#but we live in a society where a women are judged constantly for not looking immaculate

[kasiasthoughts]

It actually baffles me how people are bashing the women on all the reality tv shows for being unnatural. We literally live in a world where women are constantly being bashed for aging or gaining weight and then they wonder why things like Botox, fillers, and ozempic are trending.

Society is putting so much pressure on women to look and be perfect, and then when they spend thousands of dollars to maintain a youthful and thin look, they are still criticized. No matter what women do, it is never enough.

Instead of judging the women who are pandering to the patriarchy, we should be asking ourselves why they feel so pressured to change their natural features in the first place.

The conventional "beauty" ideal is constantly changing in forms of "trends", and only for women.

It is society that is the problem, it is patriarchy that is the problem. women are victims to the patriarchal system and we need to stop bashing them for falling victim to such a toxic system.

[kuvaajankulma]

The Bad Habit Fueling Women's Complexes

Introduction: We Need to Talk About It

Hey there — can we get real for a second? There’s this sneaky little habit that way too many women (and honestly, some men too) have picked up without even realizing it. It's feeding insecurities, building complexes, and making self-love feel like an uphill battle.

It’s high time we call it out, understand it, and kick it to the curb. Spoiler alert: you're definitely not alone in this.

Understanding the Root of the Problem

Where It All Begins: Society’s Expectations

From day one, women are handed an invisible rulebook. "Be pretty, but not vain. Be ambitious, but not intimidating. Be smart, but not bossy." Sound familiar? It’s like running an obstacle course while blindfolded — impossible to win and exhausting to try.

The Sneaky Role of Media and Social Platforms

Now toss in Instagram filters, TikTok "glow-up" challenges, and Pinterest-perfect weddings. Social media has this nasty habit of showing highlight reels, not real life. You end up feeling like you're the only mess — when in reality, everyone’s fighting their own private battles.

The Bad Habit That’s Doing the Damage

Constant Self-Criticism

Let’s just call it: being your own worst critic. That tiny voice that comments on everything from your outfit to the way you worded an email? Yeah, it’s ruthless. It's like carrying around a mean sports commentator who only highlights your fouls.

Comparison Syndrome

Scroll through your feed and there it is — someone’s dream vacation, flawless skin, massive career win. Without even realizing it, you’re asking yourself, "Why not me?" Comparison is the thief of joy, and yet we practically roll out the red carpet for it.

How These Habits Feed Complexes

Low Self-Esteem and Body Image Issues

When you’re constantly nitpicking yourself and measuring your life against others, your confidence doesn't just dip — it plummets. Suddenly, one bad hair day turns into doubting your worth as a human being. Exhausting, right?

Anxiety and Fear of Judgment

Ever walk into a room and immediately feel like everyone's judging you? Even if they aren’t, your mind’s already convinced they are. Living like that, always on high alert, robs you of joy and authentic connections.

Real-Life Stories: You’re Not Alone

Emma’s Battle with Perfectionism

Emma had it all: straight A’s, varsity letters, thousands of Instagram likes. But behind the perfect facade? Burnout. Anxiety. Crying in her car after school. Her breakthrough came when she realized: perfection isn't real. Chasing it only guaranteed she'd never feel good enough.

Sophia’s Journey Toward Self-Love

Sophia couldn’t stand looking in mirrors. Photos? Forget it. It wasn’t until a friend gently said, "You’re so vibrant and beautiful," that she questioned her toxic inner monologue. Healing didn’t happen overnight, but each small moment of self-kindness rewrote her story.

Breaking the Cycle: Practical Steps to Freedom

Recognize Your Inner Critic

First step: notice that nasty voice. Catch it mid-thought. It thrives in secrecy — shining a light on it starts to rob it of its power.

Shift from Criticism to Compassion

Caught yourself being harsh? Flip the script. Instead of "I’m so stupid," try "I’m learning." Talk to yourself like you would to someone you love.

Control Your Social Media Diet

If scrolling leaves you feeling worse instead of better, it’s time for a digital detox. Unfollow accounts that spark comparison. Curate your feed like your mental health depends on it — because honestly, it does.

Building a Healthier Relationship with Yourself

Celebrate Progress, Not Perfection

Did you show up today? Did you try? Celebrate that. Perfection is a moving target. Progress, however, is real and worth throwing confetti over.

Surround Yourself with Positive Influences

Energy is contagious. Hang out with people who see your light and remind you of it when you forget. Community isn’t just support — it’s survival.

The Power of Positive Self-Talk

Why Words Matter (Especially Your Own)

Words are seeds. What you plant, you grow. Negativity breeds weeds; positivity grows gardens. You get to choose what flourishes.

Simple Affirmations That Actually Work

Here’s a cheat sheet:

"I am enough just as I am."

"I choose progress over perfection."

"I am worthy of love and respect."

Stick these on your mirror, your fridge, your laptop. Make them unavoidable. Make them your new truth.

Helping Others Break Free Too

How to Support Friends and Family

If you notice someone trapped in self-criticism, be their mirror. Reflect back their beauty, strength, and growth. You might just change a life with your kindness.

Conclusion: You’re More Than Enough

At the end of the day, remember: You were never meant to be perfect. You were meant to be real, whole, vibrant, messy, glorious YOU.

Silence that inner critic, smash those bad habits, and show up for yourself with the same love you show others. Because honestly? You are — and always have been — more than enough.

FAQs

Q1: What is the bad habit that fuels women's complexes? The bad habit is constant self-criticism and unhealthy comparison to others, especially fed by media and societal expectations.

Q2: How can I stop being so self-critical? Start by noticing those harsh thoughts, challenge them, and replace them with kinder, more supportive ones.

Q3: Why does social media make me feel worse about myself? Social media often shows only highlight reels, creating unrealistic standards and fueling feelings of inadequacy.

Q4: What’s a simple daily practice to boost my self-esteem? Use positive affirmations every morning and celebrate small wins instead of chasing perfection.

Q5: How can I help a friend struggling with self-esteem issues? Support them through kindness, mirror their strengths back to them, and encourage open, judgment-free conversations.

You are welcome to read my other blogs @ Kuvaajankulma

And take look to my photographer Kuvaajankulma website

[angel7heaven]

When Jonah Hill said “if you need surfing with men & friendships with women who are in unstable places and from your wild recent past beyond getting a lunch or coffee or something respectful

“I am not the right partner for you.”

I thought I was way more severely mentally ill than I actually am until I realized most of society is trying to duplicate one another as if we’re Kinko’s.

People will swear they’re different by calling themselves a Staples or Office Depot.

We’re all competing to look like the same piece of paper that you can get quite anywhere.

I have a completely chaotic past and wild stories. History books will know me as the one who loyally loved JUUL Virginia Tobacco pods. I criticized myself so harshly over the years because I could never get it right. I wasn’t as crisp like FedEx paper or sharp as Office Depot supplies.

I think for awhile I just tried so hard to pull off peppy Cher or bend-and-snap Elle. But I was forcing myself into places where I don’t belong trying to fit in when it’s clearly not meant to be.

But truthfully if there’s any Cher that accurately portrays me it’s the Cher who drives on sidewalks and runs stop signs.

I’m more like Daphne who also has the assurance of Fred, intelligence of Velma, silliness of Shaggy & Scooby. You can’t make this up, I am certain this is probably in the DSM-5.

You can have all of these amazing & wonderful qualities but the generalized other will always reduce you to just a Daphne and completely disregard all the other parts of you.

It has always FLOORED me how people judge you based off of 1 season in your life where you made a bunch of mistakes that definitely look like Dionne driving on the freeway.

It’s as if that’s all you’ll ever be for the rest of your life — my indicator is doing a bunch of coke on the koala care changing station in diners that lowkey looked like the set of Breaking Bad. Or defining myself to just some young & dumb early twenties kid who thought it was somewhat a good idea at the time to take a spin class wearing only lingerie. Or the previous version of me who was surely convinced snorting excederin and drinking a Tequila Sunrise is so Pinterest cute.

There’s this unspoken word nobody will ever admit. We assign eternal sentences based off a temporary chapter. The pride of life is what permits this sentence to be unshakeable & unchangeable. In the eyes of some — who I was in a certain period is who I will be until infinity. You will always be measured by one interaction. One moment. That’s all you’ll ever be. You’re not allowed room for growth. I just never felt good enough.

But I have been perceiving myself through the lens of a superiority complex. I automatically assumed that I was responsible for your projection. It’s a lot of weight to carry shame that was never mine and didn’t even belong to me in the first place.

I carried on shame from the Jonahs & Warner Huntingtons of the world. The Vivian Kensingtons who swear they’re above you. I became small trying to measure up to a construct. I hated how different I am. A denial of self led to feeling lost & vapid. The norm robbed me of the opportunity to hold space for my youth and have an enduring compassion to times when I truly just needed to be seen & heard.

I wasn’t comfortable in my own skin because I constantly failed living up to societal standards. Standards that are completely bullshit because everyone is only qualified to offer opinions that are flux. Opinions that are unreliable. Opinions that change as soon as there’s a new TikTok trend.

I have found that people see the worst in me because they see the worst in themselves.

When you’re talking shit about me you’re talking shit about the person inside of you.

I am a mirror.

[andersonpress]

#DEEPTHOTS: I don't feel like myself, what now?

Originally written Sept 30, 2019

It always takes me forever to realize I have fallen out of my routine. Running every morning turns into waking up late for class; getting caught up with work turns into constantly trying to make the 11:59 deadline; and minimizing social media use turns into endlessly scrolling for hours. The days start to blur together, and I start to go into automation mode: wake up, do work, go to sleep. I also usually develop chronic headaches. I only get headaches when I think too hard, too long, and too much about something. When I have a thought that I just can't stop thinking even when I think my brain can't think anymore. Y'all know the ones. The ones you think when you stare off to a wall, or while you are in class, or when you look at your bank account (lmao). These thoughts put me in a mental space where I feel equally unprepared and overwhelmed by the world. Time becomes short, and my temper follows suit. My diet goes out the window, and now I'm bloated. And I've skipped all of my homework so you know I'm behind on work. But then I saw my plant.

Feeling overwhelmed, anxious, nervous, sad, upset, or mad at yourself and at your life is normal and you need to recognize those emotions first in order to utilize a break period to its fullest "glow-up" potential! Breaks should have purpose, leave you feeling more secure with your emotions, and should re-energize you! If you feel shame towards the idea of needing a break, asking for help, or recognizing you need a change in life understand that help is never a bad thing. We have to help ourselves first, before we can help anyone else. You deserve to feel good about yourself! So if you are feeling odd, or in need of change; read these steps to having you one step closer to feeling like yourself again.

1) Breaks are necessary, so take them. Period.

Life is hard, as fuck! This living shit is really for the birds. Who made this shit up? Seriously? Straight people parades, Popeyes chicken sandwich frenzies, and Kodak Black is still walking the streets. Whew chile, the ghetto. A variety of factors about your environment can build into why you might be feeling off, too. Have you recently moved, maybe just got some bad news, or ended a relationship with someone and you thought you were over it? Maybe you dropped your food outside, or got a parking ticket? Maybe you moved to a place that's super cold and cold weather makes you sad? Maybe the lights in your house are harsh, and too bright? Whatever it is, you need to take a minute in order to figure it out. Log off, put the phone on DND, and go for a walk with just your favorite playlist and your thoughts. Get one with yourself man.

2) Remind yourself of your purpose/goals.

3) Be honest to yourself when you start to feel "off."

This part is very difficult and you mustn't judge yourself or others on reaching this point. I go through stages of complicitness to my own toxic behavior. Sometimes, it lasts months and sometimes a few minutes. Depression and sadness and getting stuck in a cycle is real. It happens to us so often and we always try to avoid it. It is imperative that we start to recognize our feelings and being honest about having to deal with them. I would recommend getting a therapist or a counselor if you are privileged with insurance or funds, if not, I recommend following other bloggers and creators who deal with conversations around depression and anxiety. As a Black woman, I love watching other Black women youtubers who discuss feeling exhausted and depressed. Alyssa Forever is a youtuber who is pretty open with her struggle with depression and ways that she combats it in her career! We stan!

So if you need a break from life, take it! I encourage you to! Society has conditioned us to think that we don't deserve to take breaks, that young people shouldn't need breaks, and that being open about mental illness is taboo. Don't allow society to dictate your view of yourself! If you feel exhausted, if you think a break would help you; do it, PERIOD. "If you can't love yourself, how in the hell you gon love anybody else?" Shout out to Mother Ru.

After following all of these steps I am back like I never left. Like mother, like daughter. Thankfully, after a day outside, Molly is back to her old self: bountiful, full, and gorgeous and so am I.

Please subscribe to my website and follow me on instagram: @taywaits

[avacash]

“You can be anything”

“It is literally impossible to be a woman. You are so beautiful and so smart, and it kills me that you don't think you're good enough. Like, we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow we're always doing it wrong” (Gerwig). We all know Barbie dolls and their famous slogan, “You can be anything”. However, it looks like the one thing we can not do is have a body type any different from Barbie’s infamous unrealistic body. Growing up, I was always playing with my Barbie dolls. At my earliest of ages playing with them, I never thought twice about their body types. Yet, when I got older I realized no one could ever naturally look like the doll.  However, we cannot completely blame Barbie dolls for this thought. We need to look back at our society. To answer our question, “How has the “stereotypical” Barbie doll set expectations for how women think their bodies should look?”, Barbie dolls have made girls at a young age further develop thoughts that they need to be skinny so they can look like Barbie because that is the doll they look up to. We live in a world where women are constantly being judged no matter what. Barbies should have never been made to be as skinny as they are. It is unrealistic and dehumanizing. We can all agree that it is very hard to be a woman in our world. We do not need people saying we need to look like Barbie. Women should be able to be anything they want to be and that also means women should also feel comfortable in their body and skin. No female should ever feel like they or their body is not good enough.

[saludmariafatima]

WOMEN OF WONDERS: An In-depth Understanding on Feminism.

Feminism is a social and political movement that advocates for the rights of women on the grounds of equality of sexes. It does not deny the biological differences between the sexes but demands equality in opportunities. It covers everything from social and political to economic arenas. In fact, feminist campaigns have been a crucial part of history in women empowerment. The feminist campaigns of the twentieth century made the right to vote, public property, work and education possible. Thus, an essay on feminism will discuss its importance and impact.

Importance of Feminism

Feminism is not just important for women but for every sex, gender, caste, creed and more. It empowers the people and society as a whole. A very common misconception is that only women can be feminists.

It is absolutely wrong but feminism does not just benefit women. It strives for equality of the sexes, not the superiority of women. Feminism takes the gender roles which have been around for many years and tries to deconstruct them.

This allows people to live freely and empower lives without getting tied down by traditional restrictions. In other words, it benefits women as well as men. For instance, while it advocates that women must be free to earn it also advocates that why should men be the sole breadwinner of the family? It tries to give freedom to all.

Most importantly, it is essential for young people to get involved in the feminist movement. This way, we can achieve faster results. It is no less than a dream to live in a world full of equality.

Thus, we must all look at our own cultures and communities for making this dream a reality. We have not yet reached the result but we are on the journey, so we must continue on this mission to achieve successful results.

Impact of Feminism

Feminism has had a life-changing impact on everyone, especially women. If we look at history, we see that it is what gave women the right to vote. It was no small feat but was achieved successfully by women.

Further, if we look at modern feminism, we see how feminism involves in life-altering campaigns. For instance, campaigns that support the abortion of unwanted pregnancy and reproductive rights allow women to have freedom of choice.

Moreover, feminism constantly questions patriarchy and strives to renounce gender roles. It allows men to be whoever they wish to be without getting judged. It is not taboo for men to cry anymore because they must be allowed to express themselves freely.

Similarly, it also helps the LGBTQ community greatly as it advocates for their right too. Feminism gives a place for everyone and it is best to practice intersectional feminism to understand everyone’s struggle.

Conclusion of the Essay on Feminism

The key message of feminism must be to highlight the choice in bringing personal meaning to feminism. It is to recognize other’s right for doing the same thing. The sad part is that despite feminism being a strong movement, there are still parts of the world where inequality and exploitation of women take places. Thus, we must all try to practice intersectional feminism.

FAQ of Essay on Feminism

What are feminist beliefs?

Feminist beliefs are the desire for equality between the sexes. It is the belief that men and women must have equal rights and opportunities. Thus, it covers everything from social and political to economic equality.

What started feminism?

 The first wave of feminism occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It emerged out of an environment of urban industrialism and liberal, socialist politics. This wave aimed to open up new doors for women with a focus on suffrage.

[willowdove]

“In the context of family and relationships” yeah, what they hell else do you think I’m talking about? Do you think being a woman prevented me from being shamed for being “lazy” and “not living up to my potential” my whole goddamn life? You think my parents didn’t constantly hound me to do more extracurriculars while I was at school, to pick up more chores at home, to look harder for a job when I graduated? You think doctors took me seriously at my word that I was depressed because I couldn’t do the things I loved, and not lacking interest in the things I loved because I was depressed? I never lost interest in singing or drawing or writing- I just no longer had the energy to do it. One of my doctors wrote “anoerexic” on my file where I happened to see, despite never once talking to me about about my relationship with food. He just saw an underweight woman and assumed I had an eating disorder, rather than the fucking chronic IBS making me lose all the calories I was trying to consume. And because the doctors didn’t believe me, neither did my family.

My experience is not somehow an outlier. Don’t downplay the struggles of women to prop up the valid struggles of men. Yes, men do get judged for their chronic disabilities and that sucks. But guess what? We live in a fucking ableist society. We’re all judged!

We can discuss how gender and race play into the layers of the ableism- like, I’ve never really been expected to be the breadwinner for a home. But I damn sure was expected to be the homemaker when I was out of work. That said, I’m not sure you’re ready to have that discussion in good faith (on the basis of your other comments in the reblogs.)

Something that's stuck in my mind is how much "bad man" behavior is chronic illness type stuff that would be coddled and forgiven in a woman.

Shit like, "doesn't pull their weight on household tasks, constantly sleeping, or saying they're too tired to do anything but is playing videogames/watching TV/chatting with friends."

Shit like, "is unemployed/underemployed and either refused to get a (full-time/in their industry rather than low effort low pay) job while insisting they just can't work 40 hours or insisting on work conditions so specific that they're functionally unemployable."

[pagesofkenna]

I'm often struck by comments made in Maintenance Phase (the a wellness debunking podcast) but I was listening to an episode this week and was struck by this section and I don't have an audio editing program currently so I typed it all up

(M=Michael, A=Aubrey, from the episode "'French Women Don't Get Fat'" where they discuss that book. CW, this is a book that basically prescribes an eating disorder)

M – -But then, I mean—in between the lines, what you’re getting is, this is a woman who can basically sit down in a weekend and write 140 pages about food, and wine, and the places she likes to eat, and the farmer’s—the specific farmer’s markets in [Paris, France] that she likes going to. But then all of her actual advice is this way to, like, deny herself pleasure. It seems that she spent her life constantly thinking about this!

A – Yeah, in some ways I do wonder about this whole diet book being, like, a letter to her dad.

M – Oh?

A – “I did it! Look how much I did it! I did it so much!” Do you know what I mean? Like, that stuff stays with people, those experiences of body policing, and unwanted comments, and, like, judgements.

M – Yeah.

A – I often wonder this when I’m reading diet books, is like ‘how much of this is you continuing to differentiate yourself from either fat people (which is, like, all of them are that), and/or some past bad experience of feeling like someone else was judging your body, to be like, “No I did it the most! I’m the best at being thin, I’m the best at avoiding these judgements, and you can’t get me now, because I did it perfectly,” right?

M – Right!

A – I have a lot of compassion for it, and that unleashes a whole new wave of garbage people doing garbage things, right?

M – What I was really struck by, reading this, was how, like, how desperate people are for this stuff, that somebody can basically spend decades of their life denying themselves one of their primary pleasures, just so that they can stay thin. That’s how much of a hold this stuff has on our society, that like an individual would do this, and would effectively just live with deprivation.

A – Yeah.

M – She talks about, you have to make yogurt the night before, she makes sure to drink a huge glass of water 30 minutes before she eats every time, she goes for a walk before breakfast, she lives on the fifteenth floor of some building in New York and she often takes the stairs up. She talks about making her own copies so that she has an excuse to get up and walk around during the day. She’s thought about this every single day for her whole life, and she’s essentially prescribing this as, like, “This is, this is what you should do!”

A – Yeah, “This is how you should live your life!”

M – Right! Once you really get down to it, it’s just, this is a calorie restriction diet that you’re on for the rest of your life.

A – Right. She’s not counting calories, but it is very intensely about restricting calories by restricting high-calorie foods and by restricting kind of all foods! Just eat that leek water!

M – Right! And staying thin should almost become like a part-time job that you have, right? Like it’s this thing that occupies so much of your time. She says that you should only eat out on special occasions, you should always eat in—I mean, I, I could list fifty more of these! It’s just, like, the ways that she has adjusted her life, to remain thin.

A – If you’re not eating out and you’re only eating in, like, eating out is often a social activity. That may also mean, for her, that she’s restricting her social opportunities, or that that’s what she’s recommending to other people, or that that’s how other people are taking it. Right? It’s like, you can’t be around other people when food is present, which is many of the times that we gather together as humans, there is food present! This is calling for not just a reorganization of the foods that you eat but a reorganization of your life and your connections to other people, and it just… is so bizarre to market this level of restriction, and judgement, and everything else, as, like, “Easy breezy! You’re gonna love the food! It’s all the leek water you can eat!”

[sebdoesthings]

It's unfair how you're trying to ban Vernonciri just because it's Ciri's ship with a "strange old man". although Vernon is not much older than Ves. According to this logic, Vesiri, Roche/Geralt and Regis/Geralt are also pedophilia, which you so vehemently oppose, but for some reason, only VernonCiri gets dirt for the age difference. Stop trying to throw mud at my ship and constantly provoke me with it.

Girlie, this is the first of four asks you've sent me in a row. Chill out.

Also I never called your ship pedophilia, but clearly you seem to associate it with that, so that says more about you than it does me.

Roche is at least 45 judging by his design. There is no age implication for Ves, but if we go by design again she looks to be around Ciri's age, maybe a few years older. Ciri is around 20 or 21 years old in tw3, since "A Question of Price" takes place in 1251, so Pavetta would've given birth in 1252 most likely.

A 20 year old, even though an adult, is in a completely different stage of life than a 45 year old. They worry about different things. They have different priorities. They have different levels of experience with how the world works. The way society is structured means that older people inherently have power over younger ones by virtue of having that extra experience and knowledge. So no, your ship is not pedophilia. But it's still creepy, and the age gap makes for a serious power imbalance.

The difference between VernonCiri, Geregis and Geroche is that one of those ship involves a very young character. Geralt and Roche, who in the latter two ships are the younger ones involved, are still middle aged or older adults. They are settled into adulthood and have done their part of learning the ways of the world, society, and life as a whole. They are not going to be easily swayed by power imbalances, because power imbalances are harder to come by the older characters are.

And no, none of these ships are pedophilia. They never were and never will be, and I never claimed that either. That quote you took from my bio is not, in fact, - as flattering to you as that may be - directed at you specifically, and I actually wrote that bio before i even knew you existed. It indicates that i do not condone shipping adult characters with minors (that's characters under 18, in case you needed a refresher), such as Pavetta and "Duny" (14/15 and over 30 respectively) or Book!Ciri (who is give or take also 14 or 15 at the time) with members of the Aen Elle like Avallac'h, Eredin or Auberon. They are several hundred, if not thousand years old, and she is a literal child. THAT is pedophilia. And THAT I oppose.

I don't care if pedophilia or age gaps are normal in the middle ages because I live in 2023, not the middle ages. I have 21st century morals, ethics and beliefs, and things that go against those will naturally rub me the wrong way. I am allowed to not want to engage with those things. I do not go out of my way to harass people who don't, either.

And yes, age gaps exist today too, but if you take one look at how people ridicule Leonardo DiCaprio for not dating women over 25 when he himself is 48, you'll see that I am not alone in finding these large age gaps weird.

I am not provoking you. I am not posting in your tag, I am not tagging you in posts about ships you don't like. You choose to seek these things out yourself. I am not throwing dirt at your ship. I simply don't like it. I don't like Geralt/Yen or Geralt/Jaskier either, but strangely enough no yenralt or geraskier shipper has ever appeared in my inbox complaining about it. Me not creating content for your ship is not "throwing dirt". I am allowed to dislike a ship for whatever reason, and it is not your business to try and convince me otherwise. I like Vesiri because i think they're cute. This has no influence on your ship. They exist independently from each other.

i don't care about your ship enough to try and ban it, and i don't know where you got the notion from that I was trying to do so. I don't care about your ship, I don't care about you, and it's frankly insulting how important you think yourself to believe that everything I do is to spite you, and not simply because I enjoy something independently of you.

Me and my friends are just trying to make content for a ship we like, and you're the one who constantly tries to interject your own ship in its stead. The two can coexist, I promise. Now please stop stalking the tag of a ship you clearly don't like and stop harassing people in DMs and asks. It's not doing you or your ship any favours.

[penig]

The thing about Dan/Bess is - it's not real, because (at the time Jo calls him off) it cannot be made equal. It can only ever be courtly love, pure and chaste from afar, which is a disastrous foundation for both the companionate marriage that is the Alcottian ideal and every single alternative style of marriage available to them in the society in which they lived.

My copy of Jo's Boys is currently inaccessible, so I can't cite you chapter and verse, but I'll do my best to break it down for you anyway.

In the beginning, Dan is a "bad boy" come to Plumfield, where the Bhaers undertake the responsibility of helping him make himself over into a useful and happy member of society. Unlike the vast majority of people in his life, they recognize his virtues and regard his faults - chiefly moodiness and volatility - as capable of control and amendment, and recognize that they can give him the tools to control and amend himself, but they cannot, themselves, control and amend them.

Jo in particular has similar faults, in the form of the temper and nursing of grudges that she faced up to and learned to deal with in Little Women, in the chapter "Jo Meets Apollyon." She is the one who is most capable of understanding Dan, even though they start from wildly disparate places in other ways - Jo growing up in a loving and supportive household, and being female, as opposed to Dan's unloving, unsupportive masculine background, with no positive role models except a single unconventional teacher-figure (one of Alcott's many Thoreau avatars). Dan has many good impulses and qualities - we know this for a fact, because he was brought in during Little Men as the friend of gentle, artistic Nat - but his experiences have hitherto tended to draw out and reinforce his bad ones.

Bess, in contrast, is the pampered good girl daughter of Amy and Laurie, beautiful and innocent and with very little to trouble or vex her. In Little Men she appears as a small child, much younger than the students of Plumfield. No doubt she has her trials and faults and struggles, like everyone else, but they aren't touched on in either book and they would be of a kind nearly incomprehensible to Dan, as his trials and struggles would be nearly incomprehensible to her.

Even with the age gap (I may be wrong about how big the gap is; my impression is that it must be almost ten years but as I said I can't check right now) this is a classic romance-trope setup and a fertile ground for mutual crushes and idealization, which is harmless enough in properly supervised teenagers. In the practical reality that most concerned Alcott, and which should concern anyone thinking of marrying, it is a disaster waiting to happen if it progresses, unless it progresses just right.

Neither of them, in the beginning, is quite real to each other. How could they be? Becoming real people to each other would require a prolonged period of getting to know each other, destroying the pedestals, and learning to see each other without the rose-colored glasses on. They'd have to have fights and break ups and make ups and all that hard stuff without which a marriage is built on sand, and which, in canon, they never get.

Even at the end of that process - they still wouldn't be equal in many important respects. We can sneer at the way Victorians arranged their domestic lives all we want - and Alcott will help us do so on many points - but in a world in which men are supposed to be the providers, it is psychologically very difficult for a poor man to marry a rich woman if he has any pride at all, and Dan's chock-full of easily-wounded poor man pride. He would feel himself to be her inferior because he couldn't maintain her in comfort without relying on her money (which, remember, by law would no longer be her money but which he would constantly be aware he had not earned and didn't deserve), and society at large would agree with him. He'd be constantly aware of people looking at them and judging him as a golddigger and a sponger on his wife's family, even if they weren't doing it, and he would, in his heart, agree with that judgement.

Let us assume that Bess has absorbed all the lessons her extended family has to teach her about what is truly valuable in life and what money is for, and also knows how to keep a comfortable, frugal house and all that. She will also be aware that society judges him even though she doesn't, and she will have to cope with his concurrence in that judgement (which sets aside her judgement on a crucial factor in their marriage, which trust me is a burr under the saddleblanket of life), and that is nearly impossible.

Meanwhile, Bass would be feeling her inferiority to Dan: her legal inferiority as a woman, her inferiority in age, and her inferiority in experience. There are so many things he knows by direct experience about the world outside of Parnassus that she can only know by report. She might push herself to gain a broader experience by taking unwise risks, or undertaking work she isn't actually up to; or she might accept his tempers or his unwise attempts to protect her in inappropriate ways instead of challenging them because he must know better, and the marriage could start spiraling into an increasingly unequal, miserable existence. It takes a lot of self-knowledge and hard emotional work to get out of a negative reinforcement loop like that.

Now, all of this - in the beginning - could be overcome. Overcoming these problems was undoubtedly one motivation for Dan to go West to begin with, to "make something of himself," to be "worthy" of her. If he had come back in a more secure financial position and with scientific credit, and if she had spent the years while he was doing that undertaking work of her own, and they had both matured and met in the middle - it's conceivable. Or they could have matured to the point that they realized that, like Jo and Laurie, they really wouldn't work; and they could have met people they could marry happily, and been all friends together.

But instead Dan kills a man, unintentionally, in a fit of temper.

He didn't intend to. He regrets it bitterly. He will atone if he can. He goes to prison and he knuckles down and does his time. But this is not something you leave behind you. This is something that lives in your shadow for the rest of your life. If you kill another human being, you will always be a killer, every single day, regardless of what else you do. You will look in the mirror every morning knowing that about yourself. You can do nothing but good for the rest of your life, and that will at most make you a killer who now does good deeds. It's like losing a limb - you can find accommodations, but the leg's not growing back. That's what "sin-stained" means. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten that little hand. If nobody else blames Dan - Dan blames Dan, and quite right too.

And the society that would sneer at him for living on his wife's money would be absolutely ruthless about his having gone to prison for a violent crime. It's called "paying your debt to society," but the number of people who will actually wash that slate clean is vanishingly small. Good luck with getting an income that can support a wife even modestly with that prison record.

If Dan and Bess had an understanding before that happened, he would have to release her from it, which would afford her the opportunity to insist on it and stand by him - but she couldn't do it with any comprehension of what it would actually mean in real life, and the odds that they could be happy with these difficulties standing in their way are not good.

In the absence of an understanding - he has no business asking her to join him in groping his way forward. None whatever. If he has any shred of claim to think of himself as an honorable man in spite of it all, he can't do it.

Now, remember what happened in "Jo Meets Apollyon?" Jo almost killed her little sister. In the text it's dealt with and left behind in a single chapter; but don't tell me Jo didn't wake up with nightmares about it periodically for the rest of her life. She escaped being a killer of very nearly the same type as Dan by a hair and the grace of Laurie's prompt action. She's thought about this. She's the only one who has an inkling of what Dan's interior life is like anymore.

Just as Jo was right to refuse Laurie, she was right to advise Dan in this way, and Dan understands that in a faint glimmering way now, and will understand it better as he hoes his way down his hard, hard row and matures into somebody who, maybe, someday, will meet someone who can meet him where he lives and build a marriage with him.

But it's damned unlikely to be Bess.

Curious--does anyone in the Little Women fandom have any thoughts about Bess/Dan? It's been very long since I've read Jo's Boys (which, honestly, I liked least of Alcott's work) but Dan being in love with Bess was a plot point that stuck out for me.

I feel like they would have made a pretty interesting pair. There are 3 reasons they didn't end up together if I remember correctly, which were: 1) Dan had killed a man (in self-defense + defense of another person I think?) and he is still laden with guilt + Jo herself thinks of him as 'sin-stained' 2) Jo thinks Amy would not approve of the match and low-key warns her to distance her daughter for a while 3) Jo thinks that Bess is too cool and maidenly(?) something along those lines to return the affection.

#2' definitely true, and I can see why Jo warns Amy away (it's completely reasonable even if there's part of me that dislikes her for it--if her parents were okay with letting her marry a poor professor twice her age and with dependents, why can't she and Amy entertain Bess being with one of Jo's best students?). But #3 really is an outright assumption, and we don't have enough of Bess to confirm what she would have felt either way, I think. There really might have been a chance--they both appreciate beauty and admire the goodness in each other in different ways.

And #1 is just an interesting conflict. Dan is sorry. I think he even confesses to a priest. It reflects on him that the death weighs so heavily. But I don't like that Alcott keeps him like that, potentially forever (I suppose this is a separate though related thought from his relationship from Bess). He doesn't find peace and that makes me so sad. And again, I was very much bothered by Jo calling him in her head sin-stained when he is clearly trying to atone. It felt strange of her character.

Dan/Bess would've been interesting, both character-wise (I think Dan would have appreciated Bess' gentle nature and enlivened it, and Bess could've made Dan softer and directed his protective instincts) and thematically (of course you can be forgiven--true goodness can see your sin, embrace you in the midst of it, and accompany you to your salvation).

Buuut that's just me. Curious if anyone has any thoughts on this.

[coldmorte]

Hey! I really really like your blog and all the Dutch content, and I read your posts on Molly and Dutch and I just felt like sharing my thoughts :) If you don’t feel like it, just ignore this

I like Molly, even though I agree that she’s very much a snob and very paranoid at times.

It’s always felt very clear to me that Molly really, truly loves Dutch. And love makes you do stupid, desperate things (just look at Arthur).

Molly’s interaction with Abigail is about Dutch’s love for Molly, not the other way around. It’s Abigail saying that Dutch doesn’t love her and Molly lashing out (probably to protect herself from the truth).

This is brought up again in An Honest Mistake, when she talks to Arthur about Dutch, questioning how Dutch seems to him. When Molly says, “I really love him, you know,” Arthur averts his eyes and doesn’t look at her. I’ve always seen this as Arthur knowing Dutch doesn’t love her in the way Molly wants him to, if he loves her at all.

I’ve always seen Dutch as being kind of ahead of his time when it comes to certain progressive ideas (especially as it pertains to race), but when it comes to women, he’s very much a product of his his time. The way he talks about them and to/at them, whether it’s Molly or Abigail or Mary-Beth or Sadie, is often either dismissive or condescending.

While he doesn’t outright say it, the way he acts around the women at camp has always left me feeling like he prefers women (at least the ones he takes an actual interest in) to fit into the roles society has carved out for them; they have to be beautiful and docile and romantic-minded for him to take an interest.

You’ve said yourself, that Dutch deals with a lot of self doubt and that stems from wanting to be seen as a great and powerful man, who the people in camp can look up to, and women (especially young women) were (and to some degree stil is) seen as symbols of status. Molly is a beautiful woman from a wealthy family; she could have anyone she wanted, and she chose Dutch and ran away with him, leaving her old life behind – that’s the ultimate powermove on Dutch’s part.

I’ve always thought of Dutch as a romantic, the way he talks about love and how it’s the one thing worth living for, and I believe that he may have at some point actually loved Molly or at least convinced himself that he did, but the second he grows tired of her and realises that he doesn’t actually love her, he’s moving on to another, younger woman.

His inner romantic and his ego and need to be perceived as powerful are at odds with each other, and as the game progresses we see how his romantic and kind side wilt under the weight and pressure of his responsibilities as a leader and his need to be perceived as powerful and a great leader.

Those are my thoughts at least :)

Hello!

Thank you for the ask and the kind words! That really does mean a lot!! 💜💜💜

I am very grateful for your message, and no!!!! I don’t want to ignore it!! That wouldn’t be very fair of me, as I feel like you bring up some good points to discuss. Also, I appreciate the respect in your message and for taking the time to write so much out! I’d be happy to give you some of my time in return 🥰

(Warning: SPOILERS below)

I’m going to take your points one at a time here. So, starting with liking Molly, it’s totally fine! I don’t want to be too negative on my blog, and I don’t want people to feel like they have to think the same way I do. That wouldn’t be any fun, so it does make me happy that you can enjoy her character. I don’t want to take that away from you!! By all means, love her to your heart's content!!! ❤️

Furthermore, though I don’t personally like Molly, I don’t think she was a truly bad person. Just like every other character in the game, she had flaws and made mistakes. I primarily wish I could have gotten to know her better because she was presented during a very dark time in her life. I feel like this affected my perception of her, and I might have seen her differently, if I had gotten the chance to interact more with her character (especially outside of the RDR2 timeframe). Everybody deserves not only to love somebody, but everybody also deserves to have faith that the person they love can truthfully say the same back to them. I felt bad that Molly died such an unhappy, loveless death.

About the love Molly had for Dutch, I agree that she loved him. My point in bringing up infatuation was to primarily highlight the reason and the degree to which she honestly loved him. Did Molly love Dutch for the man he was, or for the idea of the man he was? Maybe, it was a mix? I am not sure there is enough information to give a conclusive answer to this (as I somewhat mentioned before).

To be fair, the same thing could (and should) be asked of Dutch. Did he truly love her, or did he just love the idea of having her at his side? Again, it would be fascinating to see the early part of their relationship. It would answer a LOT of questions. You mention that Dutch arguably saw Molly as a symbol of status, and I agree that it was very plausible. I think, to some degree, both Molly and Dutch saw each other as being favorable for what they represented, unfortunately.

In regard to the interaction between Molly and Abigail, I realize my response was unclear about this (that’s my bad). I'll try to write it better here, but this is really complicated to put into words! I'll do my best!!

What I said was that Molly got angry at people she “perceived” as challenging her love (this was subjective to her POV and not necessarily reflective of true reality). My original answer was not objective (nor was it meant to be - I was trying to write this part from her POV), and there are a few layers I want to analyze here. First of all, from an objective perspective, you are correct. The conversation between them was ultimately about Dutch not loving Molly the way she wanted to be loved. However, the first thing Molly did was state to Abigail that she loved Dutch. If she didn’t see this point as being in question, why did she feel the need to immediately justify it before saying anything else? To me, it seemed like she needed to actively prove that she loved him to others.

This was also seen with Karen and Arthur. The conversations with Karen were confusing because they didn’t have much context, but perhaps, that was the point - to show the extent of Molly’s paranoia (in other words, that there was no context and that she was imagining Karen to be against her out of insecurity). Molly continually complained that Karen said bad things about her, and she insisted that she not only loved Dutch, but that he loved her as well. Then, as you mention, Molly emphasized to Arthur that SHE loved Dutch (it was not directly about his love for her). Again, by constantly having to profess her feelings, it was as if she thought people were doubting her on some level.

But here is where the contradiction comes in - I believe that Molly was smart enough to know that this doubting wasn't entirely genuine. She knew it was never really her love that she should have been concerned about. Although, by focusing on herself, it was a way to deflect from her insecurity regarding Dutch and the fact that she knew, deep down, he didn’t truly love her (at least, not anymore). That’s why she got so upset when Abigail, for instance, brought this point up. As soon as the conversation shifted from Molly’s love to Dutch’s love, she lashed out and stormed away.

So, to try to summarize this all up, what I am trying to say is that Molly “perceived” challenges to her own state of emotions as a means of shifting away from her concerns about Dutch’s feelings. She knew her "perceptions" were really more like lies to herself. Molly wanted the conversation with Abigail to seem like it was about her because she felt she was more in control of that and could handle it better. From a neutral perspective, the conversation was definitely not about Molly - it was entirely about Dutch, which Molly knew (she just didn’t like Abigail directly pointing it). I hope my response makes more sense? Sorry, if I am still being confusing!

Now, as for Dutch and his progressive ideas, I think a lot of them were formed in his youth. Little information was given about his childhood, but he did seem pretty sensitive about the fact that he grew up fatherless. His dad died in the Civil War (a conflict primarily centered around the issue of slavery and states’ attitudes towards it), while fighting on the side of the Union. One reason Dutch was probably so progressive in regard to race was because of his anger over losing a parent to racially-motivated violence. Racism seemed like a waste of time and life, so he was bitter towards people who still harbored racist sentiments. He knew firsthand how destructive they could be.

Minimal insight was provided into Dutch’s relationship with his mother, other than the fact that it was quite strained and unhappy. He left home at a young age and essentially disowned her. He obviously didn’t keep in touch with her, judging that he didn’t even know she died until years after the fact. Could this have affected his attitude later in life (towards women)?

I suppose it’s possible. Maybe, Dutch would have looked better on women, had he been closer with his mother. I consider his attitude towards women as pretty average for the era. It’s not entirely fair to compare him to Arthur, who was very progressive for the time and definitely above normal standards. As you say, I think Dutch was a product of his time. In RDR2, he didn’t come across as physically abusive, nor did he overtly sexualize women. However, he did seem to expect women to act in a subordinate manner. It's not great (and I certainly do not agree with his attitude), but again, the contemporary standards in regard to gender roles did not exist in 1899.

Lastly, I COMPLETELY agree about Dutch being VERY romantic, sentimental, and idealistic. This wasn’t just limited to interpersonal relationships either - it also fit his entire perspective of America and the values he held dear. Just take a look at some of his quotes:

“The promise of this great nation - men created equal, liberal and justice for all - that might be nonsense, but it’s worth trying for. It’s worth believing in.”

And:

“If we keep on seeking, we will find freedom.”

In the beginning, he had such high hopes and strong faith that he could find a way to live free from social and legislative demands. Compare that to the end, where he started to say things like:

“You can’t fight nature. You can’t fight change.”

And:

“There ain’t no freedom for no one in this country no more.”

Dutch wanted to believe that there was a chance to live free from the threat of control, but as he started to lose people he loved and got closer to losing his own battle, he started to take on a much more cynical tone. He began to realize that his romantic notions and idealistic visions of life were not always obtainable - no matter how hard he tried to reach them - and it broke him. This change in his life outlook was kind of similar to his interpersonal relationships. When he realized they were a lot of work and not always happy/perfect, he seemed to grow frustrated. Love requires a lot of patience and energy. Despite full effort, love still does not always succeed.

Also, I just want to add that I think Dutch knew he had a problem with his pride, but he tried his best to maintain his tough, confident persona because he didn’t want to be perceived as weak. He definitely realized he messed up in putting his pride first in the end, but at that point, it was too late. Whatever was left of his idealistic aspirations in life died with Arthur up on that cliff.

Anyhow, I’ve said more than enough. I’d like to once again thank you for the ask!! I hope my response was worth the time to read and that it makes sense. Feel free to share any more thoughts you may have!!!

~ Faith 💜

[dickstailcoat]

So, I’m finally near the end again of SNS 1 (who needs sleep anyways) and I already have thoughts when comparing it to later stories he has written, be it in the SNS series or entirely new ones. I’ll provide a more thorough in-depth analysis once my notes are organized and I don’t have to deal with my day-job, but here’s a huge observation that I already see in book 1:

Rob is way in over his head.

From the get-go, we see a feminist character who is not as inclusive as many readers would like to think or feel. Repeatedly, she body shames herself, as if this is all women think about when considering their appearances, and judges other women for their ideals. She defies expectations of women, yet bows down to a man, ignoring that strong pillar of her personality. She preaches inclusivity yet shuns other women in the story who are bound by society and literally have no choice. There is something strange about her, as if she is a hero, but not one who knows the depths of the problems she faces, or the consequences of what her actions might bring.

In layman’s terms: throughout the story, there is just something off.

Eventually, the plot dwindles into some far-off abyss (let’s be honest, since book 2, the plot has gone south), and we get a more and more superficial character who appears to be all over the place in her ideals and morale, and less and less a strong woman. As a consequence, we see that core pillar of her personality, being a feminist, disappear.

This is when as the reader, if you take a critical eye to it, you realize what that ‘something’ is. She reminds you of your brother, father, uncle, grandfather, boyfriend, husband, and male friend. She knows the issues exist, she sees them, she can critically assess them, she even constantly makes light of them, but she doesn’t truly experience them fully as all women do.

Now, I’m a clown myself who often tries to make light of situations; however, I know even I will break sometimes because being a woman sometimes really sucks. I know Lilly hasn’t experienced sexual assault like many have, but she has experienced restrictions and worry over what will happen to her if she doesn’t conform to the expectations. I’m living in an very open society, and I still feel anxious, nervous, and upset over that. I still sometimes feel sad because there will always be a man saying I can’t. This happens to her too – repeatedly – and she barely bats an eye. But, she is a female character, so why doesn’t she?

The reason for this is simple: Rob is a man, and can never fully comprehend the true worries, fears, and issues women faced now, let alone then when they were much more severe.

As you read on, you begin to wonder as a reader: whose voice is this? Is it the author’s or Lilly’s? It is normal for an author to put a little bit of themselves in a character, sometimes even more so! But there is a problem when it is a man doing it to a female character. We start to see the mix of ideals and experiences; we start to see the boundary where a male writer cannot grasp what women go through on a day-to-day basis.

That would be fine initially, perhaps, for any new author. Why should we limit artistic expression? But it starts to blur into the reader’s perspective as to whether Rob himself feels this way. Because in this story, it is one single ‘joke’, and is never dealt with - not once - properly. We don’t know for an absolute fact if he himself feels this way, he’s never made it clear! But it starts to look worse and worse as the stories go on and women are less and less powerful except when they are needed to bring the reader back in from the lost plot, as if to say “Hey look! I do care sometimes!”

The result is an author writing about inclusivity, but instead, it comes across as discriminative. We have a single flat tone, as if someone is pressing a C note throughout the story, and never progressing. I don’t know about you guys, but if Taylor Swift played one single note for her entire career, none of us would be listening. It stays there the entire time, a ruler-straighter tonality of constant comedy, turning and warping the inclusivity into cheap plot devices, and mental walls for the readers that he has to shakily try to break every so often.

With that in mind, after a few books the author’s ‘colours’ start to show if this continues.

I started this series way back in the age of the dinosaurs, and adored it. I still do! I have nothing against the stories themselves or characters, I love me a good Victorian romance, but my goodness – the way the subject matter is dealt with is practically insulting of late!

I decided to go back to SNS 1, and look at it critically, as if I’m back in uni trying to dissect Shakespeare. Worryingly, it’s already visible in book 1, and is excused repeatedly with commentary by the author using what I like to call ‘false empathy’.  An Instagram commenter recently mentioned that A/Ns are unprofessional, and I agree, I think they’re dangerous. It is better to be upfront in the Prelude or Foreword, or shameless about the fact that you don’t care (G.R Martin, anyone?) because this starts to add the author’s view. With Rob constantly trying to excuse things, it makes everyone question things more and more – although perhaps in light of recent events, this is a good thing.

The fact of the matter is, at the end of the day, “This was how it was in the time” is not an excuse to have the main female character constantly beat her appearance and dismiss other female characters whilst her own personality is diminished. It tricks readers into thinking a male author cares - but does he? Can he? Will he ever truly understand?

Probably not, it’s impossible.

However, this doesn’t mean he needs to stop, and that I despise his stories (okay, maybe a little bit 😉). It means he needs to change. It can’t be ‘this is what happened and this is how it was’. It needs to be this is how it was, this is what happened, this is how it felt, and this is it’s impact. It means he needs to read a book on feminism and issues women experience. It means he needs to ask women to gain a view as to how these things actually feel, and to gain insight into how it’s not something to make a 24/7 joke out of for multiple years. He needs to read up on how those who do not fit the particular ‘box’ of discrimination he is dealing with tend to not like it when you constantly make fun of it tactlessly. There are ways to go about it, you can be funny and deal with serious issues.

Instead, Rob has chosen (and I mean chosen, the OG fandom has been trying for years to message and help this get fixed) to continue on this flatlining path where the star of our story is turned into a joke and a male stereotype of women. It is a shame, because Lilly is pretty damn cool, but he conveniently plucks that core principle out of her as the books go on, until she is eventually a husk whose only purpose is to be funny.  

In case you guys ever wondered why the OG fandom stopped reading, stopped being active on the content, and why we only post memes and have turned these two into a running joke, but still keep original Lilly in our quotes, this is why.

[grilledcheeseandguavajelly]

“Somewhere Just Beyond My Reach, There’s Someone Reaching Back For Me” -- Wilhemina Venable x Mildred Ratched

Mildred Ratched already owns my heart. That’s just the sad truth. She shares the space with Venable now. Which means that I’m left thinking of the two of them together almost constantly. And eventually it got too loud and I had to write it. 

Please bear with me, the show hasn’t even dropped a trailer yet so this is just me having fun with the little I know about Nurse Ratched (and the little I am hoping for gathered from promo pictures/teasers). Also, I wrote it in maybe two days, so I apologize in advance for any typos.

Words: ~13,500

Warnings: None? I’m hesitant to say none on a fic with ~these women~, but yeah I think that’s where we are right now. Just a bit of smut (shhhh) 

~I really hope you all enjoy this one, it’s probably a bit different than everyone was expecting, but I couldn’t resist. Alright, LET’S DO THIS~

Wilhemina’s fingers twitched on her cane, thumb rubbing reflexively against the handle as she watched the line in front of her. Stagnant. And she had been waiting for almost twenty minutes. 

She was just starting to lose her patience, especially with the man she was behind. Too tall, smelling of cigarettes. The future of her day pressed against her, the knowledge that she was going to be faced with hundreds of these men, large and consuming and throwing too much ego around. 

This convention was entirely men, as far as she could see. And as she looked around, took in their shining shoes and their notebooks and their stares, she shifted, setting her posture on her cane and standing up a bit straighter. 

Until heels clicked through the room, tapping steadily and coming to a halt just behind her. 

And Wilhemina realized that they hadn’t been staring at her. 

Soft muttering, a huff, and then Wilhemina turned, her curiosity peaked. 

Her eyes landed on a woman, entirely too perfect for her own good, from the way her hat sat at an impeccable angle to the way her feet crossed smoothly, one in front of the other, as she dug through her purse. 

A second later, her mouth pursed into a thin line as she pulled out a neatly folded stack of papers. And as she looked up, straightening, her eyes met Wilhemina’s. 

A small smirk played over her lips, no doubt at the realization that Wilhemina had been staring at her. And all Wilhemina could think to do in the moment was pop her brow, quirking her head. 

Composure. Self-preservation.

A long moment where Wilhemina let herself look her up and down, take in her quartered sleeves, peter-pan collar, the row of thick buttons that ran a perfect line down to a flared skirt. And black, velvet gloves to match. 

And then she found her voice.

“I was under the impression that I would be the only woman speaking here today.” 

And this woman, so impeccably dressed, so impeccably put together, had the nerve to pop her brow right back. 

“Well,” she countered quickly, tipping her shoulders back. “One should never assume.” 

And this time, Wilhemina couldn’t help the smirk that pulled at her lips. She offered her free hand, tapping her cane as she spoke. “Wilhemina Venable. It’s a pleasure to meet you.” 

And to her surprise, the woman took it, gloved hand warm in Wilhemina’s grip. 

“Mildred Ratched,” she replied smoothly, eyes hot as a smile curved her lips. 

Wilhemina couldn’t help but shift as she shook the woman’s hand, some sort of victory, of smugness, folding into her from the power radiating through this simple gesture. Her nose twitched and then Mildred’s hand was falling away, finding the strap of her small purse and rubbing at it absently as she pulled her composure back around her. 

She watched Mildred’s eyes flick past her, and then immediately around the room. Watched the slight shake in her breath as she undoubtedly realized what Wilhemina had only moments before. It really was all men here, save the two of them. 

“What are you lecturing on?” Wilhemina asked, pleased when Mildred’s eyes snapped back to her. 

“Psychological advances made through study of post-trauma triggers and observances in the field of action.”

Wilhemina hummed, her fingers tightening on her cane as the implication of what the woman said settled around her. “You helped during the war?”

A smug look crossed Mildred’s face, but she morphed it into a passive smile. “Helped might be an understatement.” 

There was a long moment as Wilhemina realized that Mildred was probably entirely capable of handling herself around so many men. Commanding so many men. And then the woman spoke again. 

“And you?” 

Wilhemina swallowed, tapping her cane as she set her shoulders against inevitable backlash that always came when she admitted to never helping with the war efforts. 

“No.”

To her surprise, Mildred only chuckled. Shook her head. “I meant what are you lecturing on.”

She set her jaw, fingers twitching at her error. Her mistake. But Mildred hadn’t scolded her. Hadn’t judged. She was only curious. So polite. So focused. 

“I’m simply posing the question of technology versus consciousness. And somehow, I have a feeling that these men will not like it.”

A small laugh from Mildred, and then something settled over her that looked almost uncomfortable, an uneasiness radiating off of her like a wave. 

Wilhemina quirked a brow. “Perhaps you’re not fond of it either, Ms. Ratched?” 

But Mildred shook her head. “Nurse,” she corrected. “And it’s not that. It’s simply...” 

Her eyes pulled over the men surrounding them. Staring at them. Undoubtedly murmuring about them as they walked. Always together. Always in pairs. 

Mildred fingered the strap of her purse, teeth scraping over her bottom lip for a fraction of a second before she schooled her features.

Wilhemina let her eyes run over her once more, top to bottom and back again. The language of her movements, scribbled down in books on how to cover yourself from the world. How to block everyone out and set yourself atop the pyramid of society. 

“Well, Nurse Ratched,” Wilhemina tried, smirking as she tapped her cane once more. “Order on the outside does wonders to keep the chaos safely on the inside.” 

And then those eyes, those brown, piercing eyes, viciously slicing through Wilhemina. She knew that look, that shock. She had seen right through her. Exposed her, clear as day. Mildred was vulnerable. Mildred was broken. 

Mildred was just like her. 

~~~ 

There was an expression on Wilhemina’s face that Mildred couldn’t read. And try as she might, eyes searching and picking apart the minuscule eyebrow quirks and eyes narrowing and lips twitching, she was completely lost. 

And nothing set her more on edge.

Mildred had always been able to read everyone. It was her first priority. Get a feel for them, dig down into them. Find the thing that makes them tick and spin it on its head to stay on top. 

But Wilhemina had some sort of wall around her. Something that fuzzed out Mildred’s mind and kept her pulled in tight. A magnet against a metal strip. 

A soft, “I look forward to hearing you speak,” and then Wilhemina was turning away, stepping forward in line and giving her name to the man sat at the table just in front of them. 

She watched as Wilhemina handed over her papers, shoulders askew and tapping her cane. Impatiently, Mildred realized. And she schooled her features as she recognized the difference between this tap and the way it had clicked when they were speaking. Absently, an extension of herself. 

And then, with an irritated smile, Wilhemina was checked in and moving aside, fingers flexing on her cane as she sauntered past the table. 

Mildred watched Wilhemina walk away, handing her papers to the man before her. And her eyes stayed locked on Wilhemina as she paused just before she fell out of sight, turning mid-step. 

“Name?” the man asked, pulling Mildred’s attention from the smirk that sliced across her face. 

She took a deep breath, voice perfectly even as she replied. And as he sifted through files and documentation, Mildred let herself look up again. Wilhemina was gone. 

She shoved the pang of sadness aside, straightening out the hem of her glove and shifting her purse further up her arm. And only after clearing the woman from her mind and focusing back on the man before her, did she notice how careless he was being. 

“Excuse me,” she tried, voice suddenly firm. Still impeccably soft. “You’re wrinkling the edge of my papers.” Mildred indicated to the corner of the page, where the man’s arm was pressing a nice crease into the side of her registration documents. Her fingers twitched on the strap of her purse as she composed herself. 

“They’re just papers,” the man said, offering her a small smile as he finished scribbling. 

“They’re just things, Mildred. You don’t need things.”

“Daddy, please. Not mommy’s necklace.”

“You don’t deserve it. You haven’t been a good girl.”

Mildred pressed her mouth into a thin line, taking a deep breath against her father’s voice in her head. 

“They’re my papers,” she said firmly, pressing her hand into the table and leaning forward. “And good manners would indicate you having respect for others’ things. Would it not?”

The man’s smile fractured, and Mildred almost smirked as she watched him gulp. He straightened out the corner of her papers, handing them back to her. 

“Apologies, Nurse Ratched. Your first lecture is in room 42 B, just down the hall on the right.”

“There’s a good boy,” she drawled, pulling the papers from his fingers and frowning at the line down the edge. “And you’re going to be more careful with everyone else’s belongings, yes?”

“Yes, Nurse Ratched.” 

And then she was walking away, that nice little bubble of satisfaction wedging into her heart. 

~~~ 

“Eyes up.” 

Mildred’s voice rang out through the hall, and Wilhemina was shocked at how her heart leapt at the tone of it. So commanding. So dominating. 

“Our boys sacrificed their lives on these battlefields for us. The absolute least we can do is pay attention and listen and learn, to further the pursuit of medicine that they gave their lives for. Is that not correct?”

“I don’t think they sacrificed their lives for medicine, Nurse Ratched.” 

And Wilhemina smiled at the fire that licked over her eyes, watching the way her hands splayed out on her podium. The way she straightened out her neck as her eyes bored into the boy who had interrupted her. 

“What is your name?” she asked calmly. Too calmly.

“Jimmy,” he replied smoothly, and Wilhemina’s fingers itched at the smug look on his face. She could barely see him, sitting impeccably still in her seat and tracking him with her eyes. But she knew that tone of voice. She knew that type of man. 

“Well, James,” Mildred continued, stepping around her podium and crossing her legs as she folded her hands neatly in front of her. “They may not have gone to war with the intention of furthering medicine. But they did go to war with the intention of saving lives. And how we use these lessons that they have taught us, intentional or not, could change the course of humanity as we know it. So would we not be remiss to waste such a hefty sacrifice? Do we not owe it to our boys to take as much as we can from the lives they gave so freely?”

And the sound that followed as Mildred looked over the men, eyes tracking them sharply as her expression morphed from perfectly concerned to smooth and kind, made Wilhemina’s heart pound. Because you could hear a pin drop. And never in her life had she ever come across another woman who had the same affect that she did on a group of men. Another woman who was so commanding. And so impeccably composed. 

~~~ 

Wilhemina’s cane tapped with her words, punctuating points and emphasizing the way her eyes would narrow at questions. 

“So, are you saying that we could make robots, Ms. Venable? Like…from the movies?”

A few laughs threaded out through the room and Mildred shifted in her seat, nose twitching at the innate possessiveness that pooled in her chest. 

But as she looked up at Wilhemina, vision blurring, just so, her cane slammed against the wood. Mildred had to bite her lip to keep from smiling at the way the men jumped in their seats. 

“If you were listening, Mr. Brannard, you would understand that not only is it a possibility, my colleagues and I have already accomplished it.” 

Her eyes narrowed, and Mildred hated the way that even that small act of dominance made her heart pound. 

Wilhemina pursed her lips, tilting her head and tutting softly. Condescendingly. “Or are you too naive to imagine that something this advanced could be achieved so soon? By a woman?”

The boy stuttered, looking to the man beside him for help. But he was head down in his papers, scratching out notes. 

Mildred took a deep breath, eyes falling back to Ms. Venable as she stalked around the podium. Slow. Practiced. She was making them wait, and she knew they would. 

And suddenly, just like that, in a moment — Mildred was addicted to her. 

~~~ 

The door shut behind Wilhemina and she let herself sigh, leaning onto her cane as her eyes fell closed. There was something about being surrounded by men, constantly, their eyes on her as she spoke, that always made her feel dirty. And it was exhausting, having to keep her steel walls up when Mildred was sitting in the back of the room watching her with so much intensity that she should have caught fire. 

It was sad when the only place that she could get a moment to breathe was the ladies’ room. 

That moment ended quicker than she would have liked, the squeak of the door opening forcing her to stand straighter on her cane and busy herself in the mirror. 

Strong. Unaffected. 

Heels clicked as Wilhemina wiped at the corner of her mouth, flicking off the smallest speck of stray lipstick. She waited for the woman to lock herself in a stall so that she could make a clean exit. But to her surprise, the footsteps stopped just short of her. And when Wilhemina threw a hot look over her shoulder at the intrusion, she was almost impressed. 

“Hello, dear.”

Wilhemina popped her brow, a small smirk making her lips twitch. “Ms. Ratched.”

“Nurse,” she corrected, tipping her chin up as her eyes lit from behind. 

“Mildred.”

A pause, Mildred’s gaze falling down Wilhemina’s form. “What are you doing?”

“Well I was intending to use the restroom,” Wilhemina replied, smoothing a hand down her skirt as she turned to face the woman. 

Mildred’s eyes were calculating, twitching almost imperceptibly at the corner. “Unacceptable.”

Wilhemina scoffed. “And why might that be?”

“You’re scheduled to speak again in ten minutes. You should be prepping your presentation in five.”

She gestured to the space around them, head tilting challengingly. “Hence why I’m using the restroom now.”

A beat. Mildred stared at her, fingers slipping on the strap of her purse. And Wilhemina had only spoken to this woman once, but she had watched her for almost three hours, and then another two during her own lecture. She knew why her fingers twitched. She could read her like a book. 

So she took a step forward, tapping her cane out in front of her and leaning on it, just enough to get in Mildred’s space. 

“Did you miss me, Millie?” Venable breathed, eyes flicking over Mildred’s face. And she didn’t miss the way the other woman’s breath hitched, body stiffening. “Were you hoping to get me all to yourself for a few minutes?”

Mildred cleared her throat, straightening. “And if I was?”

A smirk. 

“Do you have plans for dinner?”

~~~ 

Mildred had had plans for dinner. Of course she had. Very rarely did her schedule slip away from her, especially so when she was in a strange city around strange people. 

But somehow, for some reason, she had changed her plans. For a woman.

Slap. “Disgusting, stupid whore. Is this who you want to become? Disgrace. Pull yourself together.”

Pull yourself together. 

Wilhemina set the plate down before her and Mildred shifted in her seat, smoothing her already impeccably placed napkin on her lap. 

And only when she finally pulled her eyes off of Wilhemina, sitting down opposite her at the table and propping her cane against the wood, did she realize that this woman was an incredible chef. 

The dish was colorful, sausage swimming in pasta and decorated with fresh herbs. She comforted herself in the knowledge that she was eating better here than she would have been at the restaurant where she had reserved a table. 

A logical decision. 

They ate in silence for a few moments, Mildred fighting the shaking of her hands and trying to come up with a halfway decent conversation starter. But Wilhemina beat her to it. 

“Tell me about the war,” she said softly as she twisted her fork in the pasta, looking up at Mildred with such blatant curiosity and innocence that she couldn’t say no. Couldn’t bear to shove that wall up and bark at her and throw out her usual excuses. 

Which is how she found herself, almost an hour later, plate nearly empty as she covered her mouth with her fingers, swallowing around a bite that was just a fraction too large. 

“No no,” she corrected, taking a sip of water. “It wasn’t the bombs that were distracting. It wasn’t the gunfire. It was the screaming.”

Something flashed in Wilhemina’s eyes and Mildred stuttered, almost convinced she was about to smile. Almost convinced she was about to cry. 

“It was constant,” she continued, fingers playing over her fork as the memories flooded back into her mind. The smell of it, the sound. “Poor boys, too young to be fighting. And they never stopped. They never stopped screaming. Eventually you learn to tune it out. You have to. If you focus on them, if you let yourself hear it, everything else breaks away. You have to block it out. Or you lose the order of your surgical tent.” 

Wilhemina nodded, swallowing. “Seems impossible.” 

But Mildred shook her head again, shocking herself at how forward she was being. At how the words were spilling from her lips. Like she had known this woman for hundreds of years. 

She was almost certain that she had, the way Wilhemina’s eyes pierced straight through her every time their gazes met. 

“Logic and responsibility. That’s the key.” 

And to her surprise, Wilhemina laughed. A full, pretty sound that was too raspy for her own good. 

Mildred flushed, taking a long sip of water as Wilhemina spoke. 

“No, no. Rules. Clear lines and boundaries. A straight right and a firm wrong. It’s the only way to keep them all in line.” 

“You’re wrong,” Mildred stated, matter of fact. And when Wilhemina rose from her seat, she almost flinched. 

But she only stalked over, a smirk slicing across her face as she collected Mildred’s plate and walked it over to the sink. 

Cool. Calculated. Every one of Wilhemina’s actions had an equal, opposite reaction. They stalked around each other in perfect circles, and halfway through the dance Mildred’s mind was absolutely spinning. This time, she didn’t have a justification. Didn’t have follow-up. She was losing her grip. 

The silence was deafening, exacerbated by the tapping of Wilhemina’s heels and the clattering of tableware against porcelain. 

And then, just like that, she was back, pulling out the chair directly next to Mildred and settling down into it. 

“Most people don’t get the privilege of telling me I’m wrong.” 

Her voice had lowered, dangerous and sharp, a snake bite. And Mildred couldn’t help but dig her teeth into her bottom lip. Because this woman was so perfect, and so beautiful, and so intelligent. Sitting before her like it was nothing. Like the heat in Mildred’s cheeks wasn’t creeping down into her fingers and making them itch. 

Her eyes flicked down to Wilhemina’s lips before she could help herself, and her fingers dug into her skirt as she watched Wilhemina flick her tongue over them. Wetting them. So slick. So perfectly shaped. 

And then Wilhemina’s hand covered hers, skin soft and smooth and tender against Mildred’s. 

She looked back into Wilhemina’s eyes, suddenly dark, suddenly entirely too intense. She wasn’t prepared for this. She wasn’t ready. She wanted this more than anything she had ever wanted before in her life. 

And she silently thanked whatever gods lay above her for getting her through the war and straight to this moment. Because her entire life would be worth living if Wilhemina would just— 

Wilhemina leaned forward, and that was all it took. Just the slightest tilt of her chin. Mildred hadn’t realized how close they had gotten. But then Wilhemina’s mouth was on hers, so firm and yet so, so delicate. 

She let her eyes fall closed, let herself sigh into the feel of it. The feel of her. Turned her hand and threaded their fingers together and squeezed because this was all she had wanted. Since the moment that fire-red hair had turned and she had looked up into those deep, brown eyes.

Wilhemina pulled away before Mildred was ready to let go, and she couldn’t help the half-whine that lodged itself in her throat. That she tried so desperately to swallow down. 

“Better?” Wilhemina teased, pressing their foreheads together.

She let out a shaky breath, thumbing at Wilhemina’s knuckles. “Infinitely.” 

There was a long moment of silence, and Mildred was almost getting accustomed to these spaces, these gaps between their communication where they just let their feelings hang between them. Let their hearts speak without words getting in the way. 

Mildred swallowed, licking her lips slowly as she looked up into Wilhemina’s eyes. 

“What are the rules now, Ms. Venable?”

Wilhemina hummed, nudging their noses together as her eyes flicked down to Mildred’s lips again. “You relax and let me take care of you.” 

A wobbling breath, and Mildred wet her lips again, hands trembling as she leaned into Wilhemina. So close to what she wanted. So close. “And if I say no?”

Wilhemina smirked, hand coming up to Mildred’s throat before moving to brush delicately over her cheek instead. And when she spoke again, her eyes were lidded and she breathed the words almost directly into Mildred’s mouth. 

“Now where’s the logic in that, Nurse Ratched?” 

~~~ 

Mildred toed off her shoes. Delicately. Carefully. And Wilhemina watched in awe of the woman before her. Perfectly pristine. 

She always strove for perfection. Perfectly presented to the world, perfectly protected. Perfectly hidden. And she had thought she almost had it. But now, watching Mildred, she realized that perfection was far out of her grip. Not when it looked like this. 

Wilhemina wasn’t perfectly presented, not compared to the way Mildred took care with every tiny pleat and line and cuff. Down to the perfectly straight earrings. Down to the parallel lines of her stockings that ran up the back of her calves. And Wilhemina certainly wasn’t perfectly protected when Mildred looked at her like that, eyes wide and lips pink as she slowly, purposefully started picking down the buttons on her shirt. 

Wilhemina was only and solely perfectly exposed, her heart entirely too vulnerable around a woman that she knew would protect it. Around a part of her that she didn’t know had existed until it had tapped its way up behind her in line and pulled the zipper on the curtain over her heart. 

She couldn’t stop watching Mildred. Not when she let her shirt fall to the floor. Not when she unbuttoned the top of her skirt and tugged at the zip, shimmying out of it and letting it pool around her ankles, leaving her in nothing but a thin, silk slip and black pantyhose. 

And then she bunched up her slip and rolled them down, Venable’s eyes tracking the way that perfectly straight line up her calf crumpled as she went, bending and morphing as Mildred let her walls down. Let her in. Let Wilhemina see her for who she really was beneath all of that perfection and obsession and compulsivity. 

Suddenly it was too much, and Wilhemina simply couldn’t sit on the edge of the bed watching anymore. She needed to touch. She needed all of Mildred pressed against all of her. Every inch. Every piece. 

Wilhemina walked up behind her, wrapping her hands around her stomach and pressing a soft kiss to her shoulder before resting her chin there. 

“Do you have any idea how beautiful you are?”

Mildred turned, a smile flickering over her lips. She had been so serious when she was undressing, her mouth pulled into a line, eyes flicking between Wilhemina behind her and the mirror before her, her hands pulling over herself to smooth everything down, make sure her hair was still curling down her back, making sure her pins were all in place. But now she looked lighter. Now she looked like she had at the table, open and soft and pliant. 

“Show me,” Mildred whispered, and Wilhemina pressed another kiss to her shoulder before shifting her in front of the mirror. Her hands found the pins still holding her hair up, pulling them out slowly as she nipped and bit her way up Mildred’s neck, sucking just a bit to hard at the crook of her jaw. 

And Wilhemina couldn’t help but smile as Mildred sighed, her hand reaching up behind her and twisting through Wilhemina’s hair. 

Mildred knew when Wilhemina got the last pin out, shaking her hair out and fluffing it almost immediately. And then she turned in Wilhemina’s arms, pressing a soft kiss to her cheek as she reached around and pulled the tie from her own hair. 

It fell in heaps around her shoulders, and Mildred giggled softly. 

Wilhemina’s brow popped, sarcasm pushing through as a weak attempt at self-preservation. “Is something the matter?” 

But Mildred only laughed, shaking her head and running her fingers through Wilhemina’s hair. 

“Cinnamon sugar,” she murmured, twisting her finger through a lock and admiring it. And Wilhemina felt herself flush against her will. 

“I’m almost certain our hair is the same color,” she tried, fingers twitching on Mildred’s waist. 

Frustrated. Exposed. Worshipped. 

Mildred only shook her head, leaning forward. She hesitated for a brief moment before pressing a soft kiss to Wilhemina’s lips. And suddenly Wilhemina didn’t care if she was giggling or teasing or playing with her hair. As long as she was here. As long as she kept doing that. 

“You’re awfully sweet for someone who is supposed to be so intimidating, Ms. Venable.”

Wilhemina scoffed, rolling her eyes before Mildred grabbed at her chin, raking her eyes over her and making a shiver run down her spine. 

“Why don’t you take all of that purple off for me, cinnamon? Hm?”

And Wilhemina hated how deeply she flushed, the nickname getting under her skin like it shouldn’t have. But this was Mildred. And somehow, she knew exactly what Wilhemina wanted to hear before she realized it herself. 

It only took a few moments, untying the top of her shirt, pulling it up over her head. Sliding out of her skirt, peeling her gloves off. And Mildred watched her the entire time, eyes hot as they followed her fingers. 

She held out her hands as Wilhemina stepped out of her shoes, keeping her steady. Making sure she didn’t wobble. 

And this time, for the first time, Wilhemina completely forgot to feel exposed. She forgot to feel embarrassed about her back. She forgot to warn Mildred. 

But when Mildred kissed her again, this time a bit harder and a bit deeper, fingers wrapping up around Wilhemina’s neck and sliding down over her shoulders, over her spine, nothing happened. 

She didn’t flinch. She didn’t recoil. She didn’t even gasp. She just kept kissing her and kissing her and kissing her, until Wilhemina’s thighs hit the mattress. 

Mildred pulled back, breaking the kiss as her teeth dug into her lip, fingers rubbing together absently. Just like they had over her purse. Over her fork. 

Wilhemina gave her a small nod, tentatively grabbing for her wrists and guiding them to her stomach. 

She didn’t miss the way Mildred’s fingers flexed before she touched her, didn’t miss the glint in her eye as she hesitantly, delicately, grabbed Mina’s waist and pushed her down into the bed. 

And the way she touched her, warm palms pressing against Wilhemina’s sides before pulling away almost immediately, and then replacing them in an instant. This time firm. This time sure. This time pushing Wilhemina onto her back and smoothing up her stomach so that nails were pricking at the very bottom of her bra. 

Mildred crawled over her, pressing a singular, wet kiss just below Wilhemina’s jaw. 

“Millie,” Wilhemina breathed, squirming under her. 

“My name is Mildred,” she corrected, and Wilhemina let herself smirk, catching the way Mildred hardened and taking the opportunity to flip the switch yet again. 

She hooked a leg over Mildred’s hip, pushing her and flipping them and bracing herself above her. 

Mildred gasped, a soft whine pushing out of her as she was slammed back into the mattress. Wilhemina leaned down, nudging their noses together before flicking her tongue out and licking the tip of her nose. 

“What are you afraid of, Millie?” Wilhemina breathed, hands sliding slowly up her sides before locking over her ribs and pinning her to the bed. “Is someone losing control?” 

She couldn’t help but smirk at her own joke, amplified by the way Mildred’s eyes widened and hardened. 

“No. It’s just—“ 

Wilhemina bit down on her collarbone, cutting her off as she squirmed beneath her. She hummed, pushing her further into the bed. 

“Oh no? So you’re fine then, right?”

And after a second’s hesitation she nodded again, hands coming up to smooth out her hair as her eyes bored into Wilhemina’s. 

The word “yes” left Mildred’s mouth, but Wilhemina had already seen it in her face. The screaming. The need to dominate. The need to be dominated. The want. 

“Millie,” Wilhemina sing-songed, bending down to press a kiss to her cheek. She wasn’t surprised it was warm, the flush already clouding her perfect, porcelain skin. She was surprised that it was scorched, Mildred’s teeth dug into her bottom lip as she watched Wilhemina carefully. 

“Let go, darling,” she murmured, nails scraping lightly down Mildred’s sides. “Let me be in charge of you for once, yeah? Let those pretty little walls down. I won’t hurt you. I promise.” 

~~~ 

Wilhemina kept saying it. That stupid little nickname. Over and over. She wouldn’t stop, and Mildred couldn’t think. And it was making her furious in the absolute best way. 

She was losing control. She had always been so careful. She had always tried her absolute best. But somehow, tonight, she could feel it slipping through her fingers with every kiss, with every gasp, with every moan. 

And she was okay. 

Her world wasn’t crumbling. Mildred was surviving. And to her surprise, the world seemed to actually sort itself in those small moments, the fractions of seconds where Wilhemina panted that little nickname and Mildred’s body responded of its own accord. Mildred was thriving, Mildred was being loved. Mildred was finally living. 

And so she let go. 

She twisted her fingers in the sheets, Wilhemina’s name falling off her tongue as she arched into her. 

Wilhemina hummed, a nice, satisfied sound, and then she was kissing down her neck, fingers scratching up under her slip, up the inside of her thighs. 

Mildred should have wanted to pull away. She should have wanted to clamp her thighs shut and pull her slip down and shove herself up against the headboard. But to her surprise her thighs fell open, and before she knew what she was doing she was lifting her hips off the mattress and reaching down, tugging her slip up over her thighs, up past her stomach. 

Wilhemina pulled off of her, for a split second, and Mildred froze. But then she wrapped her hand around Mildred’s and pulled her forward, pulled her up, kissing her temple as she helped slide the slip up over her head. Threw it on the floor. 

And then Mildred was completely exposed. Completely vulnerable. Her hands came up to cover herself instinctively, suddenly too cold and too naked without the heat of Wilhemina’s mouth on her neck. 

But she was right there, threading their fingers together and pulling her hands back down into her lap. 

“It’s okay. I’m right here,” she cooed, and something deflated inside of Mildred. She let out a long breath, squeezing Wilhemina’s hands as she swallowed. And then, in a desperate attempt to gain some kind of control back, no matter how futile, she tried something. 

“Touch me, Mina.” 

She watched the other woman gasp. Let pride fill her at the pure smile that made tears prick in Wilhemina’s eyes. Traced her thumb over the back of Wilhemina’s hand. 

“Mina,” she tried again, suddenly feeling more comfortable with this intimacy. Because now they were both exposed. Equal. Again. Just like they should be. 

Wilhemina lunged forward, mouth hot and hungry as she pushed Mildred back against the mattress. And her hands. Her hands. Everywhere, all at once. Like she was trying to memorize the shape of her. Like she needed to touch her or she would disappear. And Mildred understood. Because she had that same ache, the same need within her. If her fingers weren’t on Wilhemina, pulling her tighter to her, pulling her closer, she was absolutely certain that she would vibrate and explode into a billion atoms, right there in the middle of the room. 

It suddenly turned so desperate, Mildred just about to beg for Wihemina’s fingers, for more when she felt them brush against her, cold against the heat burning between her thighs. 

Wilhemina pulled back, just so, just enough to look her in the eyes. And Mildred pushed all of her emotion, all of her want through, nodding frantically. 

“Please—“

But no sooner had she opened her mouth than Wilhemina’s fingers pushed inside of her, filling that space there perfectly and making Mildred finally feel like she was whole. 

Wilhemina smirked, and Mildred let out a soft “oh” at the unfamiliarity of it all. The comfort. And then she was moving and Mildred was moving, hips rolling down against Wilhemina’s wrist as she curled her fingers and sped up. 

And before she knew what was happening, that heat was building in her stomach, toes curling where her heel dug into Wilhemina’s back. She didn’t know how she had gotten like this, one leg thrown over her shoulder, a hand in Mina’s hair as she pressed kisses to the inside of her thighs while her fingers pumped slowly, gently, intently. 

It seemed dirty. It seemed wrong. And Mildred couldn’t have cared less. All she could fathom was that little knot of control, holding onto it as it vibrated, threatened to explode. Gripping into it with her teeth if she had to, clinging to it until that exact moment, the perfect—

It snapped, Mildred scrambling to find purchase on something as she fell through the galaxy Wilhemina had built around her. She knew her mouth was moving. She knew she was probably whining for Wilhemina. But she couldn’t hear anything. Not over Mina’s voice against her skin. 

“Yes. That’s it. Perfect. Let go. I’m right here. I’ve got you. You’re safe.” 

It took too long for her body to come back to her, for her to regain her grip on reality and grab at some sort of control again. 

But as she opened her eyes on Wilhemina between her thighs, brow pushed up as the most beautiful, genuine smile graced her mouth, her perfect mouth, Mildred decided that right now, just for this one moment, she didn’t want control back. She wanted to just be. 

“Kiss me,” she breathed, and Wilhemina was right there, mouth pushing insistently against hers. And when Mildred tasted something tangy, something sharp and spicy and unfamiliar, she realized with a start that Mina must have put her mouth on her at some point. 

She hadn’t even realized. Hadn’t registered. 

She had given herself over completely into Mina’s mercy, and she had never felt so happy. So light. So utterly and completely protected. 

A small shuffle, sheets being rucked down, and then Wilhemina was sitting up against the headboard, and Mildred was right there, curling into her side and pressing herself in as close as she could. 

She smiled as Wilhemina’s arms wrapped around her waist. Almost possessively. 

They laid like that for a moment, Mina’s fingers tracing over her side as silence fell down upon the room, all remnants of Mildred’s screams dissolving into air. And then she finally, finally got her feet back under her.

“I want to take care of you,” Mildred said softly, pressing a kiss just over Wilhemina’s heart. But to her surprise, Wilhemina only shook her head. 

Lips against her temple, and then she spoke. “Not tonight, beautiful. We both need to be up early tomorrow.” 

Mildred wanted to say that she didn’t care. She wanted to argue and protest and throw something until Mina listened and let her feel her. All of her. 

But somewhere in the back of her mind she recognized that she would have to deal with those same men tomorrow, lecturing and commanding and spending too much of her energy trying to keep herself in control. So she nodded. Because they needed sleep if they were going to survive. 

“Tomorrow,” she sighed, looking up at Mina with eager eyes. And Wilhemina smiled, pressing another kiss to her temple. 

“Tomorrow.”

She curled further into Wilhemina, letting her hands wander just a bit further than they should have, suddenly feeling so entitled to this woman. She had permission to do whatever she liked to her. Just not quite yet. 

Wilhemina hummed, pressing one last kiss to the top of Mildred’s head, and then time slowed and the air grew thick as she started to move. 

Mildred felt her shift, turning just so and pulling an arm from around her waist as she reached for the lamp by the bed. 

“Don’t turn off the light, please. Daddy, please.”

“Why, are you afraid of monsters?”

A nod.

“Oh honey, the only monster you have to be afraid of is standing right here.” 

A sickening grin.

"You’re a big girl—“

“I’m not—“

“—you can handle this. Besides. Nothing is going to get you... As long as you don’t make a sound.”

Tears welled in Mildred’s eyes as she watched Wilhemina’s fingers inch closer. And how was she supposed to tell her about this? How was she supposed to explain that this one, tiny thing was her absolute weakness? She almost didn’t. Almost made it. But just as fingers brushed against the lamp, the hair on the back of her neck stood up and she tasted something bitter, bristling. 

Time sped up all at once then, Mildred clawing at Wilhemina’s hand and wrapping her fingers tight around her wrist to stop her. 

“Wait—“ she tried, but it came out broken and wrinkled.

Wilhemina froze, looking down at her. “Is everything okay?”

And Mildred couldn’t help the tears then, sniffing as they blurred her vision and letting her fingers fall from Wilhemina’s arm. 

“Please don’t turn it off just yet,” she tried, and she scolded herself for how weak she sounded. 

Unacceptable. Pull yourself together. 

Something crossed Wilhemina’s face that she couldn’t read, and her heart dug down deep in her chest as she braced herself. 

But then Wilhemina softened, brows raising, just so, as she stroked her thumb over Mildred’s side. A smirk pulled at her lips and she quirked her head. 

“My my, Nurse Ratched. Is someone afraid of the dark?” 

And the way she said it, almost laughing, simultaneously made Mildred feel like a child being scolded and a woman being loved. 

It was a blessing that she had used her title. It had given Mildred that shock to her system to jolt her out of her vulnerable state, building her walls back up as quickly as she could as she formed the searing negation on her tongue. 

Of course not. You’re mistaken. Don’t be ridiculous. 

But she couldn’t land on one that felt quite right. Because lying didn’t feel quite right. And Mildred told herself, assured herself, that it was only because she hadn’t thought of the perfect logical theorem to support her argument. She wasn’t prepared to have this conversation. Once she found one, she would be back in control and she could right her world back on its feet. And one time, maybe this time, they could turn the light off. 

She hadn’t realized how long she had been silent until she felt Wilhemina press a kiss to her hair. Mildred was still staring her down, nose twitching as Wilhemina’s eyes searched her face. 

A deep breath, a hard swallow. And then she nodded. 

And there it was. That was it. The most open and vulnerable and exposed she had ever been with another person in her life. 

And Wilhemina, her Mina, took it in stride, simply humming before threading fingers through Mildred’s curls and pulling her up closer so that she could pepper soft kisses across her face. 

“Oh, Millie,” she whispered, and Mildred was shocked to find a gentle smile on her lips. 

“It’s childish, I know.”

She shook her head, fingers playing over the edge of her face. “Not to me.” 

“You can turn it off once I’m asleep. I just—“

“No. If you prefer it on, we leave it on.” Wilhemina hooked a finger under her chin, tipping it up. “That’s that.”

A sniff. A shaky breath. “Are you certain...?”

“Anything for you.”

And that night, when Mildred closed her eyes and steadied her breathing and melted into the warmth of her lover, she somehow, some way, felt like she had finally found her way home. 

~~~ 

“That’s it, just like that.”

Wilhemina cooed, smirking as Mildred whined and rolled her hips down her thigh. A soft gasp, and Wilhemina tightened her hand in her hair, forcing her head back to expose more of her neck. 

“Oh my, Ms. Ratched,” she tried softly, ignoring the way her mouth watered at the sight of her muscles pulling taunt. The way she swallowed. 

“Millie,” Mildred gasped, letting out a small cry as Wilhemina latched her mouth to her neck. 

She hummed as she nodded, relishing the taste of her when she was unraveling like this. Sticky, hot. So different from that sharp, sweet, clean taste when she was still dressed and still protected and still in charge. 

“You’re learning.”

Mildred scoffed beneath her, and Wilhemina had a split second to brace herself before nails were raking up her thighs and up her lower back, Mildred’s hands splaying out and holding her close. 

“And you’re going too slow.”

Wilhemina was flipped before she knew what was happening, gasping as Mildred grabbed her shoulders and shoved her down in to the mattress. Hard. 

“Millie—“

But Mildred cut her off, pressing a chaste kiss to her cheek. And when she pulled back she was smiling. Sickly sweet. 

“Besides, I thought we had an agreement that I could take care of you tonight, yes?”

Wilhemina’s brow furrowed, the need to top Mildred too intense for her to think of anything else. Until Mildred spoke again, her voice threading through the air, slicing through Wilhemina’s need like a knife. 

“Unless you were planning on breaking the rules, Ms. Venable?”

And now it was Wilhemina’s turn to smile, laughing sarcastically as Mildred pinched at her sides until she squirmed. 

“Mina,” she corrected over a giggle, biting down on her lip to keep from completely losing herself. 

Mildred smirked, cocking her head as she repeated Wilhemina’s words back to her. 

“You’re learning.” 

“Shut up and fuck me.”

Mildred quirked a brow. “Language.”

But Wilhemina was too desperate, reaching for her hands and pushing them down over her hips. 

“Now, Millie.”

And when Mildred smirked, nails pricking into Wilhemina’s tender skin there, something caught in Wilhemina’s chest. 

Her eyes were razor sharp, lips twitching from a smirk to a smile, back and forth and back and forth. And just when Wilhemina was starting to think she looked almost sickening, she spoke, leaning down and pressing their foreheads together. Just out of reach. Just a bit too far. 

“Oh now now, cinnamon. You know better than to rush me. I’m in charge tonight. That was the agreement. And I decide when you get my fingers. Understood?”

And Mina found herself nodding. 

She was rewarded with a delicate kiss to her lips. Not nearly deep enough and entirely too sweet. 

“Just so long as we’re both on the same page.” A moment, a breath spent staring into those predatory eyes. “Now why don’t you spread those pretty legs for me, hm?” 

~~~ 

Mildred combed her fingers through Wilhemina’s hair, laid out so beautifully across her, head in her lap, fingers tracing the bones of her ankles. 

Intimacy entangled.

“What did they do..?” Mildred breathed, running her fingers delicately over the morphed skin. A fleeting touch. 

Wilhemina drew a slow breath. Calculated. Shaking. “First it was the brace. Screwed in. Stretched.”

“And the appointments for the table?” Mildred asked, her own breath starting to tremble at the idea. 

Wilhemina nodded. “Yes.”

“How old were you?”

“Seven,” Wilhemina said softly, gasping as Mildred’s fingers tucked under a soft piece of her spine, bumping along the gaps in her vertebrae. 

“And it hurt.”

It wasn’t a question. She knew it had hurt. Especially on someone so young. So pliant and vulnerable. 

But Wilhemina didn’t answer, instead plowing ahead. “And then the surgery when I was thirteen.” 

Mildred flinched, the images flashing through her mind. She had seen the slides. She knew what they did. Sliced tendons and ligaments. And there was rarely any progress. 

“It didn’t work.” 

Again, not a question. And this time, as Wilhemina shook her head no, Mildred found what she was looking for. The scars from the screws. Spaced evenly apart, marred by scars from the surgery. Exactly where they should be. 

Wilhemina’s breaths stuttered as Mildred’s fingers slid over them, and she found her own breath speeding up at the thought of this woman on a table. So small. So scared. So cold. 

“And the tethers?” Mildred asked, running through the typical steps in her head. Trying to remember what she had learned in her training. 

But to her surprise, Wilhemina shook her head. She was panting now, and Mildred could feel her chest tightening in response as she trailed her fingers further down, where the spine corrected and compensated and bulged in the opposite direction. 

“Electroshock therapy.”

Wilhemina had barely spoken, barely whispered. But Mildred heard her, completely and solely focused on this poor, fragile, broken thing beneath her. And she couldn’t help the way her heart lodged in her throat. 

“W-Why?” she asked softly, her thumb brushing absently over a particularly bad scar. 

Wilhemina took a deep breath, fingers flexing in the sheets. “There was a time where they thought it would help. A misalignment of the neurotransmitters firing. Especially with younger patients. I was already through puberty. It wouldn’t have made a difference. But I was broken. They were desperate. I was the shame—“

“—shame of your family,” Mildred finished for her. And she surprised herself when a tear fell onto her cheek. A quick swipe of her thumb and it was gone, and she leaned down and pressed a small kiss at the very top of Wilhemina’s spine. “You’re not the only one.” 

Wilhemina shifted in her lap, fingers tracing Mildred’s knee as her breaths pulled long and shaky. As they slowed. 

Mildred closed her eyes, centering herself. “Did they do the final surgery? With the pins and the staples?” 

And she hated herself for how clinical it sounded when she asked. She wanted to be vulnerable. Wanted to be softer. For her. 

For her. 

But Wilhemina didn’t seem to mind, only shaking her head and sighing, her eyes fluttering closed. “I was pushed out of the house after the shock therapy didn’t work. And by the time I had earned enough of my own money to pay for the surgery, I was too old. It was too late.”

“It’s never too late,” Mildred tried, the motto ringing through her head. 

“But it was,” Wilhemina replied, her voice low and raspy. “Even if it would have worked, I was already an adult. I was already... who I was. And I didn’t know who I was without my disability. Without my cane. Without my past and my pain and my perseverance. I’m not myself without this. And I can’t fully be myself with it.”

Mildred hummed, shaking her head softly. Because she knew. Of course she knew. The more she spoke to Wilhemina, the more she was convinced that they were the same person. The same soul, split between two bodies. With the same wants and needs and desires. 

Her fingers skimmed down Wilhemina’s spine for what felt like the hundredth time, and suddenly she had this all-consuming need to memorize the exact shape of it. The exact way that it bulged and twisted and dipped. The exact way that this faulty thing kept this woman up and held her on her feet. 

Another kiss. A sigh. And then, fingers shaking as they pulled through Wilhemina’s hair, brushing it back from her face. 

“I know exactly what you mean.” 

“Stay with me,” Wilhemina breathed, pressing a soft kiss to the inside of Mildred’s thigh. And Mildred’s fingers stuttered in her hair as another tear fell, unbidden, onto her cheek. 

Because she wanted to. She was pulled tight to this woman, an anomaly of existence, the very piece of her that she had always felt was missing, that she had always been searching for. 

But she could never be so irresponsible to leave her home and leave her work and settle in with a woman that she had only known for two days. 

“Stupid, idiotic girl. Stupid, stupid, stupid.”

Could she? 

~~~ 

She had said no. And Wilhemina had broken right there, exposed and entirely too vulnerable, in her lap. 

She had cried herself to sleep that night, curled against Mildred as she cooed and shushed her and stroked delicate fingers through her hair. 

And when she woke in the morning, filled with the smell of Mildred and the feel of Mildred and the taste of Mildred still on her tongue, everything seemed a bit grey. 

They made breakfast, speaking politely and laughing occasionally. Always broken, always half-formed. Got dressed and ready for the day, separately. Dolled themselves up in different types of armor—pantyhose, gloves, skirts, glasses. 

And then Mildred left. 

And then, she came back. 

It was like the universe couldn’t fathom them being apart, a rip torn through their plane of existence when Mildred boarded her train and went back home, clear across the country. 

Wilhemina hadn’t gone with her to the station, but she could feel when she left the city, when she left the state. It was a series of ties being broken, strings snapping in her chest as each one was pulled to breaking and eventually gave out. 

Except the last one. The one that left a buzzing in Wilhemina’s ear, a ringing every time her cane tapped down that sounded so awfully close to the way Mildred sighed just as she was about to orgasm. The way she hummed, barely audible, when they kissed. 

That tie remained. And one day, almost three months later, it got hotter. 

Wilhemina had been making dinner, listening to the television drone on as she stirred her pasta in the pot, when her chest warmed. It was so sudden and so all-consuming that she almost dropped her tongs, Mildred’s name pounding through her head on a loop. 

She had known what was coming before it did. She could sense her presence. Could practically see her smoothing down her skirt and running a finger over the brim of her hat as she walked up Wilhemina’s drive. 

But the knock on the door — soft, three times — had still made Wilhemina jump, a lump of emotion lodging in her throat as she grabbed for her cane and walked slowly to the front door. 

She knew it was her. Deep down, she knew it in her soul. They were tied together, whether Wilhemina liked it or not. But there was still that tiny, nagging voice in the back of her mind that told her not to get her hopes up. That wishing only led to disappointment. 

Until she opened the door, heart pounding, and saw Mildred Ratched standing perfectly straight on her doorstep, a singular suitcase in hand. 

“Millie,” Wilhemina breathed, like she needed confirmation. Like she was seeing a ghost. 

Mildred swallowed, the smallest of smiles pushing at her lips. 

“I was transferred to an institution not far from here,” she said softly, pointing absently behind her before ducking her head against her blush. 

But Wilhemina caught it. She caught everything with this masterpiece. 

“I couldn’t stand the thought of living in this city and...” She cleared her throat, fingers fidgeting with the handle of her suitcase. “And being apart from you.”

And just as Wilhemina glanced past her at the taxi sitting idle in the street, Mildred looked up, eyes glassy and almost vibrating with emotion. 

“Does your offer still stand?”

Wilhemina had to physically bite the inside of her cheek to keep tears from her eyes, her fingers itching and playing on the top of her cane accordingly. 

“Are the rest of your bags in the taxi?” Wilhemina asked, trying not to focus on the way Mildred’s chin was trembling. Trying not to hear the pounding in her head to kiss her. 

Mildred nodded, and then Wilhemina was moving past her. A gloved hand skimmed over Wilhemina’s shoulder as she passed, just fleeting enough to be a tap.

“I haven’t paid the driver yet, I—“

But Wilhemina turned, and the angle was exactly like the first time she had walked past her in that stuffy university. But this time, the setting sun was glinting off of Mildred’s hair and there was a hope in her eyes, an intimacy that had Wilhemina’s hand tightening on her cane to keep her balance. 

“You go inside,” she started, swallowing against the dryness in her throat. “Make yourself comfortable, set your things down. I’ll retrieve the rest of your bags and take care of the cab fare.” 

It’s the least I can do, for him bringing you back to me.

Not even five minutes later, Mildred’s luggage was stacked in the foyer and the cab was driving away as Wilhemina stalked back up the short walk to her door. 

She had expected Mildred to be sitting at the dining table, or putting her things in the bedroom. But to her surprise, when she closed the door, locked it safely behind her, and turned, Mildred was standing in the middle of her entryway, still holding tight to her suitcase and watching Wilhemina with sharp eyes. 

Wilhemina tapped her cane, swallowing, and she didn’t miss the way Mildred’s eyes flicked to it. 

And then, just like that, Mildred dropped her suitcase and practically ran to Wilhemina, gloved hands pulling her face down, pulling their mouths together.

Wilhemina let herself moan, tears instantly pricking her eyes at the memory of how good this felt. How right. And then Mildred’s hands were on her waist and she was pushing her back against the door. Hard. 

“I missed you so much, Mina,” she breathed between kisses, peppering them over Wilhemina’s cheeks and down her jaw. 

And then the tears did fall, because she had missed Mildred, too. So, incredibly much. More than she would have missed the air she breathed, the food she ate. More than she had ever missed anyone or anything in her entire life. 

Her soul had been ripped from her, torn away and shipped off across the country. And now it was back, and with every kiss, they sewed themselves back together. 

Stitch by stitch. Piece by piece. 

~~~ 

She crowned herself with her nurse’s hat, pinning her hair back carefully around it and buttoning it up in the back. Wilhemina watched her. Watched the way she stood a bit straighter. Watched the way her feet came together and she shifted her weight, perfectly even. Perfectly level. 

Wilhemina walked over, drawn to her like a magnet. And her cane clicked as she went, tapping down beside her and forcing a smirk to curl Mildred’s lips as she glanced at Wilhemina in the mirror. 

She walked right up to her, snaking an arm around her waist and pulling Mildred back against her chest as her mouth found her ear. 

“You look impeccable, darling.”

Mildred quirked a brow, eyes like daggers as they bored into Wilhemina from the mirror. She hummed. 

“Almost good enough to eat.” Wilhemina pressed a kiss to her jaw, letting her eyes rake over Mildred’s perfect neck, the way it quivered as she swallowed, the shine of her hair pulled up in impeccable fashion just above her collar. She fingered the fabric there, letting her nails scrape over the soft skin just below her ear. 

“Why don’t you take a bite, hm?” Mildred’s voice caught as Wilhemina’s nail pricked against her pulse point, and when she spoke again it was low, raspy. Dangerous. “See what happens.”

Wilhemina growled, leaning forward and tugging her earlobe between her teeth. She pulled Mildred flush against her, hand splaying out on her stomach. And Mildred gasped as her fingers found Wilhemina’s thigh, nails piercing the fabric. Wilhemina felt her swallow down a moan, tense, stutter. And then there was a long breath and a shaky sigh, and the nails in Wilhemina’s leg retracted as Mildred pulled away. 

“I can’t be late for my first day of work, dear.” 

She brushed down her dress, straightening out that perfectly pinned crown and putting the finishing touches on her hair. 

And then, before Wilhemina could blink, Mildred wrapped her slender fingers around her tie and pulled her forward, dragging her out of the bedroom and through the house to the front door. 

A disapproving tap of her cane, a small frown, and then Mildred had her purse and pressed a soft kiss to Wilhemina’s cheek, skirting out the door with a dark, “See you tonight, cinnamon.” 

And she almost felt like it was a threat. 

~~~ 

Wilhemina had never known love. 

She had told Mildred flat out over dinner one night when traumas and pasts and fears were all laid bare on the table. 

Mildred was different. She had known it and lost it. Seen people shattered beyond repair because of it. And she had put up those brick and mortar walls around her heart so that she couldn’t feel that kind of sadness ever again. 

Yet somehow, every night that she came home to Wilhemina’s arms and her small smile and her absolute and complete honesty, she felt those walls start to fall. Little by little, brick by brick. And every morning when she awoke in her lover’s arms, after breakfasts shared and dressed zipped and buttoned, she had to rebuild it. Fortify herself for the world that lay just outside their door. The evil of it. The hurt. 

It became all-consuming, this uneasy thought of love. It permeated every minute of her waking day, and haunted her dreams like some sort of cruel, intangible thing. But she always woke in Wilhemina’s arms. Safe and protected and entirely too vulnerable. 

And one day, one tiny day that should have been absolutely nothing, Mildred was so consumed with the inkling of possibility of falling entirely too hard in love with Wilhemina, and what that meant for her future in this world, that she lost herself. Faltered, for a moment. Had to do up the buttons of her uniform twice before getting them to align. And forgot her lunch as she grabbed her purse and walked out the door. 

~~~ 

It wasn’t unusual for Mildred to leave for work before Wilhemina did. It wasn’t unusual that she left for work before Wilhemina was even awake and out of bed. 

At first it had scared Wilhemina, waking up alone and cold in a bed that had been so comforting and warm just hours before. Abandoned. Forgotten. 

But Mildred had only been in the kitchen, cracking her eggs with such precision that Wilhemina had almost decided right then and there never to touch another egg again. 

It just so happened that Mildred’s mornings got earlier just as Wilhemina’s nights got longer, the flex and pull of their schedules only crossing at certain points. A whirlwind of a double helix in flux. 

Those days, Mildred would slip out of bed so quietly that Wilhemina wouldn’t even notice, usually awoken by the inevitable cold of an empty bed, rather than some sound from the bathroom or clattering from the kitchen. 

Today had been no different. Today had been routine. Until Wilhemina opened the refrigerator almost three hours after Mildred had gone, only to find her lunch sitting packed and abandoned on the second shelf. 

It wasn’t even a thought, the decision to take it to her. Just an action. The institution was on her way to work — well, almost on her way — and Wilhemina was already running early. It was nothing. 

Until it wasn’t. 

Wilhemina picked through the patients that crowded the common room, pursing her lips against the disgusted expression that was forming against her will. She stepped carefully, cane tapping lightly as she watched where she was going. The facility was impeccable, but this space, so unlike the hall, belonged to the patients. Not the nurses. Blankets were left forgotten on the ground, and shoes had been kicked off. And Wilhemina was just uncomfortable enough to worry about losing her footing. 

She made it all the way to the other side of the room, coming up on a window like a sanctuary, before she realized that Mildred wasn’t here. 

But just as the thought crossed her mind and she leaned forward to peer outside, Wilhemina heard her. 

It was easy enough. The rooms were lavish, but mostly tile, and Mildred’s voice tended to carry, no matter how soft. But right now, it was hard. Harder than Wilhemina had ever heard it. 

“I don’t care if he won’t take it, he needs it. If he doesn’t take his medicine, then not only will it put everyone else here at risk, but how soon can we expect them all to start refusing their medication? They need it, Betsy. They don’t know what is good for them. We know what is best.”

Wilhemina turned from the window, Mildred’s lunch clutched between gloved fingers. And Mildred must have noticed the movement, because she looked up. But just as Wilhemina let her guard down and offered a small smile, fingers twitching in a half wave, Mildred’s face melted, something like humiliation flushing through her perfect complexion as she marched straight to Wilhemina. 

Shit. 

“What on earth do you think you’re doing here?” Mildred whispered, gripping her fingers into Wilhemina’s elbow and pulling her back across the room to the nurse’s station. 

“You forgot your lunch,” Wilhemina tried, keeping her voice down. Because somehow this was what wasn’t allowed. This was what was compromising. 

A lunch. 

Mildred’s humiliation shifted to horror, glancing for maybe the first time down at Wilhemina’s hands. 

“You can’t be serious.” 

“I don’t understand what the issue is, Nurse Ratched.” Wilhemina made sure to drag out her title. Just a bit too loud. Because she couldn’t seriously be upset with her for trying to be kind. For trying to do the right thing. She couldn’t possibly— 

Mildred’s eyes narrowed before she glanced behind her. And when she spoke, it was through gritted teeth. 

“Go set that down over there.” She indicated to a desk in the corner of the room. “And then go back to work before you screw something else up.”

A flat laugh fell out of Wilhemina almost before she could help it, fingers tightening on the bagged lunch. And before she knew what she was doing, she had shoved it into Mildred’s hands, leaning in impossibly close as she growled.

“Go set it down yourself.” She tapped her cane, too hard. Too loud. A few of the patients covered their ears. “You can be certain that this is the last time I ever do you any favors. Do you understand?”

Mildred’s nostrils flared, and her fingers twitched over the bag. “I didn’t ask for your help.”

And then Wilhemina straightened, nose twitching as she quirked her brow. “And let’s hope you never need it again.”

And then she was gone, breezing past Mildred before she said something else and the tears sticking in Wilhemina’s throat pushed up and fell. 

She heard the bag crunch as she hit her cane on the floor, propelling herself forward, one step after the other, closer and closer to the exit. And she hated the way she hoped for Mildred’s voice to ring out, to call her back. 

She almost looked back over her shoulder, a moment of weakness that she couldn’t afford. So she ducked her head instead, plowing ahead and storming down the hallway. Out the doors. All the way down the stairs to the street. 

She fumed in the taxi, fumed all the way to her desk. Fumed for the next nine and a half hours that she sat at work, fingers picking at her typewriter as she swiveled back and forth in her chair, digging and twisting her cane into the weak wood floors as she ran over arguments and words to spit at her Mildred. Her Mildred. Nurse Ratched. 

They weren’t the same woman. But neither was she. How could she be? 

By the time Jefferson came to get her, going over final plans for the next day and collecting her paperwork, she had dug a nice little dent into the floor. 

Small, deep. A bullet hole kneaded slowly and steadily. Just like the one Mildred’s words had worn into her heart. 

~~~ 

“You wouldn’t like it if I showed up at your place of work without warning, would you?” Mildred’s voice was steady, arms crossed over her chest. 

“Don’t—“ 

“Would you?” 

Wilhemina’s cane hit the ground. “Stop that. Don’t treat me like you treat them. Don’t talk to me like that.”

“Like what? I’m just asking a simple question. The answer is either yes, or no.”

“Mildred, stop shrinking me.”

“You think I’m trying to control you?”

“No,” Wilhemina growled, stalking over to her as the last of her patience wore through. “I know you’re trying to control me. And you know that that’s not how this relationship works.” 

She bent over Mildred, practically panting, and Mildred was shocked when a pang of regret shot through her. But then something hardened, because no. Wilhemina didn’t get to win this one. She had come to her office out of the blue. Could have exposed them. Put them both in danger. 

Because Mildred had been careless. Forgotten her lunch. All for being so consumed with the idea of—

Mildred tipped her chin up, eyes hard as they met Wilhemina’s fiery ones. She stood her ground. 

“Apologize.”

Wilhemina set her jaw. “No.”

She leaned up on her toes, leveling their height. “Apologize.”

Wilhemina shook her head slowly, eyes narrowing as her nose twitched. As her jaw set. 

And then there were hands on Mildred’s shoulders and Wilhemina’s mouth was on hers, hard and fast and furious as she pushed her back, back, back, slamming her hard against the wall. 

“Fuck,” Mildred hissed, and then Mina broke from her, mouth on her ear as she purred. 

“Language.” 

She scoffed, shoving at her, needing her off of her so that she could breathe. Think. Because when her hands were on her like this, and she was breathing like this, quick and ragged and right behind her ear, Mildred’s mind only comprehended one thing. 

“Mina,” she tried, nails digging in as Wilhemina pulled her off the wall for a split second, only to throw her back against it again. She cried out, something hard knotting over her heart. 

So this was how it was going to be? Fine. 

Mildred lunged forward, kissing Wilhemina sloppily, desperately. Any way she could hold on to some semblance of control. 

And she gasped, just as Mildred knew she would. So she took the opening, gripping hard into her waist and pushing her off, before her nails raked down Wilhemina’s arm and her fingers closed around her wrist. 

Mildred pulled, yanking Wilhemina after her, across the living room, around the sofa. Down the short hallway, pulling harder every time Wilhemina tried to plant her feet. Until she threw her into the bedroom, Mina practically spinning around and pinning Mildred against the wall, the door jam digging into her spine. 

She cried out, hands flying to Wilhemina’s shoulders. Clawing at her. Grappling for something to hold her down and hold her steady so she could get her advantage back. 

“You’re so fucking infuriating,” Wilhemina growled, biting hard on Mildred’s neck. But no. She didn’t get to win. 

So she pushed, hard, and sent Mina stumbling back. And Mildred was right there, stalking after her and shoving again, and this time, when Wilhemina stumbled, she landed hard on the bed. 

Mildred was over her in seconds, panting as she crushed her mouth back against Wilhemina’s, tongues fighting as their teeth clashed. Her fingers found buttons and she yanked, the rip cutting through the room. 

She didn’t even wait for Wilhemina to shrug the shirt off, fingers already dug into the waistband of her skirt and rucking it down, down, down. 

She got it down around her ankles, but as she braced herself on Mina’s knees and pulled herself back up, Wilhemina’s hand found her chin, pulling her in for a bruising kiss and holding her firm as her free hand flicked open the buttons on her shirt, one by one, so fast it should have been impossible. 

“Get your shirt off,” Mildred panted, hands scrambling to find purchase on Mina as she crawled up on the bed and straddled her. 

But Mina pulled back, a smirk like death making her eyes go black. 

“Ladies first.” 

And that was the last straw. Mildred’s patience had already been tested from the ordeal this morning, amplified by the unexpectedness of Wilhemina showing up at her work. That stupid, thoughtful way she brought her the forgotten lunch. The tiny wave. Like she cared. Like she—

Mildred growled, practically a scream as she grabbed Wilhemina’s shoulders and shoved her down until she was swallowed by the mattress. Splayed a hand out over her chest to keep her pinned. Keep her down. 

She could feel Mina’s heart hammering, could feel how fast she was panting. Gasping. 

Nails clawed at her arm, dragging down as Mildred cried out. There would be blood soon. She knew that feeling. 

But then Wilhemina pulled her hand from her chest, twining their fingers hard and pressing hot, wet, quick kisses down over the already reddening marks. Yanked her fingers back. Licked. Right over her palm. 

Mildred moaned, the feeling going straight to her core, and then her hands were in Wilhemina’s hair and she was pulling her neck taunt to get better access. So she could bite and suck and mark her for everyone to see. 

She sat up on her knees, gaining leverage. And Mina’s hands were on her ass in an instant, kneading. Hard. 

“Logic would imply that I shouldn’t let you touch me until you apologize,” Mildred managed, back to base form as she leaned into Mina’s hands. As she moaned into her neck. 

Her teeth dug into a particularly sensitive spot, pinching the already flushed skin. And just as Mina gasped, just as she thought she’d won, Mina’s hands fell to her thighs, the world spun, and she was on her back. And Mina’s hand was wrapped tight around her throat. 

“No more talking,” she growled, her free hand scraping roughly down Mildred’s stomach, under the band of her skirt, and straight between her thighs. 

“Fuck, Mina,” Mildred gasped, the words melting into a groan as her thumb slid over her underwear. 

Wilhemina shoved her further into the bed, fingers tightening. And Mildred’s vision blurred at the edges as she gasped for breath. 

Perfect. Delicious. Exactly what she wanted. 

No talking. Only feeling. Only Wilhemina. 

But then Mina spoke, voice hot by her ear. 

“I said no talking. I don’t want another word out of you until you’re ready to apologize.”

She pushed her underwear aside on the last word, slipping two fingers easily inside. Mildred cried out, hands grabbing for the arm braced on her throat and holding on tight as her hips started rocking of their own accord. 

“Apologize for what,” she panted, eyes screwing shut as Mina curled her fingers. 

A flat laugh. A squeeze to her throat. Heat pooling between her thighs. 

“For making an entire scene just because I brought you your lunch. Because I took time out of my day to make sure you were taken care of.”

Mildred was slammed back into the mattress again. 

“What does your logic say about that, Nurse Ratched?”

There were tears pricking at Mildred’s eyes now, because she wouldn’t break. She wouldn’t. But Wilhemina’s fingers picked up their pace, and then her mouth was on hers, and Mildred knew exactly what was coming. 

Mina bit down on her lip. Hard. Yanked at it, pulling until Mildred whimpered. 

“Apologize,” she growled, fingers twisting and curling and nails pricking against Mildred’s throat. 

Mildred barely had the competence to shake her head no, but she managed it. Because as loud as her body was screaming with a need for more, for so much more of this woman, her brain wouldn’t let her. 

The rational part of Mildred’s brain kept the words stuck down in her throat, pounding that she didn’t need to say them. That this wasn’t her fault. That she had only been protecting herself. But the sentimental part kept pushing them back up again, harder and harder the longer Mildred stared at Wilhemina, eyes dark and predatory and so filled with hurt. 

“I’m not letting you come until you apologize,” Wilhemina scolded, nails scratching over Mildred’s throat as her fingers moved faster, harder. Her thumb brushed over her clit. 

Mildred sobbed, entire body vibrating with the beg for release. 

It almost felt like she was choking, the way she was swallowing the words down, only for them to get stuck again. Suffocate her. 

Wilhemina shook her head softly, holding Mildred’s eye contact like a lifeline as the smallest smile graced her lips. An angel above her. Salvation. 

And that was it. Mildred broke for the millionth time with this woman, relinquishing control. 

Letting go. 

Her orgasm hit her without Mina’s permission, shaking through her body and sending lightning down her spine. And the words were pulled from her just before her vision went black, hands twisting on Mina’s arm and toes curling hard in the sheets. 

“I lo-ove you.” 

She didn’t realize that she hadn’t apologized, the wrong words coming out of her, until she blinked her vision back and saw Wilhemina’s wide eyes, clarity piercing through whatever hurt and determination had been there just moments before. 

And then Mildred realized why the words had burned so hot in her throat. It wasn’t an apology. It was the truth. The reason. The explanation of why she had behaved the way she did and why she had lashed out. Why she had felt so scared and vulnerable that she couldn’t emotionally handle seeing Wilhemina somewhere she didn’t expect her. 

She wanted to apologize then, wanted to take them back. Because she had let herself slip. Again. And all it seemed to be doing was causing more trouble. She wasn’t tampering anything down, she was spinning the world further and further out of control. Unthreading her reality and watching the picture unravel before her eyes. 

“How do you always seem to mess everything up?”

“I-I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—“

“Everything you touch turns to dust. How is that even possible? You should win some sort of prize for screwing this many things up. I swear.”

Wilhemina’s hand over hers brought her back, the air deathly still as Mildred’s voice rang off the walls. Over and over and over. 

She met Wilhemina’s eyes, heart still hammering in her chest as she fought to regulate her breathing. To calm herself down. It had always been so easy. Why was it so difficult now? 

“Does that scare you...?” Mina asked softly, shifting over her as her gaze burned through Mildred. 

Before she knew what she was doing, she nodded. Because it did. She did.

And Wilhemina matched her, nodding in time. “It scares me, too.” 

At that she did apologize, a soft “I’m sorry” falling from her lips in a last desperate attempt to calm the situation. To salvage the last piece of anything. To pull control back down over herself. 

But Wilhemina only shook her head, a softness in her eyes that Mildred had never seen before. 

“Don’t apologize.” 

And then that heavy silence. So familiar. So comfortable. Give their souls space. Let them figure it out. 

The words would come when they were ready. 

Wilhemina sniffed, tracing her thumb over Mildred’s cheek. “Do you remember when I told you that I had never known love?” 

And Mildred nodded again, finding herself unable to do anything else with the way Mina was staring at her. Eyes glittering. Galaxies. 

“I’m not sure that’s true anymore,” she whispered, gaze falling to Mildred’s mouth. Across the ages and spaces and miles between them. It could only have been inches now. “I don’t think it’s been true for a while.” 

Mildred let the words swim around her, furnishing her sanctuary here, pressed into a bed underneath Wilhemina. Locked in orbit, pulled in tight and unable to do anything but stare. 

She startled as a tear fell onto her cheek, swiping at it quickly as she sniffed. Came back to the present. The room fell back into place. 

And then her world, her life, her eternity, her Wilhemina kissed her. 

“My beautiful Millie,” she murmured, kissing her until she couldn’t breathe. Until the world swam again, this time for a completely different reason, happiness and joy threading through her and pouring like stardust in her veins. 

“Yours.” 

~~~ 

“Shall we?” 

Mildred threaded her arm through Wilhemina’s, pushing her hair up and letting her fingers ghost over the rim of her hat. 

“I’d love nothing more, Ms. Venable.” 

And the way that they walked together, their steps perfectly in time, Wilhemina’s cane tapping as she moved forward steadily, one foot after the other, matched with Mildred’s calculated walk, the way her feet barely crossed and she was almost pigeon-toed, like she was strutting down a runway. 

It should have been illegal, just after the war. It should have been frowned upon. But the power that flowed off of them when they were arm in arm like this, the way Mildred’s heart swelled and her chin tipped up and she managed to physically look down on everyone in her path, had people scattering like rats as their heels clicked along the tile. 

And the entire night, everyone at Wilhemina’s office party steered more than clear of them. Hushed whispers behind their backs had Wilhemina’s hands skirting just a bit too far down Mildred’s hips as she took small sips of her champagne, setting her gloved fingers itching and her thighs pressing together under her perfectly asymmetrical skirt. 

And Mildred made it a point to turn her head, just so, and whisper in Wilhemina’s ear whenever she was mid-conversation with her coworkers. Sometimes it was nothing. Sometimes it was filthy. 

But either way, she knew just the breath on Wilhemina’s ear was enough to make her pulse run a bit quicker. 

And sure enough, before dinner was even served, Wilhemina had made some sort of excuse and the two of them were running from the taxi, through the rain, and huddling together on the porch as Mina dug for her key. 

That night was her favorite night. 

Both of them soaked to the bone, sharing over-poured glasses of wine, half-dressed and drying out in front of the fireplace. 

And when Wilhemina gave her that smile, that particularly fond smile where her cheeks pushed up and her eyes softened, Mildred pushed her tongue into her cheek, fighting her own grin. 

They kissed until the fire burnt out, embers barely flickering in the black room. And just as the last of the light died, Mildred and Wilhemina sticky and naked and curled together on the floor, Wilhemina made to get up. 

Mildred’s hand on her arm stopped her, and she snuggled further against her to keep her still. 

“No light tonight,” she said softly. And she meant it. 

She wasn’t frightened. Not now. Not anymore. 

“Millie?” 

And Mildred let herself smile as she nodded. Because she had never been more certain of anything than she was of loving Wilhemina in this moment, and of letting herself be loved in return. Letting herself go. 

The world wasn’t logical. The world wasn’t ordered. Not when it came to her. Wilhemina had come in and spun her right out of control. And she kept doing it. Over and over again. Like it was a game. 

Maybe it was. 

And as Mildred leaned forward, capturing Mina’s lips in a languid kiss and humming contentedly, she realized that she was absolutely fine losing, if it meant that she got to have this. 

Tag List: @shineestark​ @duchessfics​ @darling-dontforgetme​ @midnight-lestrange​ @nerdaroo​ @thatgirlintheleatherjacket​

[daisyachain]

There’s a nuanced discussion to be had about the way asexual/aromantic behaviour is read as a combination of ‘queer,’ ‘deviant,’ and ‘acceptable’ by the cisheteronormative paradigm without calling aspecs straight lite or denying that it exists in a dimension separate from the gay-straight spectrum. ‘Same-sex’ and ‘opposite-sex’ will be used in some cases because the cisheteronormative paradigm we’re talking about (We Live In A Society) by definition doesn’t include trans people because it’s bad.

Descriptor 1 ‘queer’: people without known opposite-sex love interests are read as specifically gay in both history and fiction. Characters in fiction are queer-coded by showing a disinterest in the opposite sex as much as by showing interest in the same sex, especially in contexts where queerness is so marginalized as to be unspeakable in the mainstream (e.g. USA 1930-1990). Men without known female liaisons were usually suspected to be gay in 19th-20thC Anglo-American cultures (probably all Euro-related ones but I can’t speak to that literature and history). Women weren’t considered to be lesbian as much, but only because that cultural milieu couldn’t compute wlw until the 20th century. As soon as it could, the lesbian stereotype becomes ‘man-hater’ more than ‘woman-lover.’

Part of this is just sexism, but the parallels with the Confirmed Bachelor of earlier decades indicate that queerness manifests in two ways: failing to follow the cisheterosexual norm (birth -> childhood -> single youth -> heterosexual relationship) and following a path that diverges from it. Asexuality/aromanticism exists in a grey area here, it presses a ‘pause’ before the heterosexual evolution is complete. It can be interpreted within the heterosexual paradigm as heterosexual…BUT too immature/too busy/too distracted to think about/get involved in/want heterosexual relationships. However, the assumption is always that asexuality/aromanticism is failed or stunted heterosexuality, not a complete form of being. The workaholic, the trauma victim, the weirdo, the individual who is so ugly or undesirable that they can’t be viewed as human, and so they can’t be viewed as heterosexual. Asexuality/aromanticism neither confirms nor denies heterosexuality, and it also neither confirms nor denies being bi/gay. It’s unknown, unclassifiable, suspicious, odd, in a word, queer.

Descriptor 2 ‘deviant’: I don’t mean this in the ‘things a christian call you’ way but in the strict sense of ‘something that deviates from the norm.’ Parts of 21st century queer activism have focused on the similarity between heterosexual experiences and bi/gay experiences to build bridges. Attraction, romance, romantic sexual life partnership, the whole thing is the same except for the gender (relationships are no longer strictly opposite-gender). This is a way to build understanding, it got a bunch of cisgendered straights on side, etc. What it also does is obscure the ways queerness is different from cisheterosexuality. Where partnerships aren’t guaranteed to be reproductively viable, it’s difficult to build families solely based on biological descent. And in a community born outside of societal norms, then other societal norms are all up in the air. One thing that this rhetoric also excludes is asexuality/aromanticism. When gay/bi-straight alliance is based off of the common experience of monogamous romantic/sexual attraction and partnership (‘love’), then the leftovers outside of that common experience have negotiable humanity. Queerness of all sorts is marginalized/punished/reviled ofc, but as has been noted before, the most mainstream support of queerness is based off of ‘universal’ experiences that are decidedly not universal. In the old paradigm of heterosexuality and the small-but-mainstream paradigm of love-is-love, asexuality/aromanticism is a deviation from the acceptable narrative.

Descriptor 3 ‘acceptable’: in the same way that asexuality/aromanticism doesn’t fit into any of the mainstream conceptions of human life priorities, a lot of people don’t understand it. 19th century bourgeois accepted Boston Marriages because they didn’t understand how women could possibly desire lives that weren’t with men, they read the relationships as asexual/aromantic (not unacceptable) and also as subordinate to heterosexual marriage (not approved). Asexuality/aromanticism is seen as acceptable ONLY if the alternative is being gay/bi. Look on any dudebro discussion of gay-coded male characters, and they’ll immediately jump to describe them as asexual. If the character/ has any relationship with women, though, and the argument will be that they like tits, they can’t possibly be gay/bi. If you look at discussions of characters/people who could possibly be asexual/aromantic, they fall all over themselves to either insist they’re banging hot chicks (bc female characters aren’t allowed to even get as far as ace-coding, they must constantly be available) or to insult them (sometimes as a way to relate, projecting their own incelness on to some innocent cardboard cutout). Another place where you see mentions of asexuality (not aromanticism) in the mainstream is discussion of sterile/genetically abnormal people/characters. Clones, artificial humans, robots, aliens are fair game because sexuality is inherently tied to humanity. This, anything inhuman must be asexual. Rather than being good (heterosexual) or bad (gay/bi), asexuality/aromanticism is alien. Real people can’t possibly understand asexuality/aromanticism, which means it a) can’t be judged, b) must be a failure to achieve humanity, c) must be native to inhumans.

[anthrotographer]

Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962)

Directed by: Agnès Varda

Daises (1966)

Directed by: Věra Chytilová

Sorry for the long scroll. This is an essay I did for a class about a year ago. It was on two women directed foreign films Cleo from 5 to 7 and Daises. In the paper I get into a lot of the similarities between the films and what they do well, but I don’t get to really give my opinion on them. Both the Czech Daises and French Cleo are wonderfully unique. Daises was chaotic, fun, and plotless. I really had to work to eek out some meaning from that one. Cleo from 5 to 7 caught me by surprise of how much I loved it. It’s one of the best films I’ve ever watched. I don’t always judge films objectively like I ought to. Usually if there is an extremely stuck up, narcissistic lead character in a movie it turns me off. I’m not really interested in seeing personality types like that. Cleo from 5 to 7 breaks through for me though. The evolution of Cleo’s character is based so much on real experiences that I find it to be such a truthful story, with layers of weighty symbolism.

———————————————————————

The Timid Cleo and the Bold Daises

Through the Nineteen-sixties feminist movements could be seen sprouting all across the globe. The art, music, and filmmaking alike from these periods captured and spread these feminist ideals. Agnes Varda in France and Vera Chytilová in Czechoslovakia were women film directors who made films with women’s issues in mind. Varda’s Cleo from 5 to 7 is a slow, plot driven drama that follows, as David Cook puts it, “the life of a young pop singer who is waiting for a lab report that will tell her whether she has cancer” (Cook 370). Vera Chytilová ’s Daises appears to be a plot-less comedy headed by an anarchic female duo. Both films were made in patriarchal societies and appear to take place in them. The two films explore how their women protagonists deal with being seen as objects of beauty in these male dominated worlds. Cleo struggles with finding her self-worth outside of her superficiality and feels like maintaining her beauty is tied to that self-worth. Marie I and Marie II in Daises inversely have no questions about their self-worth and use their objectivity to their advantage. The Maries thus have less evolving to do in comparison to Cleo who’s journey it is to detach her pride from her beauty.

Cleo wallows in fear as she awaits the results of her biopsy. Everyone she would consider “close” to her, like her assistant, her boyfriend, and her pianist seem uninterested in her troubles or are unwilling to give her a comforting ear. That is until Cleo meets up with her old friend from art school, Dorothee. After a stressful day Cleo heads to the sculpting studio where Dorothee works as a nude model. As Cleo walks into the studio the camera appears to give us a first person shot from Cleo’s perspective. It’s a slow, apprehensive moving shot into the room where the sculpting is happening, giving us the feeling that Cleo is uncomfortable with what’s happening. Then we see Dorothee posing naked still in the middle of the class and she meets eyes with Cleo. She does not appear embarrassed in the slightest, on the contrary she is excited to see her friend. Cleo waits for Dorothee to finish her shift and get changed so they can walk out together. We learn as they talk that Cleo was in fact uncomfortable in the studio as she tells Dorothee that she would be “afraid people would find a fault” if that was her. Dorothee responds with one of the most profound quotes of the film and one that seems to stick with Cleo. Dorothee says “my body makes me happy, not proud” meaning that she can be happy about the way she looks without having her self-esteem or pride being affected by it. Through the first half of the film Cleo had been overtly concerned about her disease possibly affecting her appearance. This is exemplified by her constantly checking in mirrors to see if she is still pretty. It appears that to Cleo her beauty and fame are all she is good for. She sees herself through the patriarchal lens. For example, Cleo’s never present boyfriend shows up to her apartment for a quick chat in which he avoids the topic of her sickness and extols upon her beauty for five minutes until he leaves. Also, a few minutes later Bob, her pianist shows up and jokes about how he’s attracted to her because of her money. The possibility of a cancer diagnosis forces Cleo to start thinking the way Dorothee thinks. Allison Smith writes about Cleo’s cancer that “Her knowledge of its existence therefore obliges her to see herself differently, to take account of her own awareness” (Smith 97). This focus on the world outside of herself helps her find someone who actually cares about her and not just her good looks. That person is the soldier Antoine. Even though he finds her beautiful that is not the only aspect of Cleo that he is invested in. He cares about her health; the only other character in the film besides her longtime friend Dorothee that truly worries about her diagnosis. Cleo ultimately finds solace in the fact that she has made a real, non-superficial relationship with another human being. The protagonists in Daises also are involved in superficial relations, yet they do not perceive them as negative the way Cleo does.

The two young woman named Marie who headline the film Daises have no qualms about being objectified. Like Cleo, everywhere they go, they capture the gaze of men. The Maries are  comfortable within themselves enough to use their beauty as a tool for their own benefit. From the outset of the film the girls exclaim that they intend to spoil themselves, so using men for free dinners and then dropping them like used napkins afterwards naturally follows. One such occurrence happens in a scene where the red headed Marie is over at the apartment of some butterfly collecting pianist. The man creepily exclaims his love to her through a poem while Marie poses nude for him. He calls her Julie, giving us the impression that Marie gave him a false name, just like the Maries do with all the men they meet. Handing out false names shows the lack of commitment and respect they have for the men they toy with. Once Marie starts to put her bra back on, the pianist gets angry and says, “I wish you’d never come into my life!” Marie knows exactly how to play him though and the next thing he sees is Marie holding two framed butterflies over her exposed chest. The man completely reverts back to exclaiming his love for “Julie”. Marie uses this opportunity to ask for the one thing that the Maries always want, food. Women overeating is just one of the patriarchal taboos that Daises flips on its head.

The characters of this film go against the traditional patriarchal ideals of what women should be. Women are used to having their beauty be used against them and for the pleasure of men, but in Vera Chytilová ’s film the Maries use their beauty against men and for the pleasure of themselves. Traditionally women also have been forced into the submissive role in society, where they have to keep themselves composed and presentable constantly. To the Maries that is not even a thought that crosses their minds. They do not adhere to being the submissive ones, in fact they control the dialogue and direction of every interaction with men in the film. Laurel Harris seems to agree with me when he writes “…the Maries’ hysterical excess is a calculated response to inadequate roles in their society for individuals of their age and gender” (Harris 4). The duo also does not worry about seeming composed or mannerly when scoffing down pastries and appetizers in crowded restaurants. In antiquated gender roles women are made to watch how much they eat so they can maintain their figure, but at dinner with one of their suckers, one Marie asks the man “Are you on a diet?” I agree with Peter Hames assessment of Daises’ conception when he writes “Since women have been excluded from productive behavior, they have turned to art and play” (Hames 87). Hames is saying that Vera Chytilová ’s film is a reaction to woman being controlled for far too long. Whether Chytilová  set out to make a feminist film or not the end result for Daises is a film that does not judge its non-conformist female characters.

Cleo from 5 to 7 is more explicitly set in a male run society. Agnes Varda created a character in Cleo that starts off fully invested in that societal structure. Her happiness is tied up into her superficial being, but because of the cancer she is forced to take account of what truly is meaningful in her life. She starts to crave caring relationships with people who recognize her for more than just being a pretty pop star. Cleo finds the power within herself to break out of the caged existence of women in a male dominated society. Cleo at one point in the film rips off her wig and gives away her fashionable hat; two symbols of conventional female beauty. Cleo from 5 to 7 and Daises both represent women’s lives in these feministic ways.

The two women filmmakers Agnes Varda and Vera Chytilová end up making similar films in that they have themes of women empowerment. Yet, the way in which its illustrated in each film is drastically different. Chytilová’s Daises wastes no time in showing the viewer that women can be unapologetic anarchists. There is no preconception of womanhood that the Maries have to fight to overcome. They just are empowered women. Cleo from 5 to 7 shows the evolution that a particular woman has to make to escape from seeing herself as just an object. These films helped inspire a generation of women in not conforming to typical patriarchal standards.

 

 

Works Cited

Cook, David A. “Chapter 13.” A History of Narrative Film. W.W. Norton, 2016.

Hames, Peter. “The Golden Sixties: The Czechoslovak New Wave revisited.” Studies in

Eastern European Cinema, 2013.

Harris, Laurel. “Czech New Wave Cinema: The Children of Marx and Kafka.” PopMatters, PopMatters, 30 Mar. 2002.

Smith, Alison. “Agnes Varda.” Manchester and New York, Manchester University Press, 1998.

[okay-victoria]

Love of My Second Life: Tanya & Romance

This is both my take on why, despite seeming like the easiest and healthiest relationship to write, TanyaxVisha is up there with TanyaxMary in difficulty level for pulling off successfully, what I’ve seen go wrong in fanfic so far, and what needs to make it/any romance go right.

Where to start, where to start...um, a warning, for obvious reasons I’m going to have to talk about sex.

The Age Difference

This has the joy of being a bit creepy on both ends of the spectrum! Yay.

Visha Being Creepy

Visha is probably 5 - 6 years older than Tanya. While as more mature adults that age difference is relatively negligible, Tanya being 17/18 and Visha being in her early 20s doesn’t make it suddenly a non-issue. If you and a coworker, both in your first job out of college, went to happy hour and you met his/her significant other and they were a senior in high school, would you feel good about that?

The age-of-consent laws in bygone eras may help your case for why in-story characters give a pass to such things, but it doesn’t really help explain it to your readers. Unless I’m missing something, no one is reading this story from 1920s/30s Germany, and so it needs to have the relationship explained in a way that tries to work for modern standards. Additionally, I think people tend to mix up age-of-consent with “people found this generally appropriate”. A 19 year old dating a 59 year old violates no laws in the United States, but that doesn’t mean that most people are going to consider it a loving and healthy relationship without any proof. Even your in-story characters are probably going to have some thoughts.

The final issue, from Visha’s end of the spectrum, is that even when Tanya is aged up to 18+ and has gained some secondary sexual characteristics, she is sometimes still presented as being an “eternal loli” who can be easily be mistaken for someone around 14/15, an age at which girls normally have some secondary sex characteristics, but distinctly immature ones. I imagine this problem stems from two places:

1) Scenes when Tanya’s lolidom is brought up are not the same scenes as the romantic ones, so the problem is not as obvious to the author and

2) Author forgets that “short+small boobs+doesn’t have wrinkles yet” does not actually result in people looking like they are mid-puberty. Without being really creepy, as women age, their breast tissue drops down and to the side, waist/hip/leg ratios change, and the face loses its baby fat, among other things. Writing that references Tanya as looking like a teen comes along with the unfortunate implication that she actually looks like she is still mid-puberty, and Visha...is into that, instead of being someone who is attracted to petite POST pubescent women.

These are all extremely fixable problems. Really, all an author has to do is make Visha acknowledge that it’s weird, and probably try to talk to Tanya about her reservations before she starts trying to seduce her. It’s the handwave that is the issue. For the last/puberty problem, unless there is some reason I probably don’t want to know about that the author only wants to write the relationship if Tanya looks 14, simply describe her as a petite but adult woman, and if you need to use her looking young as a plot point, have her make an effort to adapt her adult characteristics to suit or hope that nobody looks hard enough to tell the difference.

Tanya Being Creepy

While Tanya is physically the junior member of the relationship, mentally, she is the senior, and by a lot. Tanya knows this. While I don’t necessarily think Salaryman is the Earth’s most morally-pure man, I have a high enough opinion of him to think that he was not pursuing college girls when he was like 35. Tanya should also have a moment of thought over this, or the relationship needs to wait until Visha is closer to her late 20s, when she is approaching a similar level of life maturity that Salaryman would have felt was close to his own.

Even if you think that Salaryman’s logical side would have been eroded by his “but I’m a guy, I can’t help it, college girls are hot” side [I’m side-eyeing you], I think it’s very unlikely that living as Tanya, and being on the receiving end of that kind of stuff, wouldn’t make her reconsider her stance on it, at least a little.

I know, I know, Visha’s been to war! She’s not the same as some random college girl in 2020! While this is allowable as a partial justification, because it is true, it ignores a whole lot.

First off, maturity is not a straightforward drive. All parts of you do not mentally mature at the same time. If you want to write early 20s Visha as a mature-enough partner for Tanya, a bit of time needs to be spent on what Visha loses because of it - she never has, and never will, get to be that happy-go-lucky girl. While making fun of young women for being dramatic gossips, obsessing about non-serious things, etc remains a popular sport, thinking that you are doing Visha a favor by taking that time of her life away from her says pretty terrible things about how society values women’s relationships with each other. If you don’t mean for your fanfic to accidentally imply that, it’s something that needs some love & care.

Alternatively, you could write a story in which Visha, while being a competent adult, still gets space to explore her “girly” side. If doing so, you are going to have to make a really strong case for why Tanya is willing to put up with this, as Salaryman does not come off as someone who would judge it a good use of time & effort to be constantly letting his girlfriend rattle off about things he thinks are silly and immature - there’s a lot of other fish in the sea, why not find one that is a competent adult *and* isn’t often talking about things you don’t care about.

The Canonical Setup of Visha & Tanya’s relationship

Opposite Goals

In a nutshell, Tanya is presented as a person that wants to live a safe, boring, and non-notable life, is doing her best to get there, and is constantly failing and being stressed about it because she needs to figure out a new plan. Visha is presented as someone who has major qualms about Tanya as a human being, but has a nigh-worshipful respect for her heroic officer side.

This is a massive, and I mean MASSIVE problem. You absolutely cannot ignore that what makes the characters happy is diametrically opposed to each other. Can you overcome it? Yes, by slowly developing the characters towards a compromise, but you can’t just not acknowledge it and expect me to think this relationship has any hope of leaving both partners happy. Either Tanya never escapes her never-ending stress cycle, or she does, and the entire basis of Visha’s attachment to Tanya disappears.

This can be fixed by: 1) Tanya coming to terms with a new side of herself, one that wants to be that hero. This cannot just be a one-paragraph epiphany. Tanya is shown to hate when she thinks her internal self is being changed by her new experiences and she needs a lot of work to get to a point where she is willing to acknowledge this in herself.

2) Visha has to go through a rocky part where she second-guesses herself - she thought she wanted Tanya, but turns out, Tanya isn’t the person she thought she is? How and why does she decide that she likes the person Tanya has become? This is probably the easier route, but I think runs the risk of having an author have Visha *say* Tanya does all these other good things for her, but never really show it happening.

3) The happiest medium is probably one where Visha *mostly* adapts towards Tanya, so Tanya gets to live a quiet but not too quiet life, and Visha learns to love another side. As Visha is compromising more in this sense, a healthy relationship is going to include Tanya realizing what is happening and deciding to make an effort to appeal to Visha and not just be like “Take me as I am. Or don’t.” and Visha unilaterally decides to accept that.

Why Does Tanya want to be in a relationship with Visha?

Tanya betrays no actual emotional attachment to Visha in the light novels. While you can read in rationalization to the reasons Tanya gives to her actions, she herself does not believe that it is because of an emotional connection.

Canonically, Tanya is portrayed as liking Visha because of how well Visha passes the “usefulness” test. This brings up another MASSIVE problem - does Tanya, in any way, shape, or form, actually like Visha as an individual, or just  her ability to conform to the role Tanya wants her to play?

Look, I don’t need Tanya to be in LOVE with Visha in the way we usually talk about people being in love to believe that Tanya can be in a relationship successfully. I’m fully on board with a portrayal in which Tanya can’t quite summon that level of emotion. However, she needs to like and respect Visha as an individual person, and summon a level of emotion beyond friend with benefits.

IMO, it is really hard to do that without showing Tanya and Visha disagreeing on a major piece of Tanya’s philosophy and Tanya actually listening and responding positively to it, not simply agreeing to disagree because it isn’t worth upsetting her useful sidekick, or whatever. There needs to be character development of both characters - Visha finding it in herself to be comfortable rocking the boat, and Tanya having a compelling enough reason to change something that she has clung to for two lives.

Everyone wants to be a lesbian

While I get it, the Empire is not the exact same as Germany, and yes, I know that Weimar Germany was relatively sexually progressive, it’s really not something that a well-written romance should handwave.

“Weimar Culture” in many ways developed as a result of how WW1 went for Germany. If you have a story where WW1 doesn’t go that way for Germany, gay culture is unlikely to flourish to the same degree.

All that aside, Tanya isn’t someone that is going to easily shrug her shoulders and say “you know, sometimes you need to jeopardize your career for the sake of hot sex/love”. She’s pretty clear on which she prioritizes. A lesbian relationship is not going to help her here, and she’s going to be aware of it. She needs to struggle with that choice.

Visha not struggling to accept herself as a lesbian is also somewhat of an oversight. It’s pretty unlikely that a woman born in her time period would come to terms with that easily. Visha is also never shown being attracted to other women besides Tanya, which carries a weird “I’m only a lesbian for you” vibe that is like a gross parallel of a straight guy wanting a lesbian to be so attracted to him she can’t help it, she wants the D.

And now, we enter the realm of Tanya’s relationship with her identity and sexuality.

Tanya is shown to have mental qualms both about entering a straight or lesbian relationship in her new life. The reasons behind those qualms are not explored at all in the LN, but they should be in a story in which Tanya goes into a relationship.

No matter which path puberty takes her down, there is the issue of Tanya being comfortable having sex as a woman. Even if it is with another woman, it is not going to be particular similar to the way she had sex with women as a man. That type of thing is pretty tied up with our identity. Tanya hates having her internal, I haven’t changed identity threatened, and not being able to give sexual pleasure/needing to receive it differently is the type of thing that is probably going to come along with some emotional reservations on her part.

Again, sexual identity being a part of our overall identity, while Tanya may remain attracted to women, that means her identity is now as a gay person, not a straight person. Given her biases from both growing up in Japan and the state of gay rights in her new life, it would seem atypical that she would consider this a non-issue and it wouldn’t make her question her priorities or the type of person she thought she was.

But...The Sex?

Look, I get it, sometimes you wanna see certain characters bang. We’ve all been there.

While yes, I recognize that many humans make terrible decisions solely in pursuit of sex, and so it’s perfectly realistic to have Tanya and Visha do the same and say that’s why you’re handwaving everything else, it is an extremely lazy storytelling technique, especially since neither character seems likely to go to extremes for it.

Because people focus so much on sex appeal, unfortunately, they use it as a substitute for making a good case for the relationship. Visha/Tanya is so attracted to Tanya/Visha, that now they are willing to undergo character development, because the pulsing loins urge them to. Really?

Do at least some of it first, lay the groundwork for romantic attraction before you slam them with physical attraction. While it often works the opposite direction in real life, that undercuts the romantic side in fictional story-telling.

I also think that because of the focus on their attraction to each other, what ends up missing in all TanyaxVisha fanfics I’ve seen so far is the tension. That makes it boring, I don’t care about it, and the entire reason I don’t care about it is because the choice to handwave the inconvenient facts means there is nothing in the way besides Tanya being a dumbass, which you can only do for so long without it becoming boring.

They are both attracted to each other, and admit it to themselves. Neither sees any real problem with the relationship other than not knowing if the other person likes them, but they aren’t even hung up on it and mostly work on straightforwardly winning the other person.

When in doubt, blame it on The Patriarchy

As far as we know, Tanya isn’t pining for relationship, and never thinks about a romantic relationship from her old life. Combined with other things Tanya says, it is hard to imagine Salaryman ever had a “considering marriage” relationship - more like, he may have felt partnership had some desirable aspects, but probably never was able to compromise on his kind of extreme worldview enough to try to make it work with someone, just figuring he’d find “the one” one day that wasn’t going to make him compromise.

While of course, you should not need to change everything about who you are for a romantic partner to like you, saying “you should like me for me” and then putting in exactly zero effort to do things because you know they are important to your partner, even if they aren’t for you, is not one of the keys to a successful relationship.

While it is not a problem inherent to Tanya & Visha’s relationship like the above sections, it is a problem in all forms of how I’ve seen the relationship written. It fails to answer a fundamental question: WHAT CHANGED?

Why did Tanya want love/a relationship/a wife in this life, and not in her last? If she did want it in her last life, why did she successfully find love/a relationship/a wife in this life, and not in her last?

Unfortunately, skipping the answer to this question implies that nothing changed. The success is then entirely reliant and Visha, and that brings along with it a really ugly answer.

Visha’s professional I’ll-do-anything-for-you is equated to a personal I’ll-do-anything-for-you, and she very much accepts Tanya for who she is, through all the flaws that are definitely there and that presumably no woman in Salaryman’s life was willing to put up with. Tanya doesn’t have to undergo any character development to be capable of making the relationship work.

This has some really, really unfortunate undertones. It is the very reason why even legal-but-large age difference relationships often aren’t healthy, because the older partner, instead of trying to be someone capable of contributing to the life of someone their own age, decides it’s easier to find someone younger who doesn’t know better and is more willing to put up with their bullshit. That, then, turns into a creepy grooming undertone - you make the less experienced partner think this is normal.

It really isn’t normal or good that Visha should have to put up with a relationship in which she never discovers who she wants to be because she’s so caught up Tanya’s idea of how to live your life. That is borderline emotional abuse, I am sure no one intends it to be there, but without giving some serious treatment to character development, unfortunately, it is.

To me, this has some of the worst overtones of the worst types of male fantasy - My Manic Pixie Dream Girl is completely devoted to me, and instead of emotionally adding to her life and/or our relationship, she is completely fine with me substituting being a Strong Heroic Man who occasionally buys her Nice Things. She demands I change nothing of myself and completely agrees with my Logical Man worldview, no matter what she needs to change about herself to get there. She’s hot, and I get to simultaneously be a straight man and have hot lesbian sex. Even better, because she’s a “strong” woman who is capable in her own right, not only am I physically satisfied, but I get the ego boost of “earning” the submission and subordination of a woman who is better than most people, because she knows I’m better than her.

Honestly, the more I think about it, the grosser it gets, so as far as fanfic goes I just try to ignore it and understand that the authors intention wasn’t to bring along all this baggage. However, to truly write a good Tanya x Visha story that gets away from all these unfortunate implications is a big undertaking, and it’s really impossible for it to make for a compelling side-plot that doesn’t get much screentime.

I’m generally fine with handwaving issues for sideplots, but if Tanya is making decisions because of her relationship with Visha that are now affecting the main plot, it really isn’t something that *should* be handwaved.

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.