackenzie especially

MARCHAE: OH MY GOD can we please check back in when liz and I finish

KRIS: YES

MIRI: YES

LIZ: OH WAIT

THE CAMPUS POLICE GUY

KRIS: Barton!

LIZ: does he come back?

KRIS: Yes!

MARCHAE: LOL

MIRI: I love Barton!

LIZ: I love how he chases her and then they are like kind of chummy

KRIS: I think this is the sort of spoiler that will increase your anticipation, so fuck it: Barton and Harris team up

LIZ: OPHELIA PUT DOWN THAT WEED!

I like that

MARCHAE: WHAT OH MY GOD THE GIRLS MUST GET TRAPPED OR SOMETHING

MIRI: You used my private bathroom?

LIZ: and you’ve given my insomnia a purpose for the night

WAIT

MARCHAE

MARCHAE: I am guessing sorry

he opened pandora’s box

LIZ: shit ok you are probably right

MARCHAE: grumble I HATE YOU GUYS FOR MAKING ME LIKE TV

MIRI: But seriously Jules pushed Ophelia down the stairs! That’s not ok!

KRIS: HAHAHAHAHAHA

(Marchae)

(not Jules pushing O)

LIZ: GRUMBLE.. IVE WATCHED LIKE 3 FEATURES THIS WEEK.. WHO AM I

MIRI: She’s too willing to go to far

MARCHAE: (in the most loving way possible 😊 😊 )

LIZ: She did like throw her right down the steps

MARCHAE: OH also - can we talk about why this show is also a great way to encourage people to take some kind of self defense class!

KRIS: I think that’s tricky actually

LIZ: I know. I need to have some kind of defense item or weapon on me more than i do

at least

KRIS: The Women’s Resource Center at my first grad school was really careful about its messaging on that

MARCHAE: as many times as I’ve been touched and groped it is necessary to just know i can protect myself

KRIS: Like you want to make it available as a resource

LIZ: SING

MIRI: I really do need to take a self defense class

KRIS: And also it’s just fun and empowering to know how to do that stuff

MIRI: SING!!!!!

LIZ: yessss

I like to think my dogs deter people, but what if they don’t.. I have to protect all 3 of us!

MARCHAE: kris why do you think its tricky

MIRI: Kris, do you know what we’re referencing?

If not I will make you watch it

KRIS: I do not know what you’re referencing

LIZ: HE HAS TO

OGMSL;KFJS;LFKJS;LKDFJA

MIRI: OYESSES added to the list!!!

LIZ: (that slam typing scared A.A.RON)

MARCHAE: (we’ve just asked kris a lot of questions back to back to back)

KRIS: What’s tricky is that there’s a not-very-crooked line from “It’s great to take self-defense classes!” to victim-blaming

LIZ: MISSS CONGENEALITY

MIRI: Kris, is it tricky because you don’t want to put the onus of not being assaulted on women?

KRIS: exactly

LIZ: right like .. straws that test for roofies

KRIS: Oh I’ve seen Miss Congeniality, but it was forever ago

LIZ: its not your job to not get roofied

MIRI: “not-very-crooked-line” I love that

MARCHAE: AHHHHHHHH YES Solar plexus inseam knee groin?

MIRI: YES!

KRIS: I’m a Sandra Bullock fan, I’d watch it

MIRI: Just remember to SING

LIZ: 😊

MIRI: Yay! We will do so

KRIS: (Can we do a Paul Feig series? Bridesmaids-The Heat-Spy-Ghostbusters)

MIRI: YES

YES YES YES

LIZ: Bridesmaids is in my head so much more than it should be in life

MARCHAE: But it unfortunately it becomes my job because someone didn’t teach their child to not roomie me or HUMP MY LEG

LIZ: a human humped your leg?

MIRI: Right, but it shouldn’t be

MARCHAE: I told you this

he did it twice

KRIS: I remember

LIZ: i do remember

apologizes

MIRI: and offering those classes as a response can sort of advance that narrative

or runs the risk of it

MARCHAE: I saw him again by the way and was terrified

MIRI: Not saying we shouldn’t take them to deal with current reality, though

LIZ: isn’t the #1 cause of death of pregnant ladies nation wide ... murder (mostly by dudes)?

MIRI: Wait, you did? I’m sorry

KRIS: Is it? I’d believe it but also that’s terrible

LIZ: im not here to start rumors, but Throwing Shade Podcast told me that

MARCHAE: yeah...

LIZ: or #2

MIRI: It wouldn’t surprise me at all

MARCHAE: It’s been on a couple of podcasts liz

LIZ: you should get a taser marchae

yes I’m sure it has been

MARCHAE: liz do. not. trip

KRIS: Okay do we have any other Sweet/Vicious-specific thoughts?

No rush to wrap up, we can always edit or split this up

LIZ: im not tirpping

im serious

MARCHAE: i think i am good and I’d love to have a  follow up when liz and I wrap!

LIZ: id love to do a follow up

bc ill be done w this so soon

MIRI: I’m so glad you guys love it!

MARCHAE: **also i just want to point out i wasn’t suggesting that women take classes to put the onus on them to be safe... but just as a knowing

LIZ: and ill have time to kill in PA bc I am gonna stay at my dads but he is sleeping much of the day now so I would like to do that

MARCHAE: that they can protect themselves in danger

MIRI: We know you weren’t!

KRIS: We know YOU know that

LIZ: no that is just the struggle about suggesting it to people

KRIS: Yeah

LIZ: I knew id love it

from kris’s very first reaction

I tried to figure out how to watch it like 3 times and gave up

MARCHAE: i did not know I would love it...but i definitely am a fan

and can’t wait to finish the series! I am also glad that our reader suggested it!

LIZ: between this and Miss Sloane I am woman hear me roar right now

KRIS: Thanks again to our #1 Fan @crazyhannibalthedaisiesslayer for giving Miri and a reason to step up the pressure on you two

JESSICA CHASTAIN FOR PRESIDENT

Or at least UN Ambassador

Or at least UN Goodwill Ambassador

MARCHAE: LOLOL

KRIS: Or at least a movie character loosely based on Samantha Power

LIZ: I MEAN CAN SHE BE PRESIDENT RIGHT NOW

MIRI: I have retweeted her Cannes callout speech multiple times

KRIS: Me too

LIZ: RIGHT

MARCHAE: you’ve killed me ... i am dead @kris

LIZ: AMAZZZINGGGGGG

KRIS: In the Chastain Administration I hope Sweet/Vicious creator Jennifer Kaytin Robinson gets a position in the Department of Education

LIZ: who is that

MARCHAE: Ohhh great appointment

LIZ: oh my GOD

MIRI: ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ ❤️ 

LIZ: you literally just said

haha OK YES I AGREE

KRIS: OH

Here’s a thing I already told Miri

But

LIZ: what!?

KRIS: Jennifer Kaytin Robinson was not originally a writer by training

LIZ: were all waking from a coma and the things about politics that we think right now are just a nightmare?

MIRI: Ughhhhhhhhhh I forgot about that

LIZ: Well I will be damned

MIRI: I still can’t deal with it

KRIS: And we spent so much money on screenwriting degrees

Good on you, Jennifer Kaytin Robinson

MARCHAE: http://www.glamour.com/story/mtv-sweet-vicious-series-from-creator-jennifer-kaytin-robinson-is-attacking-sexual-assault-head-on

LIZ: Seriously

MIRI: Please let us work for you

KRIS: But also seriously actresses-turned-writers: more of this

MIRI: In your forthcoming media empire

LIZ: please!?

KRIS: And on that note

LIZ: more of SISTERS DOING IT FOR THEMSELVESSSSSSS

MARCHAE: 😊

KRIS: What’s a good line to go out on here?

MARCHAE: thanks to our fan!!!

continue to be viciously woke and sweetly kind to all of humanity

LIZ: Feminasty Vigilantes Defying Gravity are my favorite ❤️

MIRI: Kennedy would be so proud of both of you right now, goddesses

KRIS: Ohhh there’s a pun I want to make so badly but it’s a spoiler

LIZ: we do try

errrmgggerdd

MIRI: Tell it to me seperately!

MIRI: He did and it was exactly the one you want it to be

KRIS: I never want to stop talking about this

LIZ: I know

MARCHAE: LOl no tell us all!

KRIS: NO

It’s worth the wait

MARCHAE: DANG IT KRIS

MIRI: Seconded

😋

KRIS: No but seriously why am I blanking on like a good Ophelia or Harris exit line

MIRI: because we’re not as witty as them

LIZ: IDK but I love that retired astronaut bear

By the time you read this Liz will have finished watching the whole show. So yeah, we’re definitely following up at some point.

If you can afford to, the best way to support Sweet/Vicious and its creators and show demand for a second season is to buy it on iTunes, Amazon, or Google Play. Maybe especially Amazon, as they may be one of the parties the producers are shopping the show to.

[kinetic-elaboration]

January 17: Less Than Zero

Finally finished my reread of Less Than Zero today. I had all but finished it as of late last week so reading the last ten pages was more of a chore than anything else--like well I slogged through so much of this it would be a shame to quit now! Not that I didn’t enjoy the experience it was just...

I read Zero for the first time my senior year of high school, when I was 18. So literally 10 years ago. And I just had this random desire to reread it, which I indulged as an experiment to see how my perspective had changed.

I do remember liking it in high school. It wasn’t exactly life-changing but I enjoyed it. It’s certainly gone down in my esteem by now, which is fair. I read it, a book about a college freshmen written by a man in his early 20s, from a high school perspective, and now I’m reading it from the perspective of someone who’s done the college thing and reached her late 20s, so hopefully my opinion has altered a little with time and maturity.

I called the book “nihilistic male navel gazing” to B and that’s the harsh version of what I think. The central thesis is obviously “we, the rich children of LA, are dead inside, because we have never wanted for anything and also we do a lot of drugs, and now we’re just desperate for literally anything to make us feel alive. Also our parents are pretty much the same.” Which is not that deep especially for a novel that, while not exactly War and Peace, does clock in at a bit over 200 pages. Like this is not a short story is what I’m saying.

There are certain passages that are so on the nose I can only assume they seemed deep to both 21-year-old Ellis and 18-year-old me, but now they’re almost eye-roll inducing. For example:

“Oh shit, Rip, what don’t you have?” / “I don’t have anything to lose.”

Right, okay then.

I also made the unfortunate decision to read the wiki article for the sequel, Imperial Bedrooms (published 2010, about 3 years after I read Zero), and it sort of made me hate Zero in a way. Which is a little unfair because I only read the wiki article, not the book, but it just sounded so bad. Like bad fanfic bad (everyone is married to everyone else? everyone’s in show business? random extreme violence but it’s on a smart phone so it’s like...innovative?). Like self-indulgent writer up his own ass bad. Like managed to ripoff both Zero and American Psycho even though he wrote both and shouldn’t  have to rip off either bad. I also got the definite impression, again just from the wiki, that Bedrooms was supposed to either destroy any sense of affiliation with Clay, or make the reader feel incredibly guilty for that sense of affiliation Or both. Which bothered me. I read Zero, and still do read Zero, as being like a rather extreme version of a common feeling of disaffection, alienation, and confusion, and incredibly, incredibly tied to Clay’s age and position in life. Without at the time having experienced it personally, I thought it was an attempt to capture that feeling of coming home again--the freshman on winter break. Yes, exaggerated, yes, through the eyes of the Super Rich and Super Drugged Up yeah whatever. And there are certainly places in the Zero text that push against the idea that we’re supposed to identify with Clay as an everyman (his last in-person conversation with Blair, for example, where she says that he doesn’t even try to be present with her, unlike other lovers of hers, implying that he is actually much worse than those around him) and other places that force you to feel guilty for any connection you do, inevitably, feel with him (for example, although he doesn’t participate in the rape of the girl in Rip’s apartment or watch the snuff film with his friends, he doesn’t truly condone either the video or the real life violence, and he certainly doesn’t do anything like call the police or so on). But frankly I find it kinda hard to take the scenes of violence seriously. I feel like they’re mostly there to show just how Serious the author is about his My Lost LA Generation Is Without Feelings thesis. They’re the sort of scenes that I feel are there to try to gross out the audience and, like much of Naked Lunch (which I just read so nice try Ellis you’re not going to impress me), they take me out of the story almost entirely. Like ‘I see what you’re doing, author.’

All that said, there are parts of Zero I liked. While the style becomes grating after 200 pages, it’s understandable why Ellis made a splash at the time, like when he’s good, he’s very good.

When I read it the first time, I inferred a sort of supernatural presence to it, like the narrative isn’t entirely set in the Real World. This read through, I didn’t see that undertone as much. The supernatural stuff I read into the Palms Springs narrative I now see as more human horror now, and a lot of the other scenes that push at a sense of creepiness now strike me more as the hallucinations of a kid who’s pretty much constantly high, more than anything else. The only outright supernatural bit is the short paragraph about the strange visions people see on Sierra Bonita, and though this is enough to make me think maybe teenage me had something here, it’s not enough to please adult me, really. (Oh also the ‘ghost story’ about the kid who liked to throw parties, then had his house burn down after a girl was brutally raped and murdered at one. That was outright supernatural in a tall-tale sort of way.) I actually think the book would be greatly improved by increasing the creepiness and the hints of something a little...otherworldly. It would be more interesting at least. Places where this could be done include the Palms Springs flashbacks, the almost-final scene where Clay visits the carnival in Topanga Canyon, the scene with Rip looking at the car graveyard, the part where it rains a lot (pages 114-115) and the section on page 77 going to 78.

I also think that pretty much everything in italics is great and I sometimes sort of wish it was the whole book. Like a short story encompassing just those sections. Ellis is at his most precise, most poignant, and most darkly beautiful in those sections; they really stand out amid a lot of emotionless depictions of parties, drugs, and vapid conversations (all of which just make that same point over and over and over: we’re dead inside, dead, dead, dead). TBH the part where Clay and Blair visit Monteray (pages 59-61) could be a stand alone short story all its own.

I obviously have mixed feelings about Clay, especially taking what little I know of Bedrooms into account, but I have stronger feelings about most of the rest of the cast of characters. I hate most of them, except for Julian and Blair. Blair is like pretty much the only one with a soul and Julian is the only one whose unhappiness actually makes me feel something, because his story is so truly tragic. (And, it goes without saying, so much more so in the book, where it’s just left hanging there, where his future is an endless cycle of the same torture, where he does not get the rest of resolution, even the death-resolution of the movie.) (It should also go without saying that I’m talking in terms of narrative here, not real life.) (Also I am semi-confused about the existence of a Julian’s girlfriend character in Bedrooms because I really thought he was gay, like I thought the writing on the bathroom wall at the end was his about himself and maybe he meant ‘I’m a faggot because I sleep with men for money’ and not ‘I’m a faggot because I’m gay’ but I just, yeah, sort of read it the second way anyway is that bad of me?)

I wouldn’t say I was especially moved by Julian’s story but I would say I was closer to moved by it than by almost anything else in the novel, which in all ways tries to keep you numbed from feeling anything real absolutely as much as possible, through the first person narration.

Finally, the movie is still obviously one of the worst movies ever made but I stick by the idea that 18-year-old me had that a much better adaptation would be in the style of a documentary: some faux-artist’s b&w camera recording of his winter break in star-studded LA. I mean it reads like that on the page so why not just make the cinematic equivalent of it?

...I know I said ‘finally’ but I was also going to talk about the weird tense stuff going on but I ALSO want to not think about this book any more so maybe another day if I feel like it or never if I don’t.

[trendingnewsb]

Quentin Tarantinos History of Disturbing Behavior Toward His Actresses

For Quentin Tarantino, a man whose taste for portraying violence against women has often been mistaken for feminist filmmaking, the line between fiction and reality is equally blurred.

As a writer and director, Tarantino is famous for pushing his female heroines towards acts of brutal violence; but more often than not, Tarantinos women find themselves on the receiving end of the directors graphic imaginationraped, beaten, killed, whipped and branded.

Like so many (male) directors before him, Tarantinos work has relied on the rape-revenge fantasyan outdated trope that throws in a sexual-assault backstory instead of doing the work of female character development. As a Mic article, Kill Bill and Our Troubled Relationship with Rape Revenge Movies elaborated, While sexual assault is worthy of in depth exploration on screen, these rape and revenge films do not depict the reality of how these assaults can affect women. Rather, they look to fetishize the act and use it as motivation for unabashed gore and violence. What should be empowering films featuring women rising out of past trauma to exact justice are often instead turned into a form of torture porn.

And yet, Tarantino has often been called a feministusually by other men. Hes the auteur of choice for cinephiles who like their directors male and their feminist films full of sexualized violence and lingering feet footage. Harvey Weinstein himself called Tarantino the most pro-woman ever, continuing, [Look at] Uma Thurman [in Kill Bill], Pam Grier [in Jackie Brown], Melanie Laurent and Diane Kruger [in Inglourious Basterds].

Since Weinstein, who stands accused of sexual assault by more than 90 women, asked, maybe it is time to revisit those iconic Tarantino heroinesand take the director to task not just for the female characters hes created, but the real-life women he mistreated in the process.

In recent years, Tarantinos legacy has come under fire by increasingly skeptical critics. In 2015, The New York Times A.O. Scott called 2015s The Hateful Eight an orgy of elaborately justified misogyny. And new allegations by his former muse, Uma Thurman, threaten to unmask Tarantino as little more than what his films would suggest: a man who is altogether too interested in torturing women.

I have to say it was very strange being strangled by the director.

Diane Kruger on Quentin Tarantino

Over the weekend, Thurman accused Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault in The New York Times.

In a series of painful, shocking anecdotes, the actress also revealed that Tarantino pressured her into a potentially life-threatening scene while filming Kill Bill. Thurman told the Times that this incident occurred after she had disclosed to Tarantino that Weinstein, who produced Kill Bill and Pulp Fiction, had previously assaulted her.

Thurman had expressed that she wanted a stunt person to do the dangerous-seeming scene, which involved operating a wobbly car that she described as a death trap. But Tarantino was insistent. He was furious because Id cost them a lot of time. But I was scared. He said: I promise you the car is fine. Its a straight piece of road, Thurman recalled. Hit 40 miles per hour or your hair wont blow the right way and Ill make you do it again. She added, The seat wasnt screwed down properly. It was a sand road and it was not a straight road.

Newly-released footage shows the subsequent crash, which Thurman says resulted in a concussion and knee damage. She described the accident to the Times, remembering, The steering wheel was at my belly and my legs were jammed under me. I felt this searing pain and thought, Oh my God, Im never going to walk againWhen I came back from the hospital in a neck brace with my knees damaged and a large massive egg on my head and a concussion, I wanted to see the car and I was very upset. Quentin and I had an enormous fight, and I accused him of trying to kill me. And he was very angry at that, I guess understandably, because he didnt feel he had tried to kill me.

Thurman also told The New York Times that Tarantino withheld the crash footage from her for years, saying, Quentin finally atoned by giving it to me after 15 years, right? She added, Not that it matters now, with my permanently damaged neck and my screwed-up knees.

A recent Sydney Morning Herald article fleshed out the connection between the directors oeuvre and the new accusations: No matter how Tarantino might defend his blood-spattered back catalogue as pro-woman or true cinematic equality, violence in the QT pantheon so often seems to be, with a few exceptions, something done by men to womenTarantino loves to put his female characters through hell. We know now, from Thurmans account of his on-set behaviour, that he also likes to do the same to at least one of his actresses in the name of authenticity in performance.

In the past, Tarantino has admitted that he knew enough to do more than I did about Harvey Weinstein. He told The New York Times that, There was more to it than just the normal rumors, the normal gossip. It wasnt secondhand. I knew he did a couple of these things.I wish I had taken responsibility for what I heard. If I had done the work I should have done then, I would have had to not work with him. Tarantino said that his ex-girlfriend, Mira Sorvino, had told him about Weinsteins unwelcome advances and unwanted touching, and that he also knew about Rose McGowans settlement with the producer. Weinstein distributed his directorial debut Reservoir Dogs in 1992, and has served as a producer on every Tarantino project since.

In the New York Times story, Thurman briefly summarized other abuses she suffered on the set of Kill Bill, with the Times reporting that, Tarantino had done the honors with some of the sadistic flourishes himself, spitting in her face in the scene where Michael Madsen is seen on screen doing it and choking her with a chain in the scene where a teenager named Gogo is on screen doing it.

In a subsequentDeadlineinterview, Tarantino called Thurmans car crash one of the biggest regrets of his life. He told Deadline that the good things I did are in the Maureen Dowd article, butcomplained that, they are de-emphasized to not make any impression. Thesegood thingsseem to include making Weinstein apologize to Thurman for assaulting her, and the herculean task of going to a storage facility to find the tapes of Thurmans car crash, which she told theTimesshes been trying to get for years. Tarantino expressed zero regret for strangling and spitting on his heroine, essentially bragging to Deadline about the skill with which he spat on Thurman for aKill Billscene. So the idea is, Im doing it, Im taking responsibility, Tarantino explained. Also, Im the director, so I can kind of art direct this spit. I know where I want it to land.

Actress Jessica Chastain commented on this perverse directorial dynamic in a series of tweets on Saturday, writing, I keep imagining Tarantino spitting in Umas face and strangling her with a chain for KILL BILL. How many images of women in media do we celebrate that showcase abuse? When did this become normalized entertainment? When violence against women is used as a plot device to make the characters stronger then we have a problem. It is not empowering to be beaten and raped, yet so many films make it their pheonix [sp] moment for women. We dont need abuse in order to be powerful. We already are.

Chastain concluded, Directors inserting themselves into a scene depicting abuse is crossing a boundary. How can an actor feel safe when your director is strangling you? Judd Apatow also reacted to the allegations on Twitter, writing, The number one job a producer and director has on a set is to make sure that everyone is safe. That can mean safe from reckless stunt preparation or safe from predatory producers physically attacking them. There is no excuse for not protecting your cast and crew.

Thurman isnt the only woman who has suffered from Tarantinos boundary-crossing.

Diane Kruger, another actress whose Tarantino role Weinstein pointed to as one of the directors feminist credentials, told Parade about her unique death scene in Inglourious Basterds: I get strangled, which was especially weird because you feel it when someone is choking you, so it was an interesting day at the office. The funny part is that Quentins hands are in the close-up. I wont give away the name of the actor who kills me, but Quentin said, Hes not going to do it right, itll either be too much or too little. I know exactly what I need and I think I should just do it. I have to say it was very strange being strangled by the director.

In an appearance on The Graham Norton Show, Tarantino recalled asking Kruger if she would let [him] strangle her: And so I just said to her, what I want to do is, Im going to be the hands, and what Im going to do is, Im going to just strangle you. Im going to cut off your air for just a little bit of time, were going to see the reaction in your face, and then well cut. He bragged, It was real. It looked really good, explaining that, When somebody is actually being strangled there is a thing that happens to their face, they turn a certain color, and their veins pop out and stuff. In other films, he complained, It always just seems fake.

In an interview promoting 2007s Grindhouse, Fergie recalled being bitten by the director during one rehearsal. She said, He came to the set and ran lines with me. In one scene Quentin got really into the character and bit me. My manager has it on his camera. Im not going to sue him or anything, but I wanted documentation. It was crazy cool.

Rose McGowan, who also starred in Grindhouse, wrote in her new memoir Brave that, The first time I met Tarantino, and for years after, every time hed see me, he said, Rose! I have your movie Jawbreaker on laser disc! I cant tell you how many times I used the shot where youre painting your toes!' She continued, That means Tarantino paid extra money to jerk off to my young feet and told me about it loudly, over and over, for years, in front of numerous people.

Additionally, according to The Telegraph, McGowan writes that for all the praise Tarantino receives for depicting strong female characters in his films, he also beats the s— out of them for his enjoyment.

Thurman, who has spent years fighting for her video evidence, and even more years staying silent, has some of the strongest insight into the cult of Tarantinothe fictional women he brings to life and the real ones he endangers. Personally, it has taken me 47 years to stop calling people who are mean to you in love with you, she told the Times. It took a long time because I think that as little girls we are conditioned to believe that cruelty and love somehow have a connection and that is like the sort of era that we need to evolve out of.

Tarantino is currently on the hunt for an authentic Polish thespian to play the part of Roman Polanski in his upcoming film, which will reportedly take on the 1969 Manson Family murder of Sharon Tate.

This piece has been updated to include comments from a Deadline interview with Tarantino published late Monday.

Read more: https://www.thedailybeast.com/quentin-tarantinos-history-of-disturbing-behavior-toward-his-actresses

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Quentin Tarantinos History of Disturbing Behavior Toward His Actresses

For Quentin Tarantino, a man whose taste for portraying violence against women has often been mistaken for feminist filmmaking, the line between fiction and reality is equally blurred.

As a writer and director, Tarantino is famous for pushing his female heroines towards acts of brutal violence; but more often than not, Tarantinos women find themselves on the receiving end of the directors graphic imaginationraped, beaten, killed, whipped and branded.

Like so many (male) directors before him, Tarantinos work has relied on the rape-revenge fantasyan outdated trope that throws in a sexual-assault backstory instead of doing the work of female character development. As a Mic article, Kill Bill and Our Troubled Relationship with Rape Revenge Movies elaborated, While sexual assault is worthy of in depth exploration on screen, these rape and revenge films do not depict the reality of how these assaults can affect women. Rather, they look to fetishize the act and use it as motivation for unabashed gore and violence. What should be empowering films featuring women rising out of past trauma to exact justice are often instead turned into a form of torture porn.

And yet, Tarantino has often been called a feministusually by other men. Hes the auteur of choice for cinephiles who like their directors male and their feminist films full of sexualized violence and lingering feet footage. Harvey Weinstein himself called Tarantino the most pro-woman ever, continuing, [Look at] Uma Thurman [in Kill Bill], Pam Grier [in Jackie Brown], Melanie Laurent and Diane Kruger [in Inglourious Basterds].

Since Weinstein, who stands accused of sexual assault by more than 90 women, asked, maybe it is time to revisit those iconic Tarantino heroinesand take the director to task not just for the female characters hes created, but the real-life women he mistreated in the process.

In recent years, Tarantinos legacy has come under fire by increasingly skeptical critics. In 2015, The New York Times A.O. Scott called 2015s The Hateful Eight an orgy of elaborately justified misogyny. And new allegations by his former muse, Uma Thurman, threaten to unmask Tarantino as little more than what his films would suggest: a man who is altogether too interested in torturing women.

I have to say it was very strange being strangled by the director.

Diane Kruger on Quentin Tarantino

Over the weekend, Thurman accused Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault in The New York Times.

In a series of painful, shocking anecdotes, the actress also revealed that Tarantino pressured her into a potentially life-threatening scene while filming Kill Bill. Thurman told the Times that this incident occurred after she had disclosed to Tarantino that Weinstein, who produced Kill Bill and Pulp Fiction, had previously assaulted her.

Thurman had expressed that she wanted a stunt person to do the dangerous-seeming scene, which involved operating a wobbly car that she described as a death trap. But Tarantino was insistent. He was furious because Id cost them a lot of time. But I was scared. He said: I promise you the car is fine. Its a straight piece of road, Thurman recalled. Hit 40 miles per hour or your hair wont blow the right way and Ill make you do it again. She added, The seat wasnt screwed down properly. It was a sand road and it was not a straight road.

Newly-released footage shows the subsequent crash, which Thurman says resulted in a concussion and knee damage. She described the accident to the Times, remembering, The steering wheel was at my belly and my legs were jammed under me. I felt this searing pain and thought, Oh my God, Im never going to walk againWhen I came back from the hospital in a neck brace with my knees damaged and a large massive egg on my head and a concussion, I wanted to see the car and I was very upset. Quentin and I had an enormous fight, and I accused him of trying to kill me. And he was very angry at that, I guess understandably, because he didnt feel he had tried to kill me.

Thurman also told The New York Times that Tarantino withheld the crash footage from her for years, saying, Quentin finally atoned by giving it to me after 15 years, right? She added, Not that it matters now, with my permanently damaged neck and my screwed-up knees.

A recent Sydney Morning Herald article fleshed out the connection between the directors oeuvre and the new accusations: No matter how Tarantino might defend his blood-spattered back catalogue as pro-woman or true cinematic equality, violence in the QT pantheon so often seems to be, with a few exceptions, something done by men to womenTarantino loves to put his female characters through hell. We know now, from Thurmans account of his on-set behaviour, that he also likes to do the same to at least one of his actresses in the name of authenticity in performance.

In the past, Tarantino has admitted that he knew enough to do more than I did about Harvey Weinstein. He told The New York Times that, There was more to it than just the normal rumors, the normal gossip. It wasnt secondhand. I knew he did a couple of these things.I wish I had taken responsibility for what I heard. If I had done the work I should have done then, I would have had to not work with him. Tarantino said that his ex-girlfriend, Mira Sorvino, had told him about Weinsteins unwelcome advances and unwanted touching, and that he also knew about Rose McGowans settlement with the producer. Weinstein distributed his directorial debut Reservoir Dogs in 1992, and has served as a producer on every Tarantino project since.

In the New York Times story, Thurman briefly summarized other abuses she suffered on the set of Kill Bill, with the Times reporting that, Tarantino had done the honors with some of the sadistic flourishes himself, spitting in her face in the scene where Michael Madsen is seen on screen doing it and choking her with a chain in the scene where a teenager named Gogo is on screen doing it.

In a subsequentDeadlineinterview, Tarantino called Thurmans car crash one of the biggest regrets of his life. He told Deadline that the good things I did are in the Maureen Dowd article, butcomplained that, they are de-emphasized to not make any impression. Thesegood thingsseem to include making Weinstein apologize to Thurman for assaulting her, and the herculean task of going to a storage facility to find the tapes of Thurmans car crash, which she told theTimesshes been trying to get for years. Tarantino expressed zero regret for strangling and spitting on his heroine, essentially bragging to Deadline about the skill with which he spat on Thurman for aKill Billscene. So the idea is, Im doing it, Im taking responsibility, Tarantino explained. Also, Im the director, so I can kind of art direct this spit. I know where I want it to land.

Actress Jessica Chastain commented on this perverse directorial dynamic in a series of tweets on Saturday, writing, I keep imagining Tarantino spitting in Umas face and strangling her with a chain for KILL BILL. How many images of women in media do we celebrate that showcase abuse? When did this become normalized entertainment? When violence against women is used as a plot device to make the characters stronger then we have a problem. It is not empowering to be beaten and raped, yet so many films make it their pheonix [sp] moment for women. We dont need abuse in order to be powerful. We already are.

Chastain concluded, Directors inserting themselves into a scene depicting abuse is crossing a boundary. How can an actor feel safe when your director is strangling you? Judd Apatow also reacted to the allegations on Twitter, writing, The number one job a producer and director has on a set is to make sure that everyone is safe. That can mean safe from reckless stunt preparation or safe from predatory producers physically attacking them. There is no excuse for not protecting your cast and crew.

Thurman isnt the only woman who has suffered from Tarantinos boundary-crossing.

Diane Kruger, another actress whose Tarantino role Weinstein pointed to as one of the directors feminist credentials, told Parade about her unique death scene in Inglourious Basterds: I get strangled, which was especially weird because you feel it when someone is choking you, so it was an interesting day at the office. The funny part is that Quentins hands are in the close-up. I wont give away the name of the actor who kills me, but Quentin said, Hes not going to do it right, itll either be too much or too little. I know exactly what I need and I think I should just do it. I have to say it was very strange being strangled by the director.

In an appearance on The Graham Norton Show, Tarantino recalled asking Kruger if she would let [him] strangle her: And so I just said to her, what I want to do is, Im going to be the hands, and what Im going to do is, Im going to just strangle you. Im going to cut off your air for just a little bit of time, were going to see the reaction in your face, and then well cut. He bragged, It was real. It looked really good, explaining that, When somebody is actually being strangled there is a thing that happens to their face, they turn a certain color, and their veins pop out and stuff. In other films, he complained, It always just seems fake.

In an interview promoting 2007s Grindhouse, Fergie recalled being bitten by the director during one rehearsal. She said, He came to the set and ran lines with me. In one scene Quentin got really into the character and bit me. My manager has it on his camera. Im not going to sue him or anything, but I wanted documentation. It was crazy cool.

Rose McGowan, who also starred in Grindhouse, wrote in her new memoir Brave that, The first time I met Tarantino, and for years after, every time hed see me, he said, Rose! I have your movie Jawbreaker on laser disc! I cant tell you how many times I used the shot where youre painting your toes!' She continued, That means Tarantino paid extra money to jerk off to my young feet and told me about it loudly, over and over, for years, in front of numerous people.

Additionally, according to The Telegraph, McGowan writes that for all the praise Tarantino receives for depicting strong female characters in his films, he also beats the s— out of them for his enjoyment.

Thurman, who has spent years fighting for her video evidence, and even more years staying silent, has some of the strongest insight into the cult of Tarantinothe fictional women he brings to life and the real ones he endangers. Personally, it has taken me 47 years to stop calling people who are mean to you in love with you, she told the Times. It took a long time because I think that as little girls we are conditioned to believe that cruelty and love somehow have a connection and that is like the sort of era that we need to evolve out of.

Tarantino is currently on the hunt for an authentic Polish thespian to play the part of Roman Polanski in his upcoming film, which will reportedly take on the 1969 Manson Family murder of Sharon Tate.

This piece has been updated to include comments from a Deadline interview with Tarantino published late Monday.

Read more: https://www.thedailybeast.com/quentin-tarantinos-history-of-disturbing-behavior-toward-his-actresses

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