#but like do you want an essay about gender roles and their impacts on comics a world dominated by man???

[littlefankingdom]

It's ironic how Batman is painted as irresponsible for having children fighting as his side (ignoring how said children would still fight without him), but never other heroes, HOWEVER the moment the Teen Titans/Young Justice wants to do something dangerous or comes back from doing something dangerous, he is literally the only responsible adult out of the Justice League. Like, the others are simply like "I'm so proud of you!" but Batman is lecturing his kids about how dangerous it was, how they didn't even told him where they were going, how they didn't contact him about their well-being enough, about how difficult it would have been for him to come help if they needed it... He's straight-up acting like a parent that found out his kid sneaked out, but they didn't came back until later the next day, and never called to tell them they were alive.

Bruce is portrayed as the "unfunny" one when one of his teenage kids is like "the team and I wants to do this dangerous thing unsupervised", because every other adult is fine with their own doing it, but like, he is being the responsible one. Yeah, a responsible parent would not be like "sure sweetie, go fight this dangerous thing with your teenage friends", they would be like "No, you could get hurt. Yes, I trust you, but this is not safe".

Sometimes, he isn't overprotective, he is normal-level-protective for when your kid is a "vigilante that fights people who will kill them without regret" as a hobby, and the others are being careless (no hate to them tho)

[oh-hush-its-perfect]

Alex Fierro's Introduction Full Breakdown

Okokok so. This is going to go full English-professor mode, where I'm drawing conclusions that are gonna seem a little far-fetched. That's what's fun about media analysis! I can say something is a symbol, and even if I don't have enough faith in RR's competency to know if he meant for it to be a symbol, it's still true! That being said, a lot of these choices I'm sure are intentional, either at a literal or subliminal level. Page numbers are going to be used not to assert a kind of authority or whatever— this is a Tumblr post, not an essay— but to help readers find the pages I'm referencing in case they'd like to do some digging of their own. Also, this is going to be really long. Really sorry to anyone with ADHD; I might make an audiofile of this so you can get the information without having to read the whole thing. With all that, let's get into it!

To kick off, let's talk about Alex being in the form of a cheetah when she first meets Magnus. Of course, there's the obvious impact of him seeing her but only so breifly, as well as introducing the conflict between her and the rest of Hall 19. But that could have easily been accomplished by almost any animal. The choice of a cheetah being implicated implies two qualities of Alex that will be recurrent throughout the two books she's in: 1. She has a tendency to run away, as we'll later learn when she describes how she became homeless, and 2. To Magnus, she's elusive. She can't be caught or held down. The event that shows this so transparently is how Alex refuses to define their relationship at the end of the series, despite it clearly surpassing the normal bounds of friendship.

But the cheetah isn't the animal Alex is in the form of when Magnus first gets a good look at her; she's a weasel. Weasel's bring up all kinds of connotations: ferocity, slickness, a lack of charm. When we want to describe someone as an untrustworthy person, we call them a weasel. RR had Alex take this form to play up her comrades' feeling of distrust towards her. She could be a double-crosser. But paradoxically, the up-front and vicious mannerisms of a weasel also have a transperency. She does not try appealing to her Hallmate's sense of goodwill because she doesn't have anything to gain from it. So even though there is the implication that she might be an antagonist, there's also evidence from her actions and mannerisms that she isn't. The weasel's long and skinny frame also allow for a smooth transition into Alex's actual body, which is convenient.

As Alex transforms into her usual human form, Magnus describes her as "a regular human teen, long and lanky, with a swirl of dyed green hair, black at the roots, like a plug of weeds pulled out of a lawn" (pg. 50). That simile at the end is of particular interest. Let's compare it to another time Magnus describes Alex's hair, in Ship of the Dead: "Her hair had started to grow out, the black roots making her look even more imposing, like a lion with a healthy mane" (pg. 136). By contrasting these two different examples, we can see the development of Magnus and Alex's relationship. The first time he sees her, he thinks of her hair as something nasty— note the word choice "weeds." Later on, though, he becomes more affectionate towards her, more complentary. The immedient negative reaction is less his actual impression, though, and more the reaction he expected to have based on everyone else's reaction to Alex.

Her clothes are equally as interesting; as Magnus describes it, Alex wears "battered rose high-tops, skinny lime green corduroy pants, a pink-and-green argyle sweater-vest over a white tee, and another pink cashmere sweather wrapped around the waist like a kilt" (pg. 50). Aside from the obvious fact that this outfit is a) bizzare, b) fire, and c) Alex's signature colors, which add a layer of style to what can otherwise be a somewhat boring series fashion-wise (excuse me, Blitz), the outfit reveals a crucial facet of Alex's backstory in a kind of subtle way. These are expensive clothes, like the Stella McCartney dress in Alex's room. Note the mention of fabrics (corduroy, cashmere) and patterns (argyle). These indicate wealth and status. Even the high-tops; shoes like that don't come cheap. But I'd like to return to the very first word of the section: "battered." Alex's wardrobe show-cases a proximity to wealth, but also shows that that proximity has been strained and lengthened, maybe for an extended period of time. Alex dresses like a rich person, but she isn't one. Least, not anymore.

The last word of that outfit-introduction is also of interest: "kilt." At the current moment, Magnus thinks that Alex is male. No one has indicated otherwise to him. Everyone has been referring to Alex with he/him pronouns. Samirah called Alex her "brother" (pg. 29). His first thought in seeing what he at first perceives as a guy with a jacket wrapped around the waist is That looks like a kilt. This thought tells us about Magnus: despite being open and accepting, he still has some lingering notions of gender conformity from his years in wider American society.

Magnus also indicates that the outfit "reminded me of a jester's motley, or the coloration of a venomous animal warning the whole world" (pg. 50). This is rather self-explanatory, but it's still worth noting that Magnus sees the outfit as something bizzare, strange, and even perhaps comical. This places Alex at odds with the other people Magnus has met. It also reveals that Magnus has zero fashion sense. But we already knew that.

After finishing up staring at the ensemble, Magnus finally gets around to actually looking Alex in the face. First Magnus says that he "forgot how to breathe" (pg. 50), which, yeah, relatable. This is justifed by saying that Alex has the same face as Loki, but the very same sentence that asserts that that's the case also suggests an alternative reason: Alex has "the same unearthly beauty" as her father. Here we can see the beginnings of Magnus's attraction to Alex, though at this point, he still has a lot of internalized homophobia. Though there's certainly some truth in that Magnus was unnerved by Alex's resemblance to Loki, the idea that Magnus pointed out that Alex was pretty without elaborating on that thought until about a chapter later— after he was informed that Alex was presently a girl— can tell us a lot about how Magnus perceives sex and beauty.

Of course, Alex's eyes are given special attention. She has cool eyes; what can I say? But I'd like to focus in on how Magnus here depicts Alex's heterochromia as "completely unnerving" (pg. 50). Again, let's contrast this with how he describes them after getting to know Alex a little better in Ship of the Dead. In Chapter 3, Magnus describes "[Alex's] dark brown eye and his amber eye like mismatched moons cresting the horizon" (pg. 25). Once again, this shows the development of their relationship— but this time, it's in a much more personal way. Eyes are the windows to the soul; they are culturally important and biologically important in inter-personal connections. In you look into someone's eyes, you're giving them your full attention, and you're implying a kind of closeness. The way that Magnus describes Alex's eyes in the second passage is downright intimate. At this point, he is in love with Alex, and it is clear when contrasting the two descriptions.

As my last point, I'd like to discuss Alex's first words on page: "'Point that rifle somewhere else, or I will wrap it around your neck like a bow tie'" (pg. 51). First of all, Alex saying this with a "perfect white smile" (pg. 51) on his face implies that she is used to being threatened. She is not afraid of being shot; she counters the promise of an attack with a promise of her own. This pleads the question: why is Alex accustomed to violence? What events of her past or qualities of her life have brought her to this point? The threat itself reveals Alex's trauma from being genderfluid in a society with rigid gender norms, as well as her antagonistic relationship with her father. Magnus makes a comment that Alex "might actually know how to tie a bow tie, which was kind scary arcane knowledge" (pg. 51). Like Alex's wardrobe, the idea that she may have experience in high-class fashion also implies her former status as a rich kid.

I could go on. I could break apart Alex saying "'Pleased to meet you all, I guess'" (pg. 51). There is a wealth of information in this short page span that tells us things about Alex Fierro in the present moment, quietly demonstrates things about her past, and characterizes the narrator Magnus Chase. This passage is also effective in hindsight in marking the progress of Magnus and Alex's relationship.

But I'd like to take a step back and look at not the pieces, but the whole picture. Alex Fierro gets a full page of pure description— her outfit, her face— and about a chapter of introduction. This comes after several chapters of build-up. Alex Fierro is an important character you need to keep your eyes on. Alex Fierro is emotionally significant to the main character, Magnus Chase. Alex Fierro is one of the most developed and well-rounded characters that Rick Riordan has ever written— heck, she's one of the best characters in middle-grade books period. The extended emphasis on her and her alone tells us exactly what role she's going to play in this story: she's the star.

[noxstellacaelum]

Filtering Female Characters Through the Male Gaze

Female characters filtered through the male gaze:  A (way) too long post about why we need a more diverse and inclusive approach to staffing showrunners, writers, directors, crew – heck, all roles -- in TV and movies.  

Yes, I know I am not the first person here on this.  

And note that while I have included a few tags b/c I talk about my frustration with Shadowhunters, Veronica Mars, the Irishman, Richard Jewell, and a few other recent shows/movies, I don’t get to this stuff until the very end,  I appreciate that fans may not want to wade through the entire essay, which (again), is a bit of personal catharsis.

I recently had a random one-off exchange with a TV writer on twitter.  The writer said that she had enjoyed the movie Bombshell much more than its Rotten Tomatoes rating would have suggested.  She wondered if the disconnect between her experience/perception of the movie and that of mainstream reviewers might have been shaped by gender: Specifically, she observed that Bombshell is a movie about women, but most reviewers are male.  

I have complicated feelings about Bombshell.  On one hand, yes, there was and is a toxic culture at Fox News.  Yes, Gretchen Carlson and Megyn Kelly were victims of that toxic culture.  But no, these women were not mere bystanders:  They traded in the racism, misogyny, and xenophobia (for starters) that still characterize Fox News today.  Why should these wealthy, privileged white women – both of whom spent many years as willing foot soldiers in the Fox News army -- get a glossy, Hollywood-approved redemption/vindication arc?  On the other hand, I am glad that the movie makers made a film about sexual harassment, and that the movie presented Kelly, in particular, as an at least somewhat complicated character.  This would not be the first time that a movie about women – especially complicated, and not always likeable women – has proven to be polarizing.

My ambivalence about Bombshell notwithstanding, the writer with whom I exchanged tweets is (not surprisingly, since she is in the industry and I am not) on to something when it comes to gender, character development and critical reception. It’s not just that Bombshell was about women, but reviewed largely by men; it’s that stories about female characters (real or fictional) often are filtered through the male gaze in Hollywood:  On many projects – even those focused on female characters – creators/ head writers are male, directors are male, showrunners are male, and producers are male.  This matters, because preferencing the male gaze impacts what stories about women get told, who gets to tell them, and how these stories are received inside and outside Hollywood.  

First, though, the caveats. I do not mean to suggest that men can never tell great stories about women.  Of course they can.   I also don’t mean to suggest that being female exempts creators, writers, directors, showrunners, etc. from sexism or misogyny (or any other forms of bigotry, as my discussion of Bombshell suggests).   There are plenty of women who prop up the patriarchy.  Rebecca Traister’s work speaks to this issue, as does the work of Cornell philosopher Kate Manne.  There is an important literature on the concept of misogynoir (misogyny directed at black women, involving both gender and race), a term coined by black queer feminist Moya Bailey, as well.  Intersectionality matters in understanding what stories are told, who gets to speak, and how stories are received in and outside Hollywood.  I also don’t mean to suggest that there are no powerful women in Hollywood.   Shonda Rhimes; Ava DuVernay, Reese Witherspoon (increasingly, given her role as a producer of projects like Big Little Lies), Greta Gerwig’s work in Lady Bird and Little Women, and others come to mind.  As I am not in the entertainment industry, I am sure others could put together a far more complete and accurate list of female Hollywood power brokers.  And, finally, I appreciate that Hollywood is a business, and people fund and make movies that they think their target audiences want to see.  So long as young, male viewers are a coveted demographic, we are going to see projects with women who appeal to this demographic onscreen.

Given these caveats, why do I think that the filtering of female characters through the male gaze is an issue? For me, it has to do with a project’s “center of gravity” -- that place, at the core of the project’s storytelling, where the characters’ agency and autonomy comes from.  It’s where I look to understand the characters’ choices and their narrative arcs.  When a character’s center of gravity is missing or unstable or unreliable, the character’s choices don’t make sense, and their narrative arc lacks emotional logic. Center of gravity is not about whether a character is likeable.  It’s about whether a character – and the project’s overall storytelling and narrative voice – make sense.  

When female characters are filtered through a male gaze, a project’s center of gravity can shift, even if unintentionally, away from the characters’ agency and point of view:  So, instead of charting her own course through a story, a female character starts to become defined by her proximity to other characters and stories.  She becomes half of a “ship” . . . or a driver of other characters’ growth (often through victimization, suffering, or self-sacrifice) . . . or mostly an object of sexual desire (whether requited or not).   Eventually, she can lose her voice entirely.  When that happens, instead of a “living, breathing” (yes, fictional, I know) character, we are left with a mirror/ mouthpiece who advances the plot, and the stories, of everyone else.

What are some recent examples of this? The two that I have mentioned recently here are Shadowhunters and Veronica Mars S4.  

- With SHTV, I will always wonder what might have been if the show – which is based on books written by a woman, intentionally as a “girl power” story – had female showrunners. Would an empowered female showrunner have left Clary, THE PROTAGONIST OF A 6 BOOK SERIES – alone on an NYC street in a skimpy party dress, in November, with no money, no ID, no mother, no father figure and no love of her life, stripped of her memories, her magic, and chosen vocation, as punishment, after she saved the world?  Would a female showrunner have sidelined Clary’s love Jace, and left him grieving and suicidal, while his family lived their best lives and told him to move on?  Would a female showrunner have said, in press coverage of the series finale, that the future of the Clary and Jace characters was a matter for fan fiction?  After spending precious time in the series finale wrapping up narrative arcs for non-canon and/or ancillary characters.  And to my twitter correspondent’s point, I guess I am not surprised that mainstream entertainment media outlets didn’t call out the showrunners’ mistreatment of Clary, and by extension, Jace, and the obliteration of their narrative arcs -- and yes, I am looking at you, Andy Swift of TV line (who called the above-mentioned memory wipe “actually perfect”).

- Likewise, with Veronica Mars, would a more diverse and inclusive writers room have made S4 Veronica less insightful and less competent than her high school self, or quite so riven with self-loathing, or quite so careless and cruel with the people in her life who love her?  Would a more inclusive creative team have made S4 Veronica less aware of the class and race dynamics of Neptune, yet more casually racist, in her mid-30s, than she was in high school?

- There are so many other examples from 2019.  Clint Eastwood falsely suggesting that a female reporter (who is now deceased and thus unable to defend herself) traded sex for tips from an FBI agent in Richard Jewell. Game of Thrones treatment/resolution of the Ceresi and Daenerys characters – where to even start.  Martin Scorsese’s decision to give Oscar winner Anna Paquin’s character a total of 7 lines in the 3-plus hour movie the Irishman.

- And, in real life, I wonder whether a Hollywood that empowered and supported female creators would make sure that people like Mira Sorvino and Annabella Sciorra got a bunch of work while also making sure that Harvey Weinstein never again is in a position of power or influence.   Same with female comics targeted by Louis C.K. Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose … the list is long, and Kate Manne’s work on what she calls “himpathy” is useful here.

To be clear, I am not saying that stories involving “ships” of whatever flavor, stories of suffering and self-sacrifice, and stories of finding (or losing) intimate relationships are “bad” or “wrong” or inherently exploitive of female characters.  I don’t think that at all.  I also don’t think that female characters have to be perfectly well-adjusted, virtuous, or free from bias, or that they should never be make bad choices or mistakes.  I want female characters who are flawed, nuanced.  I don’t mind lives that are messy, or romantic entanglements that are complicated.  Finally, I don’t think that that faulty, reductive, or unfair portrayals of female characters is a new thing.  Mary Magdalene was almost certainly not a prostitute, after all.  And classicist Emily Wilson – the first woman to translate the Odyssey into English – has brought a hugely important perspective (including an awareness of how gender matters in translation) and voice to the translation and study of canonical characters and works.

At the end of the day, I just want female characters to be able to speak with their own voices, from their perspectives.  I want them to have their own, chosen, narrative arcs.  I want them to speak, act, see, and feel as autonomous individuals, with agency, and not just in reference to others.  And, I think that more a more diverse and inclusive approach to staffing writers rooms and in choosing show runners, directors, and key positions in storytelling would help.  

[auctes]

as someone who believes toko best trigger happy havoc character, i HATE IT when people say "syo has no depth!!!" and "toko's an annoying joke!!! wowzurs!!!", AS AN AMAZING FUKAWA/SYO FAN, CAN YOU HELP ME CONSTRUCT COMPELLING ARGUMENTS ON THE COMPLEXITY OF BOTH?

hi ,   anon  !

it  can  be  frustrating  when  people  reduce  our  faves ,   but  the  first  thing  i’d  like  to  say  is  :   they’re  kind  of  right  about  touko  being  a  joke .   touko’s  fragile  mental  health  is  usually  played  for  laughs ,   and  reduced  to  a  punchline .   the  localization  calls  her  a   “  schizo ,  ”   and  her  maladaptive  daydreams  are  framed  as  something  psychotic  rather  than  for  what  they  are  :  a  coping  mechanism  that  her  brain  has  developed  to  help  her  endure  a  high - stress  situation .

i  love  when  people  ask  these  things ,   because  the  more  we  talk  about  that ,   the  more  we  can  start  to  break  down  touko’s  character .

i  would  also  like  to  state  that  this  is  a  dissociative  identity  disorder   [ DID ]   conversation .   i  do  not  have  DID ,   and  i  am  not  a  psychologist .   i  will  answer  this  to  the  best  of  my  ability  based  on  personal  research  and  an ardent  love  for  the  character ,    but  welcome  corrections  if  necessary .

let’s  talk  about  syo .

syo  has  depth .   she  is  an  extension  of  touko ,   who  is ,   herself ,   a  deeply  introspective  person .   while  syo  is  played  for  comic  relief ,   it’s  important  to  understand  where  she  comes  from  :   trauma .   childhood  trauma  that  touko ,   as  a  very  small  child ,   could  not  cope  with .   due  to  the  intense  physical ,   emotional ,    and  psychological  abuse  to  which  she  was  subject ,   touko’s  mind  created  syo ,   who  fronts  during  times  of  duress  and  guards  those  memories  that  touko  cannot  endure ,   as  a  means  of  ensuring  touko’s  survival  and  base  function .   syo  and  touko  do  identify  as  separate  entities ,   with  a  few  key  points  to  consider  :

1 .   DID  alters  can  be  ...   anyone .   anything .   have  their  own  ages ,   genders ,   sexual  identities ,   ethnicity ,   personal  histories ,   and  memories .   syo  identifies  as  the  name  the  media  give  her ,   but  identifies  with  touko’s  body ,   and  accepts  this  as  her  appearance .   a  lot  of  alters  look  physically  different  to  how  the  body  of  the  core  personality  looks .   that’s  always  been  very  interesting  to  me .

2 .   touko  acknowledges  syo  as  part  of  herself .   both  touko  and  syo  bounce  back  and  forth  when  referring  to  themselves  :  between  singular   (  i  )   and  collective   (  we  ) .   syo ,   to  herself ,   looks  like  touko .   she  looks  in  the  mirror  and  goes ,   “ i  look  like  this . ”   touko ,   especially  in  her  later  appearances  throughout  the  series ,   feels  a  sense  of  belonging  to  syo ,   and  acknowledges  that  she  is  a  part  of  touko .  

3 .   they  “  share  emotions , ”   meaning  that  there  is  some  sort  of  co - conscious  link  between  them  that  doesn’t  go  away  completely  during  a  switch .   when  touko  hurts ,   syo  hurts.   when  touko  is  in  love ,   so  is  syo .   while  syo  may  not  be  able  to understand  and  interpret  complex  emotions  to  the  capacity  at  which  touko  does ,   she  absolutely  still  feels  them .   this  is  what  enables  syo  to  act  upon  them  :   as  a  persecution  alter ,   and  later  a  protector  alter ,   syo  knows  when  she  is  fronting  that  touko  is  scared ,   or  stressed ,   or  in  danger .   these  are  the  cues  upon  which  she  justifies  her  murders ,   but  also  those  upon  which  she  is  able  to  fall  in  love  and  build  friendships .

which  leads  me  into  my  next  point  on  syo  :   everything  shed  does  is  with  the  health  and  prosperity  of  touko  in  mind .   DID ,   as  a  trauma - based  disorder ,   is  a  neurological  mechanism  in  place  to  protect  the  integrity  of  the  individual .   alters  fulfill  a  purpose  :   they  perform  roles  that  the  core  personality  physically  cannot .   syo  is  absolutely  no  different .

when  touko  decides  to  actively  end  syo’s  murderous  tendencies ,   syo  complies .   she  knows  that  touko  is  suffering  maltreatment  at  future  foundation  on  the  basis  of  her  being  labeled   “  unstable  and  dangerous ,  ”   and  so ,   syo  abstains  from  killing  so  as  not  to  jeopardize  touko’s  wish  to  eventually  join  the  foundation .   while  she  still  responds  aggressively  to  threats ,   the  only  time  she  seriously  contemplates  killing  is  during  another  episode .

you  can  watch  it  here .

this  scene  is  so  loaded  with  depth .   firstly ,   we  see  a  clear  co - conscious  link  between  syo  and  touko .   syo  volunteers  control  of  the  body  back  to  touko  when  touko  is  ready  :   even  then ,   touko  is  able  to  recall  the  moments  immediately  before  the  switch ,   when  komaru  makes  an  emotional  appeal  to  syo .

here ,   we  also  see  a  reflective ,   emotive  side  of  her .   we  see  her  pause ,   despite  whole - heartedly  believing  that  she  is  going  to  kill  komaeda .   it  is  apparent  to  syo  what  is  important  to  her  :   byakuya ,   and  komaru .   these  things  are  important  to  touko ,   and  therefore ,   important  to  syo .   she  has  never  been  treated  as  normal  :   she  has  never  really  been  considered  by  anyone  to  be  a  part  of  the  system ,   as  opposed  to  a   “  deviant  who  kills  for  pleasure .  ”   and  she  thanks  komaru  for  talking  her  down .   in  saying ,    “ i  betrayed  you ,  ”   syo  is  feeling  remorse .   it’s  touko’s  remorse ,   because  it  was  touko  who  made  the  deal  with  komaeda  to  exchange  komaru  for  byakuya .

but ,   in  the  end ,   it  was  syo  who  threw  the  fight  in  order  to  spare  komaru’s  life ,   because  she  cannot  bring  herself  to  hurt  a  person  for  whom  she  and  touko  feel  so  warmly .

i’d  also  like  to  turn  your  attention  to  danganronpa  3  :   future  arc  episode  six ,   in  which  we  can  further  witness  syo  and  touko’s  co - consciousness ,   and  syo  ultimately  choosing  to  pursue  what  feels  safe  and  warm  and  inviting  rather  than  exacting  vengeance .   komaru  talks  her  out  of  killing  monaka  :   out  of  quite  probably  letting  herself  die  in  the  process .   komaru  knows  instinctively  that  syo  has  emotions  :   love .   protectiveness .   bravery .   syo  loves  byakuya  and  komaru  more ,   and  feels  a  desire  to  protect  them ,   more  than  everyone  assumes  her  to  simply  love  violence  for  violence’s  sake .   if  something  won’t  serve  the  purpose  of  protecting  touko  and  what  is  important  to  her ,   she  isn’t  going  to  do  it .

now ,   let’s  think  about  touko .

my  blog  is  full  of  essays  upon  essays  regarding  touko ,   but  i  believe  she  can  be  best  summarized  by  the  phrase ,   the  heart  wants  what  it  wants .   a  truly  emotional ,   giving ,   and  romantic  woman ,   she  actively  hides  herself  underneath  a  repelling  armor  of  grossly  exacerbated  flaws  in  order  to  protect  her  heart  from  being  harmed .

touko  has  suffered  in  the  past  from  consistent  dehumanization ,   belittlement ,   and  abuse .   her  parents  expressed  that  they  would  have  preferred  her  dead ,   and  so  they  abused  her  at  home .   her  classmates  thought  she  was  weird ,   and  so  they  bullied  her  exorbitantly .   whenever  touko  would  actively  reach  out  to  others  to  pursue  friendships  or  romantic  relationships ,   she  would  be  betrayed  by  others ,   and  made  to  suffer  for  it .

to  help  you  understand  the  breadth  of  the  psychological  impact  that  nearly  two  decades  of  being  treated  as  less  than  human  has  had  on  touko ,   here  is  a  link  to  a  short  thing  i  wrote  on  her  ablutophobia ,   or  fear  of  bathing .   it’s  a  very  quick  overview  of  her  self  image  issues ,   and  self  preservation  tendencies .

next ,   why  don’t  we  consider  how  fully  and  completely  touko  fukawa  loves  ?   as  a  romance  novelist ,   we  expect  her  to  harbor  a  highly  idealized ,   grossly  saturated  perception  of  romantic  love .   instead ,   we  get  a  woman  who  writes  romance  purely  because  she  believes  in  channeling  the ugly  tragedies  of  her  situation  into  something  of  beauty .   here  are  my  style  notes  of  touko  fukawa’s  literary  works ,   but  we  learn  from  her  that  she  :

1 .   prefers  to  write  stories  that  are  grounded  in  reality .

2 .   enjoys  magic  realism ,   aggrandized  settings ,   but  innately  human  characters .

3 .   prefers  romantic  tragedies  to  happy  endings .    (  komaru  remarks  upon  how  sad  so  lingers  was .  )

furthermore ,   touko  states  that  while  the  power  of  delusion  and  its  subsequent  escapism  is  a  powerful  coping  tool ,   she  understands  the  harsh  line  between  fiction  and  reality .   she  understands  that  no  love  story  on  the  page  can  resemble  how  true  love  feels ,   but  her  work  is  so  intricately  entwined  with  emotion  that  she  scaffolds  her  novels  with  universal  emotional  appeal .   fictional  romance ,   then ,   does  not  satisfy  the  resilience  of  her  own  heart .   she  is  as  cynical  as  she  is  whimsical  :   a  true  hopeless  romantic  who  believes  herself  undeserving  of  loving ,   and  being  loved .   she  pours  her  heart  and  soul  onto  a  page ,   so  that  others  may  feel  to  even  a  small  margin  of  the  scope  of  her  feelings .

touko  has  a  very  resilient  heart .   despite  the  horrible  things  that  togami  did  to  her ,   and  the  abysmal  way  that  future  foundation  treated  her ,   touko  is  able  to  protect  the  last  shred  of  love  within  her  being  and  use  it  as  fuel  to  improve  herself  as  a  person .   please  remember  that  all  personal  tragedies  are  learning  experiences  of  touko  :   the  pain  she  felt  as  a  child  became  a  rich  and  lucrative  imagination .   the  trauma  she  undergoes  as  an  adult  is  the  catalyst  to  her  finally  turning  against  her  self  loathing ,   and  building  herself  from  the  ground  up .

what  do  i  mean  by  that  ?   well  ...   touko  fukawa  is  a  badass .   komaru  naegi  remarks  constantly  upon  fukawa’s  strength  ;   that  she  can’t  imagine  a   “  weak  touko .  ”   touko  loathes  herself  ;   her  fears ,   her  weakness .   loathes  that  she  can’t  function  as  a  normal  human  being  who  holds  meaningful  friendships  without  being  suspicious  of  them  ;   loathes  that  she  can’t  look  after  herself ,   exact  self  care ,   without  knocking  back  a  cocktail  of  conglomerate  anxiety .   loathes  that  she  was  weak ,   and  cowardly ,   and  it  almost  got  her  killed  when  she  has  learned  the  value  of  being  alive .

touko  vocally  objects  to  people  walking  all  over  her .   she  wants  to  be  vilified  ;  she  wants  to  be  autonomous ,   and  respected  as  a  woman ,   an  artist ,   and  a  person  within  her  own  right .   touko  exits  her  killing  game ,   and  the  next  time  we  see  her  in  ultra  despair  girls ,   she  is  the  furthest  cry  from  the  woman  we  previously  knew .   why  ?   because  touko  put  her  foot  down ,   and  went ,    “  i  need  to  change .  ”    touko  decides  to  do  away  with  her  cowardice ,   to  fight  for  acknowledgement ,   and  to  reclaim  her  own  life  when  she  has  been  so  deprived  for  so  long  of  basic  human  kindness .

touko  systematically  exposes  herself  to  blood  to  combat  her  hemophobia .   touko  credits  other  people  for  their  strength  and  uses  it  as  inspiration  to  keep  going .   touko  puts  a  stun  gun  to  her  head  and  endures  fucking  electrocution  so  that  she  can  control  her  switches  and  bequeath  her  body  to  syo  when  she  needs  to  physically  protect  other  people .   touko  mother  fucking  fukawa  admits  that  she  is  scared ,   but  picks  her  broken  body  up  of  the  ground  and  stays  standing  so  that  she  can  do  what  is  right .

touko  has  an  incredibly  strong  sense  of  right  and  wrong  that  was  cauterised  by  her  participation  in  the  killing .   in  this  scene ,   we  see  touko  voluntarily  get  the  shit  kicked  out  of  her  so  that  she  may  save  thousands  of  innocent  lives .   she  calls  haiji  towa  a  coward  for  hiding  underground  and  not  fighting  back  against  the  warriors  of  hope  as  they  terrorize  towa  city .   she  does  these  things  simply  because  it  is  the  right  thing  to  do  :   because  if  no  one  is  going  to  stand  up  and  fight  for  the  people  who  cannot  fight  for  themselves ,   then  by  god ,   touko  is  going  to  do  it .

and ,   finally   ...   the  heart  wants  what  it  wants ,   and  touko  wants  to  offer  her  heart  to  others .    “  i’ll  definitely  protect  both   ...   even  if  it  costs  me  my  life  .  ”    actual  quote  out  of  the  mouth  of  touko  fukawa .   touko  loves .   touko’s  heart  leads  her  into  danger  with  the  full  conscience  of  her  inevitable  death ,   but  she  follows  it  to  protect  the  lives  of  those  closest  to  her .   we  see  her ,   over  the  course  of  ultra  despair  girls ,   as  she  gradually  opens  up  to  the  first  person  who  has  ever  called  touko  a  friend  :   to  have  treated  touko  with  an  ounce  of  humanity  and  kindness ,   and  to  have  assured  her  unconditionally  that  touko  was  not  alone .

pain ,   to  touko ,   is  transient .   physical  pain ,   that  is .   she’d  allow  a  person  to  beat  her  to  a  pulp ,   even  kill  her ,   if  it  meant  she  would  saves  the  lives  of  those  who  matter  to  her .   byakuya  and  komaru  make  her  a  stronger  person  :   love  makes  touko  fukawa  strong .   love  makes  her  stand  against  impossible  odds ,   and  tell  those  odds  to  go  fuck  themselves .   touko  listens  to  her  heart  :   to  what  her  emotions  are  telling  her ,   and  for  that ,   her  loyalty  is  stalwart .

i  hope  this  helped  you .   i  hope  you  have  enough  in  your  arsenal  to  speak  up  for  our  girl ,   and  to  remind  everyone  of  the  strong - ass  motherfucking  hero  she  is .   if  you  have  any  further  questions ,   i  am  always  up  for  talking  about  my  daughter ,   and  how  phenomenally  important  she  is  to  me .   i  don’t  think  this  post  really  scratches  the  surface .

in  conclusion ,

[askthetriokzt]

20??

 20. Wildcard. Talk about anything

// Oh boy, anything? Lets shine some light on Criticism shall well? A key thing I learned when it comes to creating and critiquing. But before I talk about criticism, I would like to talk about a universal currency.

 Believe it or not, but all humankind share one kind of commodity, regardless of social status, nationality, race, gender, sexual orientation, or any other sort of categorization.

That commodity is time. We can give our time, invest our time, waste our time, miss our time, lose time, have it stolen, and we can value our time… the only thing we cant do, is have more time. We claim to buy time, but thats really just an exchange of our own time to delay events. Though we dont know how deep our own accounts go, we cant create more of this finite resource.

So when you invest time in watching a movie or reading a book, or any other exchange that didn’t seem worth the trade, its natural to be angry. This was your time and it has value. Simultaneously, the creator of that book or movie, or art piece, or characters, ect can invest a great deal of their own time in that works creation. Its incredibly frustrating to feel that people arent recognizing that effort. Which is where the tension between critics and creatives often arises.

The wrong word from a certain critic can undermine a lot of creative investment. Yet many a critic will defend their role as pushing back against any trivialization of an art form. In a weird way, both sides believe themselves to be creativity’s true champion. And in my eyes, the best critics convey this love for the medium

Somewhere along the way, critics became celebrities in their own right. An idea started to creep in, ��To stand out and to be noticed, many critics rely on the idea that negativity is honesty.’.

We’ve all been seduced by this at some point. Many many reviewers have gained an audience and kept it by tearing works apart. The online world in particular flocks to this. We see negativity as a voice, shouting down the groupthink. Its a statement that “We are not going to be cowed by the fandom’s whims and so they got to deal with it!”

And it works. Even if people to agree to the negativity, they respond to it. The comment in defense of their favorite characters and episodes, they denounce the critic, and for some its enough to have that response and recognition. As the saying goes, “There’s no such thing as negative publicity.”.

But given enough time, does the same tactic work? If a critic is consistently negative, regardless of context, I think people begin to see the figure behind the curtain. At most, negativity can become a gimmick, while often its a method towards false confidence. That said, is positivity instant honesty?

 Not really. Unwillingness to criticize indicates that someone is starting with the assumption that the work is good and is going backward. There’s a sense that being a fan is taking priority over being honest. So where does the balance lie?

Personally, I dont think it has to do with a quota of positive vs negative comments or reviews. The real challenge is to show love for the art and the expression. If a piece doesn't work, if it fails to register, whats the counterbalance? Can you highlight a work that did the same attempt and succeeded? That’s offering genuine criticism. Because not only are you stating that something didn’t work, but you’re also helping people understand by providing a positive point of reference.

And by criticising what didn’t work, how much authority can a critic assume? Often times, a negative ‘critic’ will go after the artist more than the artwork. Telling them to keep their hobbies at home or to no inflict their failure on the community. In essence, they’re telling others to stop trying.

If there’s ever a warning light to tune someone out, its when they discourage future attempts. How does the ability to criticize translate into the authority to dictate terms? Attempting to sabotage a person’s efforts is suffocating. You’re drawing a line in the sand with no room for discussion or growth.

I get the sense that this wouldn’t really matter to someone who thrives off of that negativity, people who create cringe blogs, or people who just attack the artist because this isn't about dialogue or insight, its about them. By putting down someone else's work, they present the illusion of intelligence and insight without risk. 

“In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read.” - Anton Ego from Ratatouille

This leaves a question if time is currency, how much time should we invest in those who do not create? Being an accomplished artist isn’t a prerequisite for giving feedback. Its the old train of thought, “I dont have to be a chef to recognize a bad meal.”. But how much can this feedback benefit the process? Often times, we can find ourselves under a barrage of words that have an emotional impact but offer very little insight. Even the phrases that can sound positive, often times dont express why they like the piece.

The fact is, not all criticism is created equal. People who have never taken the risk, often lack the perspective to offer insight, so their feedback is often focused on their own entertainment. Yet audiences are vast and can have a diverse set of opinions, often contradictory, so it becomes a judgment call. Who offers the best and most insightful criticism, and who is just making demands?

The thing that kills me is that if I could challenge these so-called ‘critics’, I’m sure their response would be, “I’m just stating my opinion. Its not my fault if others are offended.”. I’ve seen this defense or excuse thrown up so many times, its become borderline comical. This avoidance of responsibility or any acknowledgment that the message didn’t reach the audience. What this message really means is a double standard. The person is saying, “I am not going to invest the time or energy to better craft a message that will reach my audience, yet I expect you to invest the time and energy to pay attention.”

The end result is that the only people who agree, are those who already shared the same mindset beforehand. Very rarely does this sway the opposing view or offer new ideas.

Once again, I’m drawn back to the idea that a negative review can be fun to watch/listen. We might enjoy a sense of validation, we can say “Hey, I’m not the only one who didn’t like that thing.” Yet even then, I cant just point at a reviewer and say, “I’m entertained.” or “This person and I dislike the same things and therefore, they must be good critics.” I find that the critics I go out of my way to watch, offer more than just entertainment.

When Linkara lays into the toxic message that is ‘Holly Terror’, he contrasted about how SuperHeroes can knights-errant, showing the best in kindness and decencyWhen Angry Joe went full fury over ‘Ride to Hell’, it wasn’t just about bad gameplay, he also denounced the insulting and juvenile approach towards women and sex.And when BennetTheSage reviewed the anime ‘Fooly Cooly’, he reflected on how our tastes change and evolve with time but that doesn't mean that our past enjoyment was meaningless.

Honestly, the best reviews and critics aren’t those who just pick something to pieces, they’re people who recognize that creativity is an expression of an idea, even if its not well represented. By drawing our attention to the ideas to get people thinking. Bonus points if you can enjoy a laugh along the way. Yet there will always be people who just want to tear others down, attack the artist, and just be overall negative without caring about others or their growth. Whenever you put your work out there, someone else will see it as an opportunity for their own advancement.

What I hope people will take away from this, is where to invest their time. To look at a critics commentary and ask, “Is there a genuine care for the idea or expression?” “Is there just some sort of entertainment value?” Is when I can get a sense that a person is just unfunny and wearing the facade of a critic, is when I say can say “I have a pretty limited amount of time, are you really worth the investment?”

Here’s hoping that you found this long long ‘essay’, worth your own time and that it could help bring a new view to things.

[lisacongo2-blog]

‘Shrill’ Shreds Hollywood Stereotypes About How Women of Size Eat

The first time you see Annie, the protagonist of the new Hulu show Shrill, eating, her meal doesn’t look particularly pleasant. Played by SNL cast member Aidy Bryant, Annie grabs a plastic container from the fridge, opening it to reveal three white disks — supposedly pancakes — from a Tupperware labeled “Thin Menu.” While standing in her kitchen, she tries to break off a slab, puts it in her mouth, and wrinkles her nose in disgust. Her roommate, Fran (played by Lolly Adefope), walks by to witness the three doughy pucks, and says, “Good God.”

It’s not the only time Annie eats in her kitchen. Later in the series, Bryant opens a sealed container of leftover spaghetti, standing alone over an island near the sink. She twirls noodles around her fork, grinning in anticipation. She looks confident, blissed out, holding her hand under her chin as a noodle inches toward her lips. She scrunches her eyebrows and crinkles her nose, the perfect opposite of her look of disgust eating the Thin Meal pancakes. She nods and smiles while chewing, enjoying the moment.

The annals of TV are full of stories where women change themselves, from Mad Men’s Peggy Olsen to Eleanor Shellstrop in The Good Place. But Shrill, the six-episode adaptation of writer Lindy West’s memoir of the same name, is a different kind of “transformation” story, starring a woman of size. The show tells the story of Annie, a Portland-based calendar editor for an alt-weekly newspaper, trying to jump start her career, earn the love of Ryan, a painfully oblivious loser, and become a more honest, self-assured person. What Shrill is not is a story of body transformation, of a fat woman getting thin. Although it shows Annie eating diet meals and exercising with her mother, her real goal goes beyond the universal challenge of self-acceptance — she wants to feel powerful, as a woman of size and simply as a woman. She wants to demand respect from the people around her.

Those people often fat-shame Annie, whether it’s her obsessive online troll, her perpetually sneering editor, or an invasive personal trainer who eventually devolves into calling her a “fat bitch.” Still, Annie’s relationship with her body is more nuanced. Her insecurities are more often portrayed in physical details or unspoken interpersonal choices she makes because she feels that, in her words, “there’s a certain way that your body’s supposed to be and I’m not that.”

In media where a woman’s relationship with her body plays its own role, the eating scenes are telling. There are countless movies in which women devour ice cream during break-ups or lonely moments. And for years, when a person of size ate on screen, it was portrayed as comic relief, from Melissa McCarthy consuming a napkin in Spy to a cross-dressing Chris Farley on Saturday Night Live inhaling his friend’s french fries while asking, “Can I have some?”

Even in shows and movies celebrated for their representations of non-normative bodies, eating is reserved for emotional distress. In HBO’s Girls, Hannah Horvath (played by Lena Dunham) is often caught eating during low moments, like when she eats cake with her hands after her purse is stolen on the train. In Real Women Have Curves, it takes a conflict with her mother to get the protagonist, Ana (America Ferrera), to eat a bite of flan in a moment of overall positive defiance. Rarely do women of size get the opportunity to eat happily on screen without some tumult, some churning emotional hang-ups or interpersonal conflict. The exception, of course, is when people of size are shot eating healthy foods, like when the contestants on The Biggest Loser marvel over turkey burgers. But if a not-thin character is caught eating a cupcake, the audience is meant to laugh or cry at their expense.

When Annie eats so-called “indulgent” foods in Shrill, she’s not considered a failure, and it’s not used as a comic device. Instead, it’s often tied to a moment of personal or thematic triumph completely unrelated to her weight. By simply showing Annie eating the foods countless people love in a way that’s empowering, Shrill reinforces the idea that people, regardless of size, have the right to enjoy food in its entirety — not just salads and apples and other pious things, but rather the foods that are seen as permissibly comforting and luxurious for people of a smaller size. Like last year’s hit culinary travel show Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, Hulu’s new series rewrites the rules for who gets to enjoy food on television.

Annie isn’t the only big millennial woman eating spaghetti on TV. In a scene on Girls, Hannah grabs handfuls of noodles from a takeout box, dangling them into her open mouth. There is an element of watching this scene that feels relatable, especially for anyone who lives alone, but nothing about that moment is sexy or empowering. At its best, it’s a moment of comic relief born out of universality; at its worst, it’s Dunham’s self-ridiculing humor shaming herself — and other women — for eating without control while not thin.

This is far from the only moment when a woman eating sugary, greasy, and otherwise “bad” foods on television works as a boiler-plate scene representing rock bottom. In her essay “Why is it sad and lonely women who turn to chocolate?” Telegraph culture writer Rebecca Hawkes recalls similar moments in romantic comedies, like when Renee Zellweger devours chocolates under a blanket in Bridget Jones’s Diary, or when Sandra Bullock turns to ice cream in Miss Congeniality. “When you look at the trope in more detail, the implication is that eating chocolate is something ‘naughty,’” she writes. “It’s something that (calorie-counting, figure-obsessed) women shouldn’t be doing, but can’t help resorting to in moments of extreme trauma — or simply due to a comedic lack of discipline.” In her essay, Hawkes also brings up another classic plus-sized person comically shamed and punished for their gluttony: Augustus Gloop, the rotund little boy in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, presumably killed for wanting to eat some of the chocolate in a literal river of chocolate — as if anyone wouldn’t.

Ryan (Luka Jones) and Annie (Aidy Bryant)

Photo: Allyson Riggs/Shrill

But still, beyond little boys, beyond thin ladies, it’s plus-size women whose eating is most often used as a thematic example of a psychological and/or personal failure, whether it’s comical or supposedly tragic. “With any overweight, unruly woman, there’s always a tendency to pathologize their relationship with food,” says Kathleen Rowe Karlyn, author of The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter. “[For] women who dive in to the quart of ice cream or the box of chocolate, food is a source of comfort because life is not giving them other types of comfort.”

If women get fat as a plot device, they’re often shown eating something like pizza, ice cream, chocolate, or other sweets — take, for example, Goldie Hawn gorging herself on frosting post-breakup in Death Becomes Her. If a character appears to get them out of a slump, a chicken wing might be yanked out of their hands. And they won’t reach personal fulfillment until they’re skinny again. Meanwhile, women who are thin and confident — whether it’s Drew Barrymore in Charlie’s Angels, or the titular Gilmore Girls — are free to eat as much as they please, to the delight of all who watch them.

Annie didn’t originally eat the spaghetti. It was made by Fran’s brother, Lamar (Akemnji Ndifornyen), who spends the third episode, “Pencil,” visiting his sister and her roommate. For most of the first few episodes, Annie is busy obsessing over a man (Luka Jones) who is so embarrassed by her that he sends her out the back door of his apartment so his roommates can’t see her. On their first date, she eats a salad. When she arrives home after Ryan has stood her up, Lamar and Fran offer her the spaghetti. She turns it down.

Lamar, a chef, spends the episode quietly fawning over Annie. When he arrives, he gives her a box of chocolate turtles, an elaborate reference to a memory from their past. He lights up when she enters the room. And later, when she comes back after choosing not to see Ryan, he admits that he likes her, and that he always did. After they have sex, Annie tiptoes downstairs to the kitchen, where she finds the pasta he made. The scene is romantic and almost sexy, in a totally subtle, maybe even unintentional way. He didn’t make the pasta for her, specifically, but it was made by him.

But beyond the romantic arc of Annie and Lamar, the scene’s impact comes directly from what it means for her, in her path to self-respect: she’s giving herself what she wants and deserves, on her own terms. And the bewildered delight in her face as she eats is so contagiously joyful that the context of her weight becomes irrelevant.

Annie (Aidy Bryant) and Lamar (Akemnji Ndifornyen).

Photo by: Allyson Riggs/Shrill

Beyond the men in her life, one of Annie’s most fraught relationships is with her mother, Vera (played by Julia Sweeney), who’s responsible for the Thin Menu meals. During a pivotal rant, when Annie describes the ways the people around her have made her size seem like a moral failing, she says, “At this point, I could be a licensed fucking nutritionist because I’ve literally been training for it since the fourth grade, which is the first time that my mom said that I should just eat a bowl of Special K and not the dinner that she made for everyone else so I might be a little bit smaller.” One of Annie’s most significant plot developments with her mother, when she pushes back against her health policing, starts with a meal of meatball subs with her father. And when the season ends, we leave Vera lying on the ground with a bag of chips, suggesting that Annie’s number one advice giver also needs respite from controlling everything.

“Whether they’re very curvy like Mae West or they’re slender, I think what we haven’t seen in a long time is the ability of women just to be seen enjoying food,” Karlyn says. “Food is enjoyable (to women), not because they’re neurotic, not because they’re crazy, not because they’re sex-obsessed, just because food is a natural pleasure of life.” That’s how Shrill treats food, but also most of life’s joys: dancing at a party, swimming in a pool, having sex, being honest. Counter to the ways television and movies have previously presented plus-size women, as victims of their own lack of self-control, Shrill shows how restrictive life as a plus-size woman can be, and how often that’s a direct result of their self control. Shrill seems to be advocating for more self-designated freedom for women of size — the freedom to live with abandon. As Annie says, lying in bed and taking charge, “I’ve got big titties and a fat ass — I make the rules.”

Brooke Jackson-Glidden is the editor of Eater Portland. Edited by: Greg Morabito

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Source: https://www.eater.com/2019/3/28/18284128/shrill-hulu-aidy-bryant-food-eating

[sparkvelvet75-blog]

‘Shrill’ Shreds Hollywood Stereotypes About How Women of Size Eat

The first time you see Annie, the protagonist of the new Hulu show Shrill, eating, her meal doesn’t look particularly pleasant. Played by SNL cast member Aidy Bryant, Annie grabs a plastic container from the fridge, opening it to reveal three white disks — supposedly pancakes — from a Tupperware labeled “Thin Menu.” While standing in her kitchen, she tries to break off a slab, puts it in her mouth, and wrinkles her nose in disgust. Her roommate, Fran (played by Lolly Adefope), walks by to witness the three doughy pucks, and says, “Good God.”

It’s not the only time Annie eats in her kitchen. Later in the series, Bryant opens a sealed container of leftover spaghetti, standing alone over an island near the sink. She twirls noodles around her fork, grinning in anticipation. She looks confident, blissed out, holding her hand under her chin as a noodle inches toward her lips. She scrunches her eyebrows and crinkles her nose, the perfect opposite of her look of disgust eating the Thin Meal pancakes. She nods and smiles while chewing, enjoying the moment.

The annals of TV are full of stories where women change themselves, from Mad Men’s Peggy Olsen to Eleanor Shellstrop in The Good Place. But Shrill, the six-episode adaptation of writer Lindy West’s memoir of the same name, is a different kind of “transformation” story, starring a woman of size. The show tells the story of Annie, a Portland-based calendar editor for an alt-weekly newspaper, trying to jump start her career, earn the love of Ryan, a painfully oblivious loser, and become a more honest, self-assured person. What Shrill is not is a story of body transformation, of a fat woman getting thin. Although it shows Annie eating diet meals and exercising with her mother, her real goal goes beyond the universal challenge of self-acceptance — she wants to feel powerful, as a woman of size and simply as a woman. She wants to demand respect from the people around her.

Those people often fat-shame Annie, whether it’s her obsessive online troll, her perpetually sneering editor, or an invasive personal trainer who eventually devolves into calling her a “fat bitch.” Still, Annie’s relationship with her body is more nuanced. Her insecurities are more often portrayed in physical details or unspoken interpersonal choices she makes because she feels that, in her words, “there’s a certain way that your body’s supposed to be and I’m not that.”

In media where a woman’s relationship with her body plays its own role, the eating scenes are telling. There are countless movies in which women devour ice cream during break-ups or lonely moments. And for years, when a person of size ate on screen, it was portrayed as comic relief, from Melissa McCarthy consuming a napkin in Spy to a cross-dressing Chris Farley on Saturday Night Live inhaling his friend’s french fries while asking, “Can I have some?”

Even in shows and movies celebrated for their representations of non-normative bodies, eating is reserved for emotional distress. In HBO’s Girls, Hannah Horvath (played by Lena Dunham) is often caught eating during low moments, like when she eats cake with her hands after her purse is stolen on the train. In Real Women Have Curves, it takes a conflict with her mother to get the protagonist, Ana (America Ferrera), to eat a bite of flan in a moment of overall positive defiance. Rarely do women of size get the opportunity to eat happily on screen without some tumult, some churning emotional hang-ups or interpersonal conflict. The exception, of course, is when people of size are shot eating healthy foods, like when the contestants on The Biggest Loser marvel over turkey burgers. But if a not-thin character is caught eating a cupcake, the audience is meant to laugh or cry at their expense.

When Annie eats so-called “indulgent” foods in Shrill, she’s not considered a failure, and it’s not used as a comic device. Instead, it’s often tied to a moment of personal or thematic triumph completely unrelated to her weight. By simply showing Annie eating the foods countless people love in a way that’s empowering, Shrill reinforces the idea that people, regardless of size, have the right to enjoy food in its entirety — not just salads and apples and other pious things, but rather the foods that are seen as permissibly comforting and luxurious for people of a smaller size. Like last year’s hit culinary travel show Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, Hulu’s new series rewrites the rules for who gets to enjoy food on television.

Annie isn’t the only big millennial woman eating spaghetti on TV. In a scene on Girls, Hannah grabs handfuls of noodles from a takeout box, dangling them into her open mouth. There is an element of watching this scene that feels relatable, especially for anyone who lives alone, but nothing about that moment is sexy or empowering. At its best, it’s a moment of comic relief born out of universality; at its worst, it’s Dunham’s self-ridiculing humor shaming herself — and other women — for eating without control while not thin.

This is far from the only moment when a woman eating sugary, greasy, and otherwise “bad” foods on television works as a boiler-plate scene representing rock bottom. In her essay “Why is it sad and lonely women who turn to chocolate?” Telegraph culture writer Rebecca Hawkes recalls similar moments in romantic comedies, like when Renee Zellweger devours chocolates under a blanket in Bridget Jones’s Diary, or when Sandra Bullock turns to ice cream in Miss Congeniality. “When you look at the trope in more detail, the implication is that eating chocolate is something ‘naughty,’” she writes. “It’s something that (calorie-counting, figure-obsessed) women shouldn’t be doing, but can’t help resorting to in moments of extreme trauma — or simply due to a comedic lack of discipline.” In her essay, Hawkes also brings up another classic plus-sized person comically shamed and punished for their gluttony: Augustus Gloop, the rotund little boy in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, presumably killed for wanting to eat some of the chocolate in a literal river of chocolate — as if anyone wouldn’t.

Ryan (Luka Jones) and Annie (Aidy Bryant)

Photo: Allyson Riggs/Shrill

But still, beyond little boys, beyond thin ladies, it’s plus-size women whose eating is most often used as a thematic example of a psychological and/or personal failure, whether it’s comical or supposedly tragic. “With any overweight, unruly woman, there’s always a tendency to pathologize their relationship with food,” says Kathleen Rowe Karlyn, author of The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter. “[For] women who dive in to the quart of ice cream or the box of chocolate, food is a source of comfort because life is not giving them other types of comfort.”

If women get fat as a plot device, they’re often shown eating something like pizza, ice cream, chocolate, or other sweets — take, for example, Goldie Hawn gorging herself on frosting post-breakup in Death Becomes Her. If a character appears to get them out of a slump, a chicken wing might be yanked out of their hands. And they won’t reach personal fulfillment until they’re skinny again. Meanwhile, women who are thin and confident — whether it’s Drew Barrymore in Charlie’s Angels, or the titular Gilmore Girls — are free to eat as much as they please, to the delight of all who watch them.

Annie didn’t originally eat the spaghetti. It was made by Fran’s brother, Lamar (Akemnji Ndifornyen), who spends the third episode, “Pencil,” visiting his sister and her roommate. For most of the first few episodes, Annie is busy obsessing over a man (Luka Jones) who is so embarrassed by her that he sends her out the back door of his apartment so his roommates can’t see her. On their first date, she eats a salad. When she arrives home after Ryan has stood her up, Lamar and Fran offer her the spaghetti. She turns it down.

Lamar, a chef, spends the episode quietly fawning over Annie. When he arrives, he gives her a box of chocolate turtles, an elaborate reference to a memory from their past. He lights up when she enters the room. And later, when she comes back after choosing not to see Ryan, he admits that he likes her, and that he always did. After they have sex, Annie tiptoes downstairs to the kitchen, where she finds the pasta he made. The scene is romantic and almost sexy, in a totally subtle, maybe even unintentional way. He didn’t make the pasta for her, specifically, but it was made by him.

But beyond the romantic arc of Annie and Lamar, the scene’s impact comes directly from what it means for her, in her path to self-respect: she’s giving herself what she wants and deserves, on her own terms. And the bewildered delight in her face as she eats is so contagiously joyful that the context of her weight becomes irrelevant.

Annie (Aidy Bryant) and Lamar (Akemnji Ndifornyen).

Photo by: Allyson Riggs/Shrill

Beyond the men in her life, one of Annie’s most fraught relationships is with her mother, Vera (played by Julia Sweeney), who’s responsible for the Thin Menu meals. During a pivotal rant, when Annie describes the ways the people around her have made her size seem like a moral failing, she says, “At this point, I could be a licensed fucking nutritionist because I’ve literally been training for it since the fourth grade, which is the first time that my mom said that I should just eat a bowl of Special K and not the dinner that she made for everyone else so I might be a little bit smaller.” One of Annie’s most significant plot developments with her mother, when she pushes back against her health policing, starts with a meal of meatball subs with her father. And when the season ends, we leave Vera lying on the ground with a bag of chips, suggesting that Annie’s number one advice giver also needs respite from controlling everything.

“Whether they’re very curvy like Mae West or they’re slender, I think what we haven’t seen in a long time is the ability of women just to be seen enjoying food,” Karlyn says. “Food is enjoyable (to women), not because they’re neurotic, not because they’re crazy, not because they’re sex-obsessed, just because food is a natural pleasure of life.” That’s how Shrill treats food, but also most of life’s joys: dancing at a party, swimming in a pool, having sex, being honest. Counter to the ways television and movies have previously presented plus-size women, as victims of their own lack of self-control, Shrill shows how restrictive life as a plus-size woman can be, and how often that’s a direct result of their self control. Shrill seems to be advocating for more self-designated freedom for women of size — the freedom to live with abandon. As Annie says, lying in bed and taking charge, “I’ve got big titties and a fat ass — I make the rules.”

Brooke Jackson-Glidden is the editor of Eater Portland. Edited by: Greg Morabito

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Source: https://www.eater.com/2019/3/28/18284128/shrill-hulu-aidy-bryant-food-eating

[butaneplate02-blog]

‘Shrill’ Shreds Hollywood Stereotypes About How Women of Size Eat

The first time you see Annie, the protagonist of the new Hulu show Shrill, eating, her meal doesn’t look particularly pleasant. Played by SNL cast member Aidy Bryant, Annie grabs a plastic container from the fridge, opening it to reveal three white disks — supposedly pancakes — from a Tupperware labeled “Thin Menu.” While standing in her kitchen, she tries to break off a slab, puts it in her mouth, and wrinkles her nose in disgust. Her roommate, Fran (played by Lolly Adefope), walks by to witness the three doughy pucks, and says, “Good God.”

It’s not the only time Annie eats in her kitchen. Later in the series, Bryant opens a sealed container of leftover spaghetti, standing alone over an island near the sink. She twirls noodles around her fork, grinning in anticipation. She looks confident, blissed out, holding her hand under her chin as a noodle inches toward her lips. She scrunches her eyebrows and crinkles her nose, the perfect opposite of her look of disgust eating the Thin Meal pancakes. She nods and smiles while chewing, enjoying the moment.

The annals of TV are full of stories where women change themselves, from Mad Men’s Peggy Olsen to Eleanor Shellstrop in The Good Place. But Shrill, the six-episode adaptation of writer Lindy West’s memoir of the same name, is a different kind of “transformation” story, starring a woman of size. The show tells the story of Annie, a Portland-based calendar editor for an alt-weekly newspaper, trying to jump start her career, earn the love of Ryan, a painfully oblivious loser, and become a more honest, self-assured person. What Shrill is not is a story of body transformation, of a fat woman getting thin. Although it shows Annie eating diet meals and exercising with her mother, her real goal goes beyond the universal challenge of self-acceptance — she wants to feel powerful, as a woman of size and simply as a woman. She wants to demand respect from the people around her.

Those people often fat-shame Annie, whether it’s her obsessive online troll, her perpetually sneering editor, or an invasive personal trainer who eventually devolves into calling her a “fat bitch.” Still, Annie’s relationship with her body is more nuanced. Her insecurities are more often portrayed in physical details or unspoken interpersonal choices she makes because she feels that, in her words, “there’s a certain way that your body’s supposed to be and I’m not that.”

In media where a woman’s relationship with her body plays its own role, the eating scenes are telling. There are countless movies in which women devour ice cream during break-ups or lonely moments. And for years, when a person of size ate on screen, it was portrayed as comic relief, from Melissa McCarthy consuming a napkin in Spy to a cross-dressing Chris Farley on Saturday Night Live inhaling his friend’s french fries while asking, “Can I have some?”

Even in shows and movies celebrated for their representations of non-normative bodies, eating is reserved for emotional distress. In HBO’s Girls, Hannah Horvath (played by Lena Dunham) is often caught eating during low moments, like when she eats cake with her hands after her purse is stolen on the train. In Real Women Have Curves, it takes a conflict with her mother to get the protagonist, Ana (America Ferrera), to eat a bite of flan in a moment of overall positive defiance. Rarely do women of size get the opportunity to eat happily on screen without some tumult, some churning emotional hang-ups or interpersonal conflict. The exception, of course, is when people of size are shot eating healthy foods, like when the contestants on The Biggest Loser marvel over turkey burgers. But if a not-thin character is caught eating a cupcake, the audience is meant to laugh or cry at their expense.

When Annie eats so-called “indulgent” foods in Shrill, she’s not considered a failure, and it’s not used as a comic device. Instead, it’s often tied to a moment of personal or thematic triumph completely unrelated to her weight. By simply showing Annie eating the foods countless people love in a way that’s empowering, Shrill reinforces the idea that people, regardless of size, have the right to enjoy food in its entirety — not just salads and apples and other pious things, but rather the foods that are seen as permissibly comforting and luxurious for people of a smaller size. Like last year’s hit culinary travel show Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, Hulu’s new series rewrites the rules for who gets to enjoy food on television.

Annie isn’t the only big millennial woman eating spaghetti on TV. In a scene on Girls, Hannah grabs handfuls of noodles from a takeout box, dangling them into her open mouth. There is an element of watching this scene that feels relatable, especially for anyone who lives alone, but nothing about that moment is sexy or empowering. At its best, it’s a moment of comic relief born out of universality; at its worst, it’s Dunham’s self-ridiculing humor shaming herself — and other women — for eating without control while not thin.

This is far from the only moment when a woman eating sugary, greasy, and otherwise “bad” foods on television works as a boiler-plate scene representing rock bottom. In her essay “Why is it sad and lonely women who turn to chocolate?” Telegraph culture writer Rebecca Hawkes recalls similar moments in romantic comedies, like when Renee Zellweger devours chocolates under a blanket in Bridget Jones’s Diary, or when Sandra Bullock turns to ice cream in Miss Congeniality. “When you look at the trope in more detail, the implication is that eating chocolate is something ‘naughty,’” she writes. “It’s something that (calorie-counting, figure-obsessed) women shouldn’t be doing, but can’t help resorting to in moments of extreme trauma — or simply due to a comedic lack of discipline.” In her essay, Hawkes also brings up another classic plus-sized person comically shamed and punished for their gluttony: Augustus Gloop, the rotund little boy in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, presumably killed for wanting to eat some of the chocolate in a literal river of chocolate — as if anyone wouldn’t.

Ryan (Luka Jones) and Annie (Aidy Bryant)

Photo: Allyson Riggs/Shrill

But still, beyond little boys, beyond thin ladies, it’s plus-size women whose eating is most often used as a thematic example of a psychological and/or personal failure, whether it’s comical or supposedly tragic. “With any overweight, unruly woman, there’s always a tendency to pathologize their relationship with food,” says Kathleen Rowe Karlyn, author of The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter. “[For] women who dive in to the quart of ice cream or the box of chocolate, food is a source of comfort because life is not giving them other types of comfort.”

If women get fat as a plot device, they’re often shown eating something like pizza, ice cream, chocolate, or other sweets — take, for example, Goldie Hawn gorging herself on frosting post-breakup in Death Becomes Her. If a character appears to get them out of a slump, a chicken wing might be yanked out of their hands. And they won’t reach personal fulfillment until they’re skinny again. Meanwhile, women who are thin and confident — whether it’s Drew Barrymore in Charlie’s Angels, or the titular Gilmore Girls — are free to eat as much as they please, to the delight of all who watch them.

Annie didn’t originally eat the spaghetti. It was made by Fran’s brother, Lamar (Akemnji Ndifornyen), who spends the third episode, “Pencil,” visiting his sister and her roommate. For most of the first few episodes, Annie is busy obsessing over a man (Luka Jones) who is so embarrassed by her that he sends her out the back door of his apartment so his roommates can’t see her. On their first date, she eats a salad. When she arrives home after Ryan has stood her up, Lamar and Fran offer her the spaghetti. She turns it down.

Lamar, a chef, spends the episode quietly fawning over Annie. When he arrives, he gives her a box of chocolate turtles, an elaborate reference to a memory from their past. He lights up when she enters the room. And later, when she comes back after choosing not to see Ryan, he admits that he likes her, and that he always did. After they have sex, Annie tiptoes downstairs to the kitchen, where she finds the pasta he made. The scene is romantic and almost sexy, in a totally subtle, maybe even unintentional way. He didn’t make the pasta for her, specifically, but it was made by him.

But beyond the romantic arc of Annie and Lamar, the scene’s impact comes directly from what it means for her, in her path to self-respect: she’s giving herself what she wants and deserves, on her own terms. And the bewildered delight in her face as she eats is so contagiously joyful that the context of her weight becomes irrelevant.

Annie (Aidy Bryant) and Lamar (Akemnji Ndifornyen).

Photo by: Allyson Riggs/Shrill

Beyond the men in her life, one of Annie’s most fraught relationships is with her mother, Vera (played by Julia Sweeney), who’s responsible for the Thin Menu meals. During a pivotal rant, when Annie describes the ways the people around her have made her size seem like a moral failing, she says, “At this point, I could be a licensed fucking nutritionist because I’ve literally been training for it since the fourth grade, which is the first time that my mom said that I should just eat a bowl of Special K and not the dinner that she made for everyone else so I might be a little bit smaller.” One of Annie’s most significant plot developments with her mother, when she pushes back against her health policing, starts with a meal of meatball subs with her father. And when the season ends, we leave Vera lying on the ground with a bag of chips, suggesting that Annie’s number one advice giver also needs respite from controlling everything.

“Whether they’re very curvy like Mae West or they’re slender, I think what we haven’t seen in a long time is the ability of women just to be seen enjoying food,” Karlyn says. “Food is enjoyable (to women), not because they’re neurotic, not because they’re crazy, not because they’re sex-obsessed, just because food is a natural pleasure of life.” That’s how Shrill treats food, but also most of life’s joys: dancing at a party, swimming in a pool, having sex, being honest. Counter to the ways television and movies have previously presented plus-size women, as victims of their own lack of self-control, Shrill shows how restrictive life as a plus-size woman can be, and how often that’s a direct result of their self control. Shrill seems to be advocating for more self-designated freedom for women of size — the freedom to live with abandon. As Annie says, lying in bed and taking charge, “I’ve got big titties and a fat ass — I make the rules.”

Brooke Jackson-Glidden is the editor of Eater Portland. Edited by: Greg Morabito

Eat, Drink, Watch.

Food entertainment news and streaming recommendations every Friday

By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy and European users agree to the data transfer policy.

Source: https://www.eater.com/2019/3/28/18284128/shrill-hulu-aidy-bryant-food-eating

[rhymaresh]

The Gendered Gaze and Objectification of Women in Teen TV Shows (E4’s Skins vs NRK’s Skam)

This essay will be discussing the issue of the gendered gaze in teen-catered television shows, focusing primarily on two shows with similar content and a similar targeted demographic: the British TV show Skins, and the Norwegian teen drama, Skam (translating to ‘Shame’). I will be exploring issues of spectatorship, the gaze in relation to gender politics, and the effects of the objectifying gaze on audiences.

The female body has been subject to objectification through spectatorship and voyeurism long before the age of media, starting with nude paintings of women catering largely to male collectors and leading up to present time when in a patriarchal, consumerist society the female body has become a commodity. Television has become oversaturated with objectifying representations of women to the extent of which it is has become near impossible to place a female body in the spotlight without it becoming subject to objectification. As Constance Penley states in her book, Feminism and Film Theory,

“Cinematic images of woman have been so consistently oppressive and repressive that the very idea of a feminist filmmaking practice seems an impossibility. The simple gesture of directing a camera towards a woman has become equivalent to a terrorist act. This state of affairs — the result of a history which inscribes women as subordinate — is not simply to be  overturned by a contemporary practice that is more aware, more self-conscious. . The impasse confronting feminist filmmakers today is linked to the force of a certain theoretical discourse which denies the neutrality of the cinematic apparatus itself.” (Penley, 1988)

The field of female representation is hard to navigate under these conditions, perhaps even more so when the media in question is aimed at teenage audiences. As statistics show, watching television is one of the main leisure habits that teenagers engage in. The effects of negative representation and objectification has been proven over and over again to be detrimental to young, impressionable audiences and recent decades have seen an increase in body-image related issues in teenagers and young adults, making it almost impossible to not draw a line between the two facts.

“Versions of what it is to be a woman, then, are offered to the teenage viewer; versions which become part of the range of ideas which form an identity. Whether they are incongruent with other ideas being offered, or identical to them, may, of course make a difference to how much influence they have. So, for example, if all the cultural messages a young woman receives tell her that she must, first and foremost, be a perfect body, then it is possible to surmise that this would have more impact than if it were only coming from one direction.” (Frost, 2001, p. 98)

The increasing amount of teenagers consuming television shows has led to the birth of an entire new genre, that of teenage drama shows such as Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, Freaks and Geeks, Skins, and 13 Reasons Why, to name only a few. As Rebecca Feasey notes in Masculinity and Popular Television

“Television has routinely featured teenagers and the teen experience in a range of talent shows, variety programs, soap operas and sitcoms, with such programming culminating in the teen television drama of the early to mid-1990s. These texts do not merely reflect adolescent interests and anxieties, but rather, they play a significant role in managing and shaping the teen experience. However, even though the small screen appears saturated by the trials and tribulations of the teen life and a varied spectrum of adolescent concerns, this youth demographic has little or no control over such representations.”  (Feasey)

Many of such TV shows seem to present a teen reality that has more of an intended aspirational aspect to its characters than an intent to represent teen life and struggles as they are, most of them concerning themselves mainly with centering their plot around skinny girls, rich families, large parties and expensive cars. However, as one The Guardian article aptly notes, Skins was one of the first teen dramas to actually take an interest in portraying something more similar to reality. A fact which perhaps contributed to its incredible popularity over the years.

“Skins [...] took the radical step of considering what young viewers might want and aspire to by actually thinking about and consulting young viewers. It told the story of a group of mates in Bristol who were leaving school, who slept with each other, went to parties, drank a lot, smoked weed, and talked like the kids they were. Their personal dramas weren’t the dramas of adults transposed on to slightly younger adults to act out; they were smaller, more honest and more precise than that. The first series [...] played with typical teenage issues. They were exaggerated and comic, but believable nonetheless: the characters were dealing with losing their virginity, eating disorders, school trips, sexuality, divorce, friendships, and not feeling good enough for your peers.”  (Nicholson)

However this does not make Skins exempt from issues of objectification when it comes to female characters. In fact, in its attempt at realism it may have further added to the issue in a vicious cycle of objectification. In fact one of the first scenes on the show involves one of the main characters looking out the window at a naked woman who is unaware of him watching her. In another scene from the same episode the camera pans up Michelle’s body as Tony watches her dance at a party. Later, in another episode Tony is spying on one of the teachers who steps naked out of the shower. In these scenes the camera becomes the tool through which voyeurism is performed.

Even past that, the show’s female characters are objectified by the males ones to the extent of them becoming mainly a plot point in the story lines of the male ones. Of course, the objectification of women extends outside the world of film and it’s realistic to believe teenagers would treat each other this way, however it is possible to maintain realism as well as address these issues. From the very start we see Tony and Sid treating Cassie as nothing more than an object, a means to an end, a tool for Sid to achieve his goal and lose his virginity. Female nudity on the show seems to only have the purpose of giving pleasure to the male spectators through voyeurism. Especially in teen television shows, this contributes to the oversexualisation of girls, both on and off screen and raises concerns regarding objectification and consent.

The question that needs to be asked in this case seems to be: is it possible to create a television series that offers a realistic representation of teenage life while also dealing with such issues? It seems hard to think this would be possible. However, in the years since Skins came to an end in 2013, another teen TV drama has risen in popularity. Created in 2015 Skam (Shame), a Norwegian TV series focusing on the lives of a group of teenagers from Oslo, is now airing its last season and has one-upped the british favourite both when it comes to representation and objectification as well as production.. Less over the top when it comes to its characters and the dramatic situations they are put through, Skam presents a more realistic, more self-aware version of teenage life, choosing to subtly point out the issues that come with issues such as the male gaze rather than encourage it (much as its British counterpart has). As one viewer states, in an article for the Guardian, “Skam’s real appeal goes beyond its current leads, no matter how telegenic and lovable they are. ‘The show is very willing to tackle ignorance among Norwegian teens – you see a lot of it and you also see the part where they get educated.”” (Hughes)

Skam, just as Skins before it, deals with a lot of the issues prevalent among teenagers today: friendship, romance, virginity, sexuality, mental health, body image, religion, sexual assault and consent, to name just a few. However, unlike Skins, when it comes to female objectification, instead of simply putting it in practice, Skam points out its problematic aspects, both through its well written dialogue as well as through elements of cinematography.

In the short time it’s been airing, Skam has proven to be one of the most innovative tv shows as well, fact which has contributed to its widespread popularity. Each season of the show is focused on one main character and takes place in ‘real time’ with clips being posted on the show’s website throughout the week and adding up to form one complete episode every Friday. The clips are accompanied by screenshots of texts between the characters and by posts made on their social media, which add to the storyline. The music in the show is also very significant to the scenes it accompanies, from Akon’s I Wanna Fuck You to Yusuf Islam’s Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood. The scenes are shot mainly on location, and only a few weeks before the respective episodes are meant to air. This way, the director, Julie Andem, and the production team can receive the teenage fan’s feedback and sometimes alter the storylines in order to maintain its realism.

So far out of the four season of the show, three of them have had females leads, while one season focused on a male character’s journey to coming to terms with his sexuality. The first season of the show dealt with issues of insecurity, cheating and trust, the second season dealt with issues of consent and sexual assault, the third one tackled self-acceptance and mental health, and now, on the last season with a Muslim girl as a main character, it is expected issues of religion and discrimination will be tackled. Due to the predominantly female point of view throughout the show and possibly the female director however, the instances where women are objectified are addressed as opposed to being left as they are. In one particular instance, one of the male characters with a notorious reputation as a ‘player’, takes advantage of one of the girls’ crush on him and after having sex with her and getting what he wanted, proceeds to ignore her. As a Dazed article notes,

“Skam speaks directly to its viewers as a peer rather than from a pulpit. Another moment shows a character called Vilde, who is told point-blank by the guy she is lusting after that he’s just not that into her. Her friends attempt to comfort her, telling her he’s not worth it. Still, she can’t help but feel inadequate. “I know you should think that if a guy doesn't like you, it’s not you there’s something wrong with. It’s him,” she says. “But how does one think like that? I keep thinking it’s me there’s something wrong with.”” (Taylor)

Throughout the entirety of the show the entire storyline attempts to deconstruct female objectification rather than encourage it in the same way Skins did before it. Due to this it is rarely that the camera focuses on the female body in a sexualising or objectifying way. Even when two female characters end up making out while drunk at a party, with one of the male characters watching them, the scene never becomes sexualising.

In conclusion, while Skins certainly captured the reality of teenage life and validated a lot of the experiences and emotions, its oversexualisation of the female body and in particular of teenage girls’ bodies, makes it at the very least almost uncomfortable to watch and at most damaging to its young audiences. Skam, as its Norwegian counterpart, is not afraid to show the same realities, while still educating audiences. Its use of the camera as an instrument of the Gaze is far less extreme than the one Skins offered its audience. In an age of social media and consumerism where women’s bodies are objectified perhaps more than ever it is almost a novelty when a teen-targeted TV show treats its female characters with respect while still managing to capture all those key moments of their adolescence, and manages to do so without showing their bodies framed in oversexualising ways.

[fitnesswomenshealth-blog]

Dear Men of #MeToo: Abuse Is Behaviour, Not a Symptom of Mental Illness

New Post has been published on https://cialiscom.org/dear-men-of-metoo-abuse-is-behaviour-not-a-symptom-of-mental-illness.html

Dear Men of #MeToo: Abuse Is Behaviour, Not a Symptom of Mental Illness

Trigger warning: Sexual harassment/abuse

The #MeToo movement has served quite a few gals arrive out with their stories of sexual harassment and abuse at the fingers of potent guys. It has also highlighted the difficulties affiliated with mental wellbeing. Lots of ladies have spoken up about the effect of these incidents on survivors and comprehending why women of all ages just take time to come out in the open up with their narratives. At the same time, the much more catchy mentions of ‘mental health’ have been furthered by the adult males accused of sexual harassment and assault them selves, via their very carefully-worded apologies.

Mayank Jain, a journalist at the Company Common, comic Utsav Chakraborty and Abhishek Upadhya, an editor at India Television, tried to use their psychological health troubles as a defence just after currently being accused of predatory conduct by several women of all ages. Phrases like “struggle”, “disease”, “seeking help” and “therapy” were being littered on their Twitter timelines. These terms say things that these adult men want us to know – but do they seriously issue? And why communicate about it now?

Placing lousy mental well being on the table when you are accused of misconduct is a common gambit. Just after the poet Mary Karr wrote about how her previous associate David Foster Wallace had abused her physically and emotionally, a good deal of backlash centered on Wallace’s mental health and fitness troubles. In a personalized essay for the New Yorker, celebrated creator Junot Diaz talked about the repression of his childhood abuse and linked it to the accusations of assaulting and harassing several women of all ages. The courtroom trials of Roman Polanski talked about his ‘mental illness’ quite a few periods, adhering to his arrest for sexually abusing small children.

The similarities are obvious. All these males, and several other individuals, affected generations with their perform in literature and the media, experienced from mental wellness problems and abused these who seemed fewer impressive. Even so, it would be amiss to connect abuse and mental well being.

Initial off, there are similar styles of violence perpetrated by persons with as perfectly as without  a mental health issues. “The intersection of abusers with mental health difficulties is incredibly thin,” Sadaf Vidha, a Mumbai-primarily based psychologist whose clientele includes survivors of gender-based mostly violence, suggests. “Think about it while reversing the roles – when women of all ages or minorities experience from mental wellness difficulties, do we see them routinely abusing or assaulting other persons?”

Exploration denies a website link

Mayank Jain. Credit score: Fb

The affiliation of psychological illness with abusive conduct isn’t new the ‘insanity defence’ is likely its most popular byproduct. Researches have been discovering this relationship for a long time and have observed prevalence of mental sickness in convicted intercourse offenders, but no indicators of a crystal clear lead to-outcome has been located.

A 1999 review by Jenny Muzos of the Australian Institute Of Criminology dispels the fantasy that violent behaviour is involved with mental ailment. It identified that properties of crimes this sort of as homicides fully commited by offenders diagnosed with a mental condition were being no distinct from those of crimes committed by other offenders.

Right after a enterprise collection of scientific studies, Nancy Erickson, an attorney and expert on domestic violence and lawful troubles, concluded that though mental sickness could or may perhaps not exist in abusers, the abuse they inflict is a conduct and not a symptom.

A meta-analysis of many experiments by Andrew Klein, a professor of regulation at the Indiana College, Bloomington, and funded by the US Section of Justice, for the Battered Ladies Justice Task states that men who abuse are no more probable to undergo from mental ailments than the everyday populace. Their paper reads, “Although batterers may perhaps endure from depression or very low self-esteem immediately after getting arrested or restrained, these conditions have not been identified to have caused the abuse.”

Jaydip Sarkar, of the Institute of Mental Overall health, Singapore, asserted in a 2013 assessment of the assessments of psychological wellness of sex offenders in India that rape, sexual harassment and other predatory behaviours are not automatically the result of having a psychological wellbeing challenge.

The difficulty of perpetrators utilizing worry as a final result of work and/or substance abuse as an excuse was reviewed in a 1999 evaluation by Sarah Buel, a law firm and professor at Arizona Point out University. Buel spent 3 decades functioning with survivors of domestic violence and concluded that however violence are not able to be induced by pressure, stress could exacerbate violence.

When abusers use psychological health troubles as a shield, it provides to a horrifying, misinformed and ableist narrative. “Men immediately or indirectly stating that abusive tendencies are because of to mental health troubles, is just a further version of ‘I could not manage my need/anger’,” Vidha additional. “This is a really effectively-known sample. Abusers will blame wellness, exterior environments or the victims, just about anything that will allow them not to take accountability for their misuse of electrical power.”

The get the job done of Lundy Bancroft

Jain’s tweet about him in search of treatment to “reform himself” was very similar to Mark Halperin’s lengthy apology for reportedly assaulting about 50 percent a dozen females through his time at ABC Information, in the early 2000s. In his assertion, Halperin said he sought mental health and fitness counselling immediately after he left ABC.

Be sure to go through my statement under. pic.twitter.com/8ld8k8DC6O

— Mark Halperin (@MarkHalperin) Oct 27, 2017

Lundy Bancroft expended decades researching and counselling abusive gentlemen. In his 2002 e-book, Why Does He Do That? Within the Minds of Indignant and Controlling Gentlemen, Bancroft discusses the myth at the rear of utilizing psychological well being as a reason to abuse as very well as to feed misguided beliefs that potentially treatment method that can ‘fix’ these gentlemen.For case in point, on Diaz’s reference to his childhood abuse, Bancroft writes, “… abusive males may possibly obtain that accounts of childhood abuse is one of the very best ways to pull heartstrings.”

Bancroft states that people have the likely to get over psychological injuries from childhood and the impact of these accidents want not thrust the human being to inflict exact behaviour on other individuals.

When Chakraborty described his mental well being, he was making an attempt to sneak it into his apology and lay the ground for sympathy. Bancroft pointedly dismisses this, composing “… abuse is a challenge of values and not of psychology. Psychological disease does not result in abusiveness any longer than alcohol does. Perceptions of daily life circumstances in these males are exact, their minds perform logically and they comprehend induce-effect.”

The very same goes for Jain’s excuse and Upadhya proclaiming to search for professional assistance to deal with “these issues”. Bancroft proceeds, “I have still to fulfill an abuser who has produced any meaningful and lasting alterations in his behaviour by means of therapy no matter of how significantly insight he might have gained.” He also writes that qualified assistance will only help make them “happy, perfectly-adjusted” abusers mainly because interventions like psychotherapy can only tackle problems they are devised to tackle, and abusive conduct is not one of them.

It is also important to differentiate among two types of damaging conduct. One is wherever critical mental disorders like mania could cause a human being to become harmful, as a final result of which they may end up hurting the folks about them. The other is where the destruction is intentional and isn’t motivated by the sickness.

Of program, none of these usually means that any psychological wellness troubles these males might have are invalid or non-existent. They are probable to be as distressing for these males as they are for everyone else. Having said that, the distress does not have something to do with their incapability to understand consent or the company of the females.

“We are a patriarchal culture and allowing for psychological wellness issues to turn out to be an excuse for abuse or assault will lead to huge misuse of insurance policies and legal guidelines like the Mental Health Act,” Vidha claimed about the repercussions of individuals obtaining into these connections. “We want to differentiate amongst what socialisation teaches males that is ‘okay to do’ and what their psychological health and fitness conditions guide them to do.”

Psychological health and fitness problems and predatory behaviour can coexist in a one mind but with some length among each other. There are individuals who do go through from a mental disease and are abusive towards females – and there are also persons with a psychological health issues who do not engage in these types of conduct. This is the place human psychology takes a stage back and phone calls price programs to the phase.

Prateek Sharma is a college student pursuing a master’s diploma in clinical psychology, a researcher and a mental wellbeing activist operating to advertise inclusive psychological health and fitness treatment in India. He tweets @prateekshawarma.

You can follow The Wire‘s in depth coverage of Indian media’s Me Also motion listed here.

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[plantrock]

Hi Internet!

It’s that time of year again. I’m pleased to report that even with moving, traveling, and starting school again, I still managed to read 53 books in 2017. Not as many as last year, but given the chaos my life has been through in the last 12 months I am not in the least upset. 50 books is a good goal for me, as it’s roughly one book a week–though in reality I read in jumps and spurts. Sometimes a book will take two weeks, whereas, in weeks like this one, I’ll read three books in one week.

For this year’s recap I am going to separate the books I read into categories by my ratings, as well as give a one-sentence (ish) review. Want more info? Message me or look up the book!

FIVE STAR

THE POWER, Naomi Alderman

   Women around the world spontaneously obtain the ability to generate and control electricity and the chaos that ensues left me shaken in the best way. (WORLD WAR Z meets THE HANDMAID’S TALE.)

GLAMOUR ADDICTION, Juliet McMains

A very readable academic analysis of the socioeconomic landscape of competitive Ballroom dance that had me excitedly annotating from page one.

HAMILTON: THE REVOLUTION, Lin-Manual Miranda & Jeremy McCarter

I mean do I really have to explain this–there’s a million things I haven’t done, but just you wait.

THE END OF THE DAY, Claire North

A slow-but-emotional travelogue of the adventures of the Harbinger of Death–not my favorite of North’s novels, but contains her characteristically beautiful prose.

THE COLLAPSING EMPIRE, John Scalzi

The first installment in a cinematic space opera series by sci-fi giant Scalzi, EMPIRE is tightly plotted, has fascinating characters, and the far-future world feels familiar without exactly copying others in the genre.

REJECTED PRINCESSES, Jason Porath

Tired of the Grimm and Disney versions? This collection of women from myth, legend, and history around the world explores less convenient and less kid-friendly tales of women who stuck to their guns and caused a ruckus.

SO YOU’VE BEEN PUBLICLY SHAMED, Jon Ronson

Though slightly dated in our modern light-speed internet world, this exploration of the power of social media is required reading for anyone participating in the Feed.

PANDEMIC, Sonia Shah

Yes, I’m a sucker for the world-wide-plague book, but this non-fiction depiction of how epidemics begin, spread, and shape the world we know today is excellent.

SPINNING MAMBO INTO SALSA, Juliet McMains

An ethnographic and historical comparison of the three US cities that spawned Salsa and Mambo, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in social dance and the phenomenon that is Salsa.

EVERYTHING I NEVER TOLD YOU, Celeste Ng

A deft and moving family drama about immigration, middle-class America, and the secrets we keep from those closest to us.

FOUR STAR

SAILING TO SARANTIUM & LORD OF EMPERORS, Guy Gavriel Kay

A lyrical and occasionally violent duology that walks the line between alt-history and fantasy based on the Byzantine empire.

THE REFRIGERATOR MONOLOGUES, Catherynne Valente

THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES meets every superhero story ever–this short-story collection is piercing look at (loosely) veiled comic book tales and the women they have wronged.

THE NURSES, Alexandra Robbins

A non-fiction account of lives of those in the medical field who often seem to play second-fiddle to doctors. (Honestly I don’t remember much about this one, but I must have enjoyed it.)

STORIES OF YOUR LIFE, AND OTHERS, Ted Chiang

A mind-bending collection of science fiction short stories, including the one that inspired the 2016 movie ARRIVAL.

VAMPIRE GOD, Mary Hallub

The most comprehensive academic analysis of vampire media in the 19th through 21st centuries I have ever read.

IT DEVOURS!, Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor

This second book in the Night Vale world tackles science vs religion, and though they miss the mark a little, I will always love their prose and the universe they have built.

DANCE WRITINGS AND POETRY, Edwin Denby

This collection of original poetry and arts reviews contains gems from mid-20th-century dance critic Edwin Denby, including a fascinating interview regarding classicism with George Balanchine himself.

THE CITY AND THE CITY, China Mieville

  Is it science fiction? Is it artfully written detective fiction? I don’t think I’ve read a book so able to walk that line between fantasy and reality–as the characters walk the lines between their inexplicably separated cities.

BEAUTIFUL FLESH: A BODY OF ESSAYS, edited by Stephanie G’Schwind

 A collection of essays from a variety of authors, each focusing on a particular body part and their relationship to it. My personal favorite was a musing on the heart and humans’ relationship to electricity from an author with an implanted defibrillator.

WHAT IS LIFE? HOW CHEMISTRY BECOMES BIOLOGY, Addy Pross

A systems chemists attempt to re-frame how we think about life and its origins on our planet. This book is short but technically dense–good for the trained scientist, less so for the layperson.

THE BEGINNING OF THE WORLD IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, Jen Campbell

A quietly creepy collection of fairy tale and folk-lore-influenced short stories. My favorite was the first story, about a man who buys his girlfriend a new heart to ensure that she won’t leave him.

THE QUEEN OF BLOOD, Sarah Beth Durst

A bit of a guilty pleasure read, this fantasy series opener explores a world where the ruler of the realm must fight back malevolent natural forces.

AMBERLOUGH, Lara Donnelly

 CABARET the musical in novel form–this darkly beautiful story details the rise of facism in a fantasy world and how it impacts a colorful cast of miscreants.

THE ESSEX SERPENT, Sarah Perry

A beautiful and suspenseful tale of romance and loss in Victorian England, set again the backdrop of a hunt for a fantasy creature.

HILLBILLY ELEGY, J. D. Vance

  Both an autobiography and an attempt to explain the socioeconomic situation of Appalachian folks–but I’m conflicted on how much to buy into his arguments. Worth a read, though.

THE DIABOLIC, S. J. Kincaid

This story of a test-tube-grown bodyguard finding her humanity in a crumbling, corrupt space empire is the first YA sci-fi in a while that I didn’t hate!

BALLROOM DANCING IS NOT FOR SISSIES, Elizabeth & Arthur Seagull

Despite the sub-title, there is nothing R-rated about this how-to guide in balancing relationships and ballroom dancing.

DANCE WITH ME: BALLROOM DANCING AND THE PROMISE OF INSTANT INTIMACY, Julia Erickson

Despite the author’s obvious disdain for GLAMOUR ADDICTION (see Five Stars), this sociological analysis of studio ballroom culture lands on many of the same points as that other title, in addition to a hilariously accurate layout of the different performances of gender roles seen on the social dance floor.

THREE STAR

FOSSE, Sam Wasson

High on the drama and the page count, this biography of choreography legend Bob Fosse wastes no opportunity to dip into his sordid history and the seedy side of Broadway.

FUTURE HOME OF THE LIVING GOD, Lousie Erdrich

Despite its lovely prose, this novel doesn’t rise above the fact that it’s basically a less-good retelling of THE HANDMAID’S TALE.

MINDSET, Carol S. Dweck

My boss at my old job ‘suggested’ I read this. I remember nothing about it.

 THE MAD SCIENTIST’S GUIDE TO WORLD DOMINATION, Edited by John Joseph Adams

This collection of mad-science-themed short stories was sadly a mixed bag of quality–I loved one or two, barely finished others.

THE AERONAUT’S WINDLASS, Jim Butcher

A rollicking romp through a steampunk fantasy world, though I found the characters stock and the world forgettable. (The cat, though, is worth the price of admission alone.)

THE PALACE THIEF, Ethan Canin

Four not-particularly-memorable short stories concerning isolation and mid-century masculinity.

THREE DARK CROWNS, Kendare Blake

You’d think I’d have learned by now that YA fantasy does not float my boat, but, alas, I went into this tale of warring island factions and powerful queens-to-be expecting more than it delivered.

HOW TO BUILD A GIRL, Caitlin Moran

Sadly the details of this book have also faded, though I recall not understanding the nuances of British classism.

HEADS IN BEDS, Jacob Tomsky

A bit memoir, a bit how-to on cheating the hotel system of years gone by, a bit forgettable.

YOU’RE NEVER WEIRD ON THE INTERNET (ALMOST), Felicia Day

I’ve been a fan of Day since the Guild years, but this memoir suffers from the same problem as most of its internet-personality cohort–her story isn’t over, and the book feels unfinished.

JEROME ROBBINS: HIS LIFE, HIS THEATER, HIS DANCE, Deborah Jowitt

An interesting but dense biography of Broadway legend and second-fiddle-to-Balanchine Robbins. I was glad of the information, but am wary of glorifying a man who had a reputation as a tyrannical director.

DANCING OUT OF LINE: BALLROOMS, BALLETS, AND MOBILITY IN VICTORIAN FICTION AND CULTURE, Molly Engelhardt

Some interesting comparisons between Regency era and Victorian era social dance norms, but this book’s focus on dance depictions in time-period fiction did not hold my interest.

THE HOUSE OF GOD, Samuel Shem

A bizarre and polarizing account of the lives of medical residents in the 1970s that reads like a fever dream.

THEN WE CAME TO THE END, Joshua Ferris

I think this fictionalized account of office life was supposed to be equal parts pathos and satire, but I found it just vaguely sad and forgettable.

FROM BALLROOM TO DANCESPORT: AESTHETICS, ATHLETICS, AND BODY CULTURE, Caroline Picart

The author makes some interesting points about changes necessary to the DanceSport world in order for the sport’s inclusion in the Olympics, but the rest of the book is superseded by GLAMOUR ADDICTION (see Five Star).

AN EMBER IN THE ASHES, Sabaa Tahir

Again with the I-apparently-don’t-like-YA-Fantasy, and this one had the added bonus of being way too violent for my tastes.

THINKING WITH THE DANCING BRAIN, Sandra Minton

Neuroscience 101 for dancers–a nice refresher for me, but not much beyond that.

THE CROWN’S GAME, Evelyn Skye

Romance! Czarist Russia! Romance! Magic! Sadly I didn’t get into the relationship of the main characters.

TANGO AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PASSION, Marta E. Savigliano

This academic analysis of the history of tango and the socioeconomic forces at work during the dance’s creation had some interesting tid-bits, but I found it difficult to read and some stylistic choices hard to decipher.

TWO STAR

ZONE ONE, Colson Whitehead

I love zombie novels, but this one tries to be ‘litrary’ and cerebral and I just found it dull,  forgettable, and overly wordy.

THE ANUBIS GATES, Tim Powers

The cover of this absurdist time-traveling fantasy promises way more Ancient Egypt than I actually got. Crazy premise, idiotic characters, and only enough rollicking fun to laugh at.

YOU ARE A BADASS, Jen Sincero

For all its bluster and wanna-be subversiveness, BADASS is a pretty standard self-help book. Sadly I am one of the most self-motivated people I know, so the get-up-and-go was lost on me.

THE BLACK PRISM, Brent Weeks

The fascinating magic system was the only thing carrying me through this mess of unlikable characters and fantasy tropes.

ONE STAR

BALLROOM! OBSESSION AND PASSION INSIDE THE WORLD OF COMPETITIVE DANCE, Sharon Savoy

Never have I disagreed so completely with advice given and conclusions drawn as I did from those of professional-ballet-dancer-turned-cabaret-division-star Savoy. Want a rant? Ask me more.

  And that’s a wrap! If you made it all the way down here, thank you for reading, and may you have a wonderful New Year!

A Reading Re-cap: 2017 Hi Internet! It's that time of year again. I'm pleased to report that even with moving, traveling, and starting school again, I still managed to read 53 books in 2017.

[angstandhappiness]

Interesting

It's ironic how Batman is painted as irresponsible for having children fighting as his side (ignoring how said children would still fight without him), but never other heroes, HOWEVER the moment the Teen Titans/Young Justice wants to do something dangerous or comes back from doing something dangerous, he is literally the only responsible adult out of the Justice League. Like, the others are simply like "I'm so proud of you!" but Batman is lecturing his kids about how dangerous it was, how they didn't even told him where they were going, how they didn't contact him about their well-being enough, about how difficult it would have been for him to come help if they needed it... He's straight-up acting like a parent that found out his kid sneaked out, but they didn't came back until later the next day, and never called to tell them they were alive.

Bruce is portrayed as the "unfunny" one when one of his teenage kids is like "the team and I wants to do this dangerous thing unsupervised", because every other adults is being fine with their own doing it, but like, he is being the responsible one. Yeah, a responsible parent would not be like "sure sweetie, go fight this dangerous thing with your teenage friends", they would be like "No, you could get hurt. Yes, I trust you, but this is not safe".

Sometimes, he isn't overprotective, he is normal-level-protective for when your kid is a "vigilante that fights people who will kill them without regret" as a hobby, and the others are being careless (no hate to them tho)