#do you think marriage in our western christian understanding of it even exists over there? and if it does would eda participate?

[fredbsmith]

Discovering My Father

A Memoir

My childhood memories contain no trace of my father.

He was present in my childhood only in the very earliest years, infancy years, before memories can form and stay with you.  He was away, in the Navy serving as a ship’s doctor in the Pacific during World War II while I was still in diapers.  He was never to return to us.  My mother learned of incidents of infidelity during his travels and banished him from the household forever.

Mama’s banishment decree created a vast separation between him and what remained of our nuclear family.  He was never to be spoken of at home, nor his existence acknowledged.   Mama remarried, after the divorce, a man 10 years younger than herself, and she arranged for my younger sister and me to be legally adopted by our new stepfather.  We took on his surname, and the order was given that we must now call him, and think of his as, our father. 

This radical restructuring of our family troubled me in the ensuing years.  My true father had had to sign off on the adoption papers, in return for which he was relieved of any child support obligations.  I found myself wishing he had refused, had angrily denounced this slashing of all bonds between us, we who were his flesh and blood!  Could I ever forgive him for that?

My stepfather came from the rural South; unlike my mother, he had received no education beyond high school; and he had always worked in blue-collar jobs.  He had been raised in a fundamentalist Christian family, and he saw the world in stark, black-and-white tones, full of wickedness and insolence, demanding draconian punishments.  He professed love for me at times, but even at my young age I could sense this was perfunctory, not genuine.  I remember more vividly how strongly he felt that I, a coddled Mama’s boy, was sorely in need of punishment, which he proceeded to administer liberally.  One of the cruelest punishments I received, a prolonged beating with a rubber hose, was for forgetting one of my assigned daily household chores.  I think he had interpreted my lapse in duties as an act of defiance of his commands; I look back on it, to this day, as a typical oversight committed by the absent-minded, day-dreamy sort of person that I have always been.

I was puzzled, as I grew older, by the obvious strength of the marriage bond between my mother and stepfather, and by the way she appeared to defer to him in so many family matters.  She was clearly more intelligent and more learned than he; she had a BA degree from the University of Chicago, after all, the sort of distinction which was quite a rarity among the residents of the small town in Western Colorado where we lived.  As the years went on, my stepfather proved a failure as a family breadwinner, and Mama then became our sole financial support.  I now wonder if Mama wasn’t doing a little bit of acting back then, taking on the role of subservient homemaker to make us appear more like one of the conventional nuclear families we were seeing on television.  I also wonder if she over-valued her marital relationship because, with the bitter memory of her first marriage, she knew my stepfather was not the sort of man who would ever betray her.

I am often troubled reflecting on Mama’s passive acceptance of the abuse I was receiving from my stepfather.  Did she really believe that the beatings, as well as his continual teasing and belittling of me, were in my best interest?  She had absorbed certain cultural attitudes of the American South from her own father, a Bavarian immigrant who had spent his first years in his adopted country there, learning American norms and customs in Slaughter, Louisiana.  Perhaps she really believed that boys needed to be physically beaten and verbally assaulted, to toughen them up, to grow up properly.  In any case, I never understood why this otherwise active, independent, outspoken woman, who seemed to have such a deep understanding of the world, never stood up for me.  Such thoughts created a barrier that prevented me from ever trying, as an adult, to develop and nurture the loving, open relationship with my mother that I would otherwise have wished for.

Throughout my teen years, I yearned for escape from the toxic environment I had at home.  Coming into young manhood, I was accepted at a prestigious college in the East, and I saw this as a kind of salvation, since I now had a practical excuse for minimizing my visits back to Colorado.  Thereafter, I maintained both a geographic and emotional distance from home, which initially brought me some degree of comfort.

As years went by, the distance sustained a sense of relief but not of happiness.  I was, in fact, quite a sad young man.  I came to learn that people who have been abused as children tend to develop the habit of self-blaming.  For some reason, it is easier to accept suffering as the predictable result of your own shortcomings, and therefore something theoretically you might be able to correct, than to acknowledge that you have been dealt a bad hand by the universe and that you are powerless to do anything about it.  In any case, I had become remarkably proficient at self-blame.  Feeling that all of the things that go wrong in the world around you are your own fault is a sure-fire recipe for perpetual sadness.

It took many years of life as a young adult, and processing of memories on a therapist’s couch, before I recognized that there was a step I could take which would help me to heal the wounds inflicted upon me in childhood.  It was to search out and find my father.  This seemed an important task in coming to terms with the reality of my situation and reducing the burden of exaggerated self-blame I had taken on.

I undertook the project during the years I was doing residency training, the beginning of the 1970’s, when I was in my late twenties.  I had little information about my father other than his somewhat unusual French-sounding surname, “Mafit,” the surname I bore through the first grade in school, and the fact that he had received medical training.  Assuming that he was still alive, was practicing medicine somewhere in the United States and that he would have become certified in some medical specialty, I was able to locate a promising candidate by searching the reference section of my medical school’s library.  There was an obstetrician-gynecologist in Roseburg, Oregon, named Mafit, whose dates of medical school graduation and of naval service seemed appropriate for my father.  I was interested to see that this Dr. Mafit had done his ob/gyne residency at Washington University in St. Louis in the years immediately following the end of the war.  That was the time period in which my adoption had been transacted.  If this was indeed my father’s record I was seeing, it meant that he would have made the decision to sign the adoption papers while employed, hundreds of miles from where his children were living, as a hospital resident, a position that in those days required literally residing within the hospital’s walls and being available to provide care to the hospital’s patients around the clock.   It would have provided little or no salary and he likely would not have been able to hire a lawyer.   This would not fully justify his willingness to give up his children, but it went part of the way as an explanation, providing a glimpse of how restricted he was in his ability to act and allowing me to imagine how painful it would have been to be a parent trapped by these circumstances.

I sent off a brief handwritten letter to this Dr. Mafit at his listed office address, saying that I believed him to be my father with whom I had lost touch many years back, and, if my supposition was correct, would he be interested in writing to me?  I received an immediate reply (“immediate” for the days of snail mail) saying that he was indeed my father, corroborated by the enclosure of an old photograph of him holding me as a baby.  He said that for years he had been hoping I would reach out to him, and he thanked me for doing so and praised the courage he thought it must have taken.  He understood the depth of Mama’s antipathy toward him and explained that that was the reason he had not taken the first step.  He anticipated I had been told many bad things about him growing up, which he hoped he would have the opportunity to counter.  (Actually, I had been told almost nothing about him; the worst I had been told was that he was a man who cared nothing for his children, which the reply letter itself seemed to disprove.)  He signed the letter, “your loving father, Ted.”

We wrote letters to each other periodically, he more faithfully and promptly than I, over the following years, the years of his life that remained, and we visited each other on both coasts once every year or so.  I learned much about him, although I was, of course, not seeing him from the perspective I would have had as a growing child.

He was a tall, tanned, white-haired man, who spoke slowly and softly and with a western drawl, which belied the enormous drive and energy that lay below the surface.  He had carried on a solo practice of ob/gyne in this small city for his entire professional career, which meant he could be called on 24/7, around the clock and around the calendar, to report to the hospital to perform a delivery or emergency surgery.

He was never inclined to take on a partner, or involve himself in a group practice typical of most of today’s ob/gynes.  I believe he was, in his heart, a committed loner.  He valued his independence; he was one of the original maverick practitioners in Oregon who made the national news when they resigned en masse from the state medical society after it started requiring regular continued medical education as a condition of membership.

He had a number of friends and professional contacts, with whom he had cordial but not close relationships.  I suspected he was a man who had difficulty with intimacy.  He married three more times after the breakup with my mother, each time to a successively younger woman.  He had three daughters with his second wife, my half-sisters, who are about half a generation younger than I.  They all had the experience of looking to him as a dad when little, and they told me that he had seemed distant to them in those years.

Ted's second wife, Melba.

It came up once in conversation that one of his teachers when he was in training was Dr. William Masters, who had later acquired national attention for his work, with Dr. Virginia Johnson, on human sexuality.  When I asked Ted what Masters was like, he remembered him as “a scrupulously honest man” and “a very dedicated researcher.”  He didn’t have much to say about the popular book and I was left with the impression that he didn’t do much sexual counseling in his ob/gyne practice.

In his early years of practice, he had traveled to New York to attend lectures at Cornell Medical School being given by Dr. George Papanicolaou, the originator of the screening test for cancer of the cervix of the uterus now known as the “Pap smear.”  Ted wanted to be able to offer this test to his patients, but many medical laboratories didn’t do it; there was a lot of skepticism in the medical community at the time, probably because Papanicolaou himself was a scientist who studied reproductive physiology in monkeys and not a medical doctor.  So Ted learned to do the test himself, and, after acquiring official certification, performed it in his office laboratory up until his retirement.

He incorporated elective abortions into his practice after the Roe v. Wade decision made them permissible.  He took referrals from the other ob/gyne specialist in Roseburg, who was a Roman Catholic and had personal religious objections to the procedure.  Ted himself professed no religion.  He did not believe in unlimited access to abortion, however.  Any woman who asked him to terminate her pregnancy first had to demonstrate that she had a reasonable plan for avoiding unplanned pregnancies in the future (he would, of course, assist her with this), and she was advised that he never performed a second abortion on the same patient.

He was passionate about his hobby of fly fishing, which he indulged in almost daily.  He had used much of the wealth generated from his practice to purchase an estate whose back lawn was bordered by the North Umpqua River, so that he could do fly-casting from his back yard. 

Ted was addicted to, but seemingly not impaired by, alcohol.  The addiction was integrated into another consuming hobby, winemaking and viticulture.  He purchased land for a vineyard adjacent to his home and acquired a second vineyard later, a few miles away.  When he retired from his practice, he became a professional vintner.  He drank a bottle of wine daily as a matter of course, and he believed it did not affect his ability to do a delivery or emergency operation when called on in his off-hours.  I realize this is a claim many would find implausible.  I certainly did not perceive any effect from his drinking when we dined together; he remained the quiet, reserved, dignified, soft-spoken man he always was.  His colleagues and support staff at the hospital, who had observed his performance over many years, appeared never to have suspected his alcohol use.  In his last days, after he was admitted to the hospital’s Coronary Care Unit with a coronary artery occlusion that was to prove fatal, he developed a seemingly bizarre neurological syndrome that mystified the hospital staff.  They discussed bringing in an outside neurological specialist to consult.  His daughter and wife had to quietly suggest that what they were witnessing was delirium tremens, and that it would disappear if he was given alcohol.  To make such a diagnosis on a respected senior member of their medical staff would never have occurred to them.

In addition to the character-defining traits I’ve just outlined, I also learned some things about my father that must, I suppose, be considered trivia, but which I’ve always found endearing:

He was spectacularly good-looking in pictures from his youth, with his dark hair and moustache making him resemble Douglas Fairbanks or Ronald Coleman.  Many NY friends to whom I introduced him on his visits here commented on how dashing he was.

His full name was Trowbridge Rudolph Mafit.  The Mafits seemed to have a penchant for giving their offspring colorful names.  My paternal grandmother’s first name was Theil, and she had had two sisters whose names were Leith and Devere.  My three half-sisters were named after them, Andrea Leith, Leslie Theil, and Dana Devere.

Ted had become famous among members of the fly-fishing community for the flies that he designed and crafted himself.  One such hand-tied fly was the subject of a feature article in Field and Stream, and it was later marketed commercially as the “Doc’s Fly.”

He also acquired fame among Oregon winemakers.  The local county museum to this day has on display a bottle of white pinot noir that he produced sometime in the 1970s, believed to be the first of this variety to originate in Oregon.

Ted owned 23 cats at the time of my first Oregon visit, three Siamese inhabiting the house, the remainder domestic short-hairs roaming about his estate.  They all had names.  He joked that he was emulating, and hoping to surpass, Ernest Hemingway in their number.

It was during his final days that my father and I once again became separated.  I actually did not realize it was happening at all, at the time, that he had begun the process of dying.  He wrote me two letters describing the coronary events that he had experienced.  He somehow managed to use descriptive medical language to minimize the seriousness of his condition; he made it seem as if he would be back on his feet, working his vineyards any day now.  I fell for it, and decided I would not plan my next visit to Oregon until he had recovered.

It came as a shock when I was notified that he had died.  I flew to Roseburg to attend the funeral.  My heart broke when I saw photographs of him in the days before he died, the days when he was writing me the cheery letters; he was gaunt, disheveled, in distress, and obviously a seriously ill man in those photos.  I re-read the letters and slowly began to appreciate his artful use of the medical language to alleviate my concern.  There was only one unequivocal deception on his part; he claimed in his letters that he was being told he was not a candidate for coronary artery bypass surgery.  My sisters and his wife, who witnessed the events in real time, let me know that the opposite was the case.  His doctors repeatedly implored him to consent to surgery, and, each time, he adamantly refused.

I’ve concluded that he simply wanted to die alone, and with as little revelatory conversation as possible.  He did not want me to come to say good-bye to him in person.  It would have been too painful for him.  The exposure of his alcoholism on his death bed must have been mortifying to him; he just wanted to slip away quietly.

This seemed to encapsulate the sort of man he was, a man to whom peace and preservation of his dignity was all important.  He was not a street fighter like Mama.  He could never have taken her on in a brawl. 

To return to my original question, the issue of forgiving him for abandoning his parental rights at the time of the divorce now seems irrelevant.  What I had earlier yearned for from him was simply not in him to give.  And I am at peace with that now.

[ithisatanytime]

Lazy Town | Cooking By The Book Music Video

one of the consequences of the recent shift in the public perception of jews and power that i think a lot of people are gonna miss is that even for the most blue pilled normie boomer, the idea that jews in nazi germany were just some random ethnic minority they scapegoated is irrefutably destroyed, the average person now perceives jews at the very least as a powerful group and that perception is cast back onto their understanding of history, it undermines a key pillar of the jewish lie, this holocaust narrative cannot be overstated in its importance to satan, as it provided the moral justification for equating simple prejudice with mass murder, so what the holocaust myth did was morally equate having preconceived notions based on race with mass cold blooded murder its hard for a modern westerner to even imagine a world in which blatant racism was seen as just “rude” instead of the ultimate unforgivable sin, yet this was the mode of the entire earth for literally thousands of years, we are living in a STRANGE time, if i cant convince you its an evil time, it should suffice to convince you of the strangeness of the times at the very least. if you own a bible, i suggest you search meticulously for passages railing against fucking young girls, sex BEFORE marriage, drug use, racism, sexism, homophobia etc. you will come away wanting, it doesnt matter if you are a christian im merely trying to impress upon you the strangeness of our current times, you could do the same for the quran, the torah, whatever ancient book of wisdom you want and you will find nothing even resembling the moral framework we are currently operating under, its a completely modern jewish invention, it is the work of the devil himself.

the premarital sex thing you may find some examples of if you dont understand the original meanings of fornication and adultery which as time progressed began to be used interchangeably, but i am completely convinced that adultery used to mean in the sexual context exactly what it means in other contexts its a commandment for the ancient israelites (modern europeans) not to race mix with the surrounding tribes, and if you have read the old testament you will quickly find that marriage and sex are the same thing, many of the patriarchs were “married” to their wives in beds and tents, you will find no example of one of them waiting for some ceremony before consumating their marriage the concept of this didnt even exist at the time, once you fucked you were married, extra marrital sex was fornication, the original meaning of adultery is as i described but slowly over time it became synonymous with fornication even by the time of jesus ministery so that didnt happen recently.   think of flour and granulated sugar, if you are making a cake, you will marry these two ingredients which just means to mix them together to make them as one “what gad has made one let not man make twian” and with that same cake baking analogy, lets say while you were making your cake and you had a bowl of sugar, a salt shaker should spill and pour into the sugar, well now the sugar has become ADULTERATED by salt, meaning they have mixed but they do not mix well, one ingredient has polluted the other. in the modern usage of the term adultery, the universal definition of adultery is sort of meaningless, i believe they just became synonymous and i think that when the israelites disobeyed gods command against adultery (race mixxing) and took wives from their defeated enemies and became like them and adopted their abominable ways like child sacrifice, they sought to actively muddle the meaning of adultery and conflate it with fornication to obfuscate the sinful nature of what they had done.as far as the fucking young girls thing goes a lot of people will take issue with that and i get it, but you dont understand, the most common age of consent laws in history where they can be found put the age of consent at puberty, literally thirteen years old in most instances sometimes 12, but fucking a 13 year old and leaving her would permenantly damage her right? the same is true for a 25 year old a 30 year old etc, they are damaged by promiscuity, but none are damaged if they are kept as wives.

 the times we are living in ARE evil, but they are as strange as they are evil. their is a time for everything under the sun my brothers and sisters and christ, even a time to kill, even a time for war. i do it for she

[theglasscat]

if eda and raine get married like some of you nerds keep saying then it's gotta end with a big musical number where eda utters the exact words, "wow wow fellas, look at the old girl now fellas"

[olderthannetfic]

I'm a Chinese, nationally and racially. Racial projection seems to be a common practice in western fandom, doesn't it? I find it a bit... weird to witness the drama ignited upon shipping individuals with different races, or the tendency to separate characters into different "colors" even though the world setting doesn't divide races like that. Such practice isn't a thing here. Mind explaining a bit on this phenomenon?

--

Sure, I can try. But of course, fish aren’t very good at explaining the water they swim in.

Americans aren’t good at detecting our own Americanness, and a lot of what you’re seeing is very much culturally American rather than Western in general. (In much of Europe, “race” is a concept used by racists, or so I’m told, unlike in the US where it’s seen more neutrally.) Majority group members (i.e. me, a white girl) aren’t usually the savviest about minority issues, but I’ll give it a shot.

The big picture is that most US race stuff boils down to our attempts to justify and maintain slavery and that dynamic being applied, awkwardly, to everyone else too, even years after we abolished slavery.

There’s a concept called the “one drop rule” where a person is “black” if they have even one drop of black blood.

We used to outlaw “interracial” marriage until quite recently. (That meant marriage between black people and white people with Asians and Hispanic people and others wedged in awkwardly.) Here’s the Wikipedia article on this, which contains the following map showing when we legalized interracial marriage. The red states are 1967.

That’s within living memory for a ton of people! Yellow is 1948 to 1967. This is just not very long ago at all. (Hell, we only fully banned slavery in 1865, which is also just not that long ago when it comes to human culture.)

Why did we have this bananas-crazy set of laws and this idiotic notion that one remote ancestor defines who you are? It boils down to slavery requiring a constant reaffirming that black people are all the same (and subhuman) while white people are all this completely separate category. The minute you start intermarrying, all of that breaks down. This was particularly important in our history because our system of slavery involved the kids of slaves being slaves and nobody really buying their way out. Globally, historically, there are other systems of slavery where there was more mobility or where enslaved people were debtors with a similar background to owners, and thus the people in power were less threatened by ambiguity in identity.

Post-slavery, this shit hung around because it was in the interests of the people in power to maintain a similar status quo where black people are fundamentally Other.

A lot of our obsession with who counts as what is simply a legacy of our racist past that produced our racist present.

--

The other big factor in American concepts of identity is that we see ourselves as a nation of immigrants (ignoring our indigenous peoples, as usual). A lot of people’s families arrived here relatively recently, and we often don’t have good records of exactly where they were from, even aside from enslaved people who obviously wouldn’t have those records. Plenty of people still identify with a general nationality (”Italian-American” and such), but the nuance the family might once have had (specific region of Italy, specific hometown) is often lost. Yeah, I know every place has immigrants, and lots of people don’t have good records, but the US is one of those countries where families have on average moved around a lot more and a lot more recently than some, and it affects our concepts of identity. I think some of the willingness to buy into the idea of “races” rather than “ethnicities” has to do with this flattening of identity.

New immigrant groups were often seen as Other and lesser, but over time, the ones who could manage it got added to our concept of “whiteness”, which gave them access to those same social and economic privileges.

Skin color is a big part of this. In a system that is founded on there being two categories, white owners and black slaves, skin color is obviously going to be about that rather than being more of a class marker like it is in a lot of the world.

But it’s not all about skin color since we have plenty of Europeans with somewhat darker skin who are seen as generically white here, while very pale Asians are not. I’m not super familiar with all of the history of anti-Asian racism in the US, but I think this persistent Otherness probably boils down to Western powers trying to justify colonial activities in Asia plus a bunch of religious bullshit about predominantly Christian nations vs. ones that are predominantly Buddhist or some other religion.

In fact, a lot of racist archetypes in English can be traced back to England’s earliest colonial efforts in Ireland. Justifying colonizing Those People because they’re subhuman and/or ignorant and in need of paternalistic rulers or religious conversion is at the bottom of a lot of racist notions. Ironic that we now see Irish people as clearly “white”.

--

There are a lot of racist porn tropes and racist cultural baggage here around the idea of black people being animalistic. Racist white people think black men want to rape/steal white women from white men. Black women get seen as hypersexual and aggressive. If this sounds like white people projecting in order to justify murder and rape... well, it is.

Similar tropes get applied to a lot of groups, often including Hispanic and Middle Eastern people, though East Asians come in more for creepy fantasies about endlessly submissive and promiscuous women. This nonsense already existed, but it was certainly not helped by WWII servicemen from here and their experiences in Asia. Again, it’s a projection to justify shitty behavior as what the party with less power was “asking for”.

In porn and even romance novels, this tends to turn up as a white character the audience is supposed to identify with paired with an exotic, mysterious Other or an animalistic sexy rapist Other.

A lot of fandoms are based on US media, so all of our racist bullshit does apply to the casting and writing of those, whether or not the fic is by Americans or replicating our racist porn tropes.

(Obviously, things get pretty hilarious and infuriating once Americans get into c-dramas and try to apply the exact same ideas unchanged to mainstream media about the majority group made by a huge and powerful country.)

--

Politically, within the US, white people have had most of the power most of the time. We also make up a big chunk of the population. (This is starting to change in some areas, which has assholes scared shitless.) This means that other groups tend to band together to accomplish shared political goals. They’re minorities here, so they get lumped together.

A lot of Americans become used to seeing the world in terms of “white people” who are powerful oppressors and “people of color” who are oppressed minorities. They’re trying to be progressive and help people with less power, and that’s good, but it obviously becomes awkward when it’s over-applied to looking at, say, China.

--

Now... fandom...

I find that fandom, in general, has a bad habit of holding things to double standards: queer things must be Good Representation™ even when they’re not being produced for that purpose. Same for ethnic minorities or any other minority. US-influenced parts of fandom (which includes a lot of English-speaking fandom) tend to not be very good at accepting that things are just fantasy. This has gotten worse in recent years.

As fandom has gotten more mainstream here, general media criticism about better representation (both in terms of number of characters and in terms of how they’re portrayed) has turned into fanfic criticism (not enough fics about ship X, too many about ship Y, problematic tropes that should not be applied to ship X, etc.). I find this extremely misguided considering the smaller reach of fandom but, more importantly, the lack of barriers to entry. If you think my AO3 fic sucks, you can make an account and post other fic that will be just as findable. You don’t need money or industry connections or to pass any particular hurdle to get your work out there too.

People also (understandably) tend to be hypersensitive to anything that looks like a racist porn trope. My feeling is that many of these are general porn tropes and people are reaching. There are specific tropes where black guys are given a huge dick as part of showing that they’re animalistic and hypersexual, but big dicks are really common in porn in general. The latter doesn’t automatically mean you’re doing the former unless there are other elements present. A/B/O or dubcon doesn’t mean it’s this racist trope either, not unless certain cliched elements are present. OTOH, it’s not hard for a/b/o tropes to feel close to “animalistic guy is rapey”, so I can see why it often bothers people.

A huge, huge, huge proportion of wank is “all rape fantasies are bad” crap too, which muddies the waters. I think a lot of people use “it’s racist” as an easy way to force others to agree with their incorrect claims that dubcon, noncon, a/b/o, etc. are fundamentally bad. Many fans, especially white fans, feel like they don’t know enough to refute claims of racism, so they cave to such arguments even when they’re transparently disingenuous.

--

Not everyone here thinks this way. I know plenty of people offline, particularly a lot of nonwhite people, who think fandom discourse is idiotic and that the people “protecting” people or characters of color are far more racist than the people writing “bad” fic or shipping the wrong thing.

But in general, I’d say that the stuff above is why a lot of us see the world as white people in power vs. everyone else as oppressed victims, interracial relationships as fraught, and porn about them as suspect. Basically, it’s people trying to be more progressive and aware but sometimes causing more harm than good when those attempts go awry.

[dwellordream]

“…The ideas that animate Harlequin romance novels, Game of Thrones, and Disney movies alike can be traced back to the nineteenth century. Look at the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites and others influenced by them—works like John William Waterhouse’s “Lady of Shalott” (1888) and Frederic William Burton’s “The Meeting on the Turret Stairs” (1864)—and you’ll see some very familiar figures.

These canvases reflect popular Victorian understandings of medieval ladies: passive, slender, aristocratic, the objects of knightly devotion. These women have never laboured in the fields with sunburned necks or callused hands. Their clothing and flowing hairstyles are eclectic, designed more to make nineteenth-century audiences think about a distant, misty, heroic past than to accurately reproduce any given moment in the Middle Ages. And, they are, invariably, white.

Art doesn’t exist in a vacuum. These paintings were produced when European imperialism was at its zenith; when Darwinian theories of evolution were twisted to justify colonialism and social hierarchies based on race; and when a supposed early-medieval “Teutonic”—or Germanic—ancestry for the white Protestant populations of Britain and North America was claimed to be the reason for the explosive economic growth of those regions.

They were also painted at the same time that white people in Europe and the Americas were enjoying steadily increasing standards of living—in large part thanks to the backbreaking, and often coerced, labour of those in colonised places. Black and brown women helped to shape history, but Victorian society excluded them from the category of “lady” because of the colour of their skin.

Nineteenth-century thinkers drew on the medieval past in order to justify racial and class inequities, or burgeoning notions of nationalism. These thinkers racialised the medieval lady. They idealised her as white, passive, and unsuited to manual labour. In doing so, they made her into a rationale as to why her elite, white, female descendants could sip tea in parlours while brown and black women toiled in the fields—or in their houses—to bring them that tea. The status quo was given such a venerable heritage that it was made to seem natural, even inevitable. Such ideas were then, and are now, pervasive and insidious. They were absorbed by white women, by Disney animators, by the makers of Halloween costumes, and even by those who write histories.

But what happens if we take the medieval lady off her pedestal? What kind of woman do we see inhabiting the Middle Ages if we try to peel off the Victorian veneer of chivalry and politesse? Does looking at what medieval people actually did in the past tell us something about our own assumptions concerning race and gender? In part, this is a process where we have to reconsider the language we use. What do we mean by “lady”? What did medieval people mean by the term? Or, rather, since most texts produced in western Europe in the Middle Ages were written in Latin, what were the connotations which they associated with the word domina?

The first key difference is that the modern English word “lady” simply doesn’t have the aura of power which the Latin word domina did in the Middle Ages. A domina was a woman with authority and moral rectitude in her own right, not simply the consort or complement to a dominus (lord). A domina (and holders of other Latin titles applied to women in medieval records, like comitissa, vicedomina or legedocta) administered estates and adjudicated legal disputes. It did not matter whether she held her title by inheritance or through marriage. Those who held titles in their own right, or those who were widowed, could exercise significant power over fiefs and vassals.

For example, when Matilda, countess of Tuscany (1046-1115), was referred to as domina, it was because she controlled a large swathe of northern Italy. She was the mediator during the famous meeting between Pope Gregory VII and the German emperor Henry IV at her great fortress of Canossa. In doing so, she influenced the outcome of a major medieval power struggle. On his accession to the throne in 1199, King John of England installed his mother Eleanor of Aquitaine (ca. 1122-1204), as domina of the French territory of Poitou and gave her authority in all of his lands—a tacit acknowledgement of her political skill.

Eleanor even managed to expand queenly authority in some ways. She seems to be the first queen of England after the Norman Conquest to have regularly collected the “queen’s gold”, a one-tenth share of some of the legal fines paid to the king. This gave her a valuable (and somewhat independent) source of revenue—and with money comes power. As a more modest example, one contemporary of Matilda of Tuscany’s was a woman named Mahild of Alluyes, domina of a far smaller territory in northern France. She wasn’t a player in papal or imperial politics. Yet as wife and widow, she oversaw the affairs of her vassals and witnessed charters which they drew up in the chapter house of the nearby abbey of Marmoutier, which gave her considerable influence over their lives. And there are many, many more dominae in the sources.

Medieval aristocratic women were sometimes seen as passive by their male contemporaries; those with power who broke this mould were sometimes described in plainly misogynistic terms. But equally, their deeds could be lauded. For example, one of the great chroniclers of the early twelfth century, the Anglo-Norman Orderic Vitalis, wrote that the French noblewoman Isabel of Conches was “lovable and estimable to those around her.” He complimentarily said that she “rode armed as a knight among the knights”, and compared her favourably with Amazon queens.

Matilda of Boulogne (ca. 1105-1152), queen of King Stephen of England, was one of her husband’s most capable partisans during the Anarchy—the period of civil war that tore twelfth-century England apart. Not only did she head the government during her husband’s captivity, but proved herself a capable military commander. She directed troops into battle at the so-called Rout of Winchester and arranged for her husband’s release when he was captured.

A generation or so later, the English countess Petronella of Leicester (ca. 1145-1212) participated alongside her husband in the Revolt of 1173-74; she gave her husband military advice, rode armed onto the battlefield, and was even wearing armour when captured. These actions may not have been normal behaviour for a domina—administration and adjudication were more usual. But they were still within the bounds of possible behaviour for a medieval woman without endangering her status as a “lady.”

The Matildas, Mahild, Eleanor, Isabel, and Petronella: it is hard to imagine any of these dominae as the subject of a Waterhouse painting or the centrepiece of a Disney movie. They weren’t always victorious or virtuous; they could be ambitious and high-handed and hold ideas which most people today would find distasteful. And yet, whether medieval chroniclers approved or disapproved of these women individually, they didn’t think the very fact that they were active, decisive, and opinionated was out of the ordinary. Neither should you.

Nor would the colour of their skin have been thought a defining aspect of their status as a lady. There was certainly prejudice about skin colour in the Middle Ages. The relatively small number of non-white people in northern Europe means that we can’t definitively point to a woman of colour exercising political power there. But things were slightly different in southern Europe, in areas like Iberia—modern Spain and Portugal—which was long home to Christian, Jewish, and Muslim populations of multi-ethnic heritage.

While there were religious prohibitions against Muslim women marrying non-Muslim men, there are some scattered examples of intermarriages between dynasties in the early Middle Ages: Muslim women of north African or Arab descent marrying into northern, Christian royal families. For instance, Uriyah, a daughter of the prominent Banū Qasī dynasty, married a son of the king of the northern Spanish kingdom of Navarre; Fruela II, king of Asturias, married another Banū Qasī woman called Urraca. Their ancestry doesn’t seem to have posed a barrier.

Western Europeans may have only rarely had direct contact with non-white female rulers further afield—like the powerful Arwa bint Asma, queen of Yemen (r. 1067-1138)—but when they did, it could be in dramatic fashion. Shajar al-Durr, sultana of Egypt (d. 1257), famously captured Louis IX of France during the Seventh Crusade and ransomed him for an eye-wateringly large sum.

While historical examples of women of colour exercising prominent roles in Europe during the Middle Ages are few in number, skin colour didn’t limit the imaginations of white medieval Europeans. Medieval people often had clear anxieties about skin colour and blackness, but despite this racism they could still envision a brown- or black-skinned woman as a member of the upper classes, just as they did the white-skinned Mahild or Isabel.

For example, the early thirteenth-century German epic poem Parzival centres on the eponymous hero and his quest for the Holy Grail. Parzival has a half-brother, the knight Feirefiz, who is mixed-race. His mother, Belacane, is the black queen of the fictional African kingdoms of Zazamanc and Azagouc; the narrative praises her beauty and her regal bearing. As another example, a Middle Dutch poem written about the same time, Morien, recounts the story of the handsome, noble knight Morien, “black of face and of limb,” whose father Sir Aglovale fell in love with his “lady mother,” a Moorish princess.

However, the most vivid example is provided by medieval depictions of the biblical Queen of Sheba. Scholars think the historical Sheba likely lay somewhere in southwestern Arabia; other traditions place the kingdom in east Africa. Regardless of the queen’s historicity, various traditions grew up around her in the Middle Ages. Some of the most popular of these claimed that she had a son by the biblical king Solomon. She frequently appears alongside him in art, in elegantly draped garb as on the late twelfth-century Verdun Altar, or accompanied by courtiers as in an early fourteenth-century German illustrated bible: a beautiful black woman and a regal queen. When you think of a medieval “lady”—you could do worse than to think of her.

All of this should prompt us to look again, to reconsider how racialized Victorian ideals of womanhood still impact us—both in contemporary popular culture and also in our understandings of the medieval past. When we think about the Middle Ages, we should consider the impact of race, and especially whiteness, on how we think about it. That is not necessarily because our medieval forebears did so, but because our nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ones did so very much.

The idea of the “lady” was one of the useful fictions which they and others employed, glorifying white, upper-class womanhood as an apex of western achievement. This helped to make existing racial and imperial hierarchies seem like they had such a long history that they must be innate, biological: a simple fact of life. But it was a fiction, and a harmful one. If we are to better understand the medieval past, it is one we must set aside.”

- Yvonne Seale, “My Fair Lady? How We Think About Medieval Women.”

[notafraidofredyellowandblue]

Flake interview 2020-01

Not a new interview, but relatively recent, Flake with "Der Standard" 2020-01 before an appearance of Flake in Vienna (author Stefan Weiss), don't think there's a translation on the website, so here's a shot..:

Rammstein keyboardist Flake: "The reunification was a mess"

Christian "Flake" Lorenz hits the keys not only as a keyboardist, but also as an author. A conversation about controversial views on the GDR, fireworks and climate protection

At Rammstein he is the "keyfucker" - GDR jargon for keyboard players. His real name is Christian Lorenz, but he has been calling himself "Flake", pronounced in German, of course, since his youth. For a quarter of a century, the native of East Berlin has been the alien in the German rock band, the thin freak among the strong musclemen. In the meantime, Flake also hits the keys as an author: In "An was ich mich so erinnern kann" (2015) he wrote down his GDR experiences, followed in 2017 with "Heute hat die Welt Geburtstag", a literary autobiography about Rammstein. On March 26, Flake will come to Vienna's Globe Theater for a reading.

STANDARD: We are currently celebrating 30 years of 'Die Wende' *1). Your joy is limited, as one knows. How do you perceive the anniversary?

Flake: 'Die Wende' and reunification of Germany have to be separated. I experienced the change as a punk at the time. The ossified old concrete headframe of the GDR Politburo was also our enemy. We didn't want this idiotic regime anymore and we fought to loosen it up. When the wall came down, we didn't know what to do with the freedom we suddenly had. But then began an incredibly exciting time in which we tried to develop professionally, politically and musically in every direction.

STANDARD: And then came the reunification.

Flake: A lot went wrong from then on. We were annexed as a useless country, entire biographies were declared worthless, companies were closed so that the western companies could expand. We have been reset to such an extent that resentment and disappointment have built that have persisted until now. By and large, the reunification in this form was a mess.

STANDARD: If you look at Germany's east today, right-wing populism has recently had great political success there. A legacy of reunification?

Flake: Many people are disappointed because certain promises have not been fulfilled. But they already had the political left in their lives, now they are trying it with the right. Personally, I cannot understand how one can vote for the AfD *2). But those who do are doing it in large part in protest against the mainstream parties. It is clear that the AfD cannot meet expectations either. If the AfD were to rule, many people would notice very quickly that it is not getting better, but worse.

STANDARD: You grew up in the East Berlin punk scene. What are the differences between the East and West punks?

Flake: There was a fundamental difference: the Ostpunks didn't need any money because life was absurdly cheap, rent around 25 marks. The koney you made from one concert lasted over a month. So you could make the music you wanted to make and not just the music that sells well. Absurdly enough, it made us very free.

STANDARD: There were also IM Stasi informers among your band colleagues at the time (IM: unofficial employee, note). Aren't you angry with the repressive surveillance state of the GDR?

Flake: I'm not angry with IM informers in the bands. Because their IM status often made it possible for the bands to exist at all. The Stasi didn't lock up its own people. The best example of this is the GDR band 'Die Firma'. It was founded by IM informers. The gag was that 'Die Firma' ('The Company') was actually a synonym for "Stasi". Covered by the Stasi, they then sang anti-subversive texts. Almost brilliant really.

STANDARD: Do you understand when it is said that the GDR was an injustice state and that Stasi repression was a kind of terror?

Flake: I can understand it when people say that who have experienced it and suffered from it. But personally, I can't say that the whole state was bad. I don't want to know how many innocent people have been or are being imprisoned and monitored in the West. I do not find the generalization of the "unjust state" okay.

STANDARD: Would Rammstein have been conceivable in the GDR?

Flake: We wouldn't have founded a band like Rammstein within the GDR because it would have been the wrong answer to this system. We founded Rammstein because we noticed that our punk music wasn't getting anywhere in the West. It took harder stuff.

STANDARD: You have retained a kind of socialism within the band. Nevertheless, Rammstein is a millionaire company. Were there moments when you thought: The money could not only destroy our character but also the band?

Flake: Rammstein is a company where money fluctuates a lot. We have a lot of employees, we buy tons of pyrotechnics, we have a huge stage, costumes, our own electricity network, we shoot extremely complex videos. The money that remains private can actually hardly harm us, because it is so limited. We really have to make sure that the plus-minus calculation works out.

STANDARD: In your book "Heute hat die Welt Geburtstag" you describe the 25 years of Rammstein as a long partnership: It has become calmer in bed, but you understand each other blindly. Is divorce even an option?

Flake: Divorce is definitely not an issue. It's like a very long marriage: You don't even think about divorce anymore.

STANDARD: In the midst of tough muscle men, you were always the figure that breaks everything, especially in the interaction with singer Til Lindemann, who sometimes roasts you on stage like a cockroach. It looks like the traditional comedian constellation white clown and stupid August, Laurel and Hardy with SM components. How important is that to the show?

Flake: We developed that more by accident. We never made it up: you are the strong one, I am the weak one. At our first concerts we always stood around very haphazardly, then we started pushing and provoking each other. When I watch a normal heavy metal band I get bored easily. We always have something going on.

STANDARD: Do you sometimes long for a role change at Rammstein? To be the strong one for once?

Flake: Nah, I have other worries. With those couple of concerts, I can handle my role well enough.

STANDARD: Can you even enjoy appearances or does that only come afterwards? After all, a Rammstein show is precision work.

Falke: What do you mean enjoy? I enjoy when everything runs smooth and everything works like a machine. There are good and bad concerts, at the good ones we take off like an airplane.

STANDARD: Rammstein mixes black romanticism with black humor. You yourself love the blues, which often sails in similar waters. Can you draw joy out of melancholy?

Flake: The blues is the best example of this. Sadness and comfort go hand in hand. All of popular music arose from a problem of the respective author. This is exactly what you want to hear when you are not feeling well yourself. During puberty you normally don't want to hear "Walking on Sunshine" either.

STANDARD: Traditionally, there is also joy in melancholy and morbidity in Vienna. Is that the Eastern European impact?

Flake: Slavic music is very melancholic, on the other hand the Goth culture comes from the west. So I wouldn't really pinpoint that to anything local.

STANDARD: It is said that Rammstein did more to preserve the German language than all the Goethe Institutes put together. Are you proud of that?

Flake: Yeah. But the interesting thing is that we are regarded more highly abroad than in our own country. In Germany there is a lot of ranting: We are dull and foolish about Germany - complete nonsense.

STANDARD: Rammstein has always been compared to the totalitarian parody band Laibach. They recently played in North Korea with the aim of appearing subversive. Is something like that conceivable for Rammstein?

Flake: We'd have to think very carefully about what we want and why we want it. If that were to help someone, okay - but only to be able to say, "We're subversive now," that's not an argument.

STANDARD: For reasons of climate protection, there is an increasing number of missile bans. A topic for Rammstein?

Flake: We played a concert in Chicago once. The local fire protection was so rigorous that we shouldn't even have lit a match. Complete ban on pyro. We went on stage and said: either we are leaving because we are not allowed to make a fire here, or we are playing without. The audience wanted the latter, of course. And it became one of our best shows. You have to weigh it up a bit: should you stop all things like a Rammstein show for climate reasons? But I totally understand that there shouldn't be any more bangs on New Year's Eve. I was in Vienna once at the turn of the year, and there was relatively little banging. I thought that was good. Berlin is one of the most terrifying cities on New Year's Eve. There it's pure aggression.

Notes:

*1) i kept 'Die Wende' as the term for the political transformation in east germany, not sure what the official english phrase is

*2) AfD, short for 'Alternative für Deutschland' or 'Alternative for Germany' is a right-wing populist political party, often characterized as far-right, known for its opposition to the European Union and immigration

[ruminativerabbi]

Christchurch

There was something creepy and unsettling about settling into Purim this week as we were all still reeling from the news about the mass shooting last Friday at the mosques in New Zealand. Yes, it’s true that at the heart of Purim is the encouraging story of how a plot to murder innocents was thwarted by a combination of cleverness, bravery, and extreme chutzpah on the part of Mordechai and Queen Esther. But how could that happy outcome provide comfort for the Muslims of New Zealand (or, for that matter, for New Zealand’s Jews, who could surely just as easily have been the shooter’s victims) given that Haman’s plot failed utterly, while last week’s attack took the lives of fifty innocents at worship? There is something to learn from that comparison, though, but it has to do more with the villain’s motivation in both stories than with how either turned out in the end…because what motivated Haman to plan a nation-wide pogrom openly intended to annihilate the Jewish community in his time and place is more or less precisely what motivated the alleged shooter in New Zealand—at least judging by the so-called “manifesto” he emailed to more than thirty recipients, including the Prime Minister’s office in far-off Wellington, just minutes before the attack on the first mosque.

Assuming the authorities have the right man, which they seem certain they do, the shooter seems to have been motivated by a set of grim fantasies that society needs seriously to address. Admittedly, the seventy-four-page manifesto is a long read, although nowhere near as long as the 1,500-page screed penned by Anders Brevik, the man convicted of murdering seventy-seven people, mostly high school students, in a shooting rampage on the Norwegian island of Utoya in 2011 and whose writing covered many of the same topics covered in the New Zealand shooter’s manifesto. (Brevik’s unabashed motivation in undertaking his act of mass murder was to get his book read by the public, an incentive so real in his mind that he actually referred in public to the shooting as his personal “book launch.”)

At the heart of both documents is the deep-seated fear of replacement, a theme most Americans first heard about when the white supremacist marchers in Charlottesville shocked the world back in 2017 by chanting “Jews will not replace us,” a slogan so foreign to most that even I, who consider myself more than knowledgeable about anti-Semitic tropes, did not understand it properly at first. (To revisit what I wrote last fall about eventually coming to understand what the slogan means to those who chant it, click here.)  Nor, I finally seized, was this just a creepy mantra intended solely to unnerve or to upset, but actually a slogan fully expressive of the idea that serves as the beating heart of white supremacist paranoia. The concept itself is simple enough: that the policies promoted by liberal Western democracies that permit immigration from third-world countries, encourage racial integration, promote (or at least permit) interracial marriage, justify ever-descending fertility rates as the result of personal decisions with which the state may never interfere, endorse access to abortion as a basic human right, and enact gun control laws intended to declaw the basic human right to bear arms—that these policies are all part of some mysterious global effort to replace “regular” white people (i.e., working-class whites who belong to Christian churches they either do or don’t attend) with people of color in general, but particularly with Muslims from third-world countries.

The white supremacists of different nations promote different versions of this theory—but they all derive at least to some extent from the 1973 novel by French author Jean Raspail, Le Camp des Saints, in which an ill-prepared host of Western nations, primarily France but others as well including the U.S., are at first slowly and then decisively overwhelmed by immigrants from the Indian subcontinent, Western Africa, and Southeast Asia. Eventually South Africa is overrun too, as is Russia, with the result that the world as we know it comes to a decisive end even before the book does. (The book is available in English in Norman Shapiro’s translation as The Camp of the Saints, published by Scribner’s in 1975 and still in print.)

And that specific fear—that faceless hordes of dark-skinned people of various ethnic and national origins are just biding their time on their own turf until the misguided members of the liberal establishment in eventually every First World country blindly and stupidly open the gates without caring who comes through them or what those people stand for—that is the underlying emotion that appears to have provoked the mosque bombings in New Zealand, the mass murder of high school students in Norway, and any number of violent incidents in our own country. When white supremacists talk about the fear of being “replaced,” that is what they mean.

It’s not entirely untrue, of course, that immigrants—and particularly in large numbers—alter the face of the host country that takes them in. That surely did happen in our own country after successive waves of immigrants in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries fundamentally altered the face of American culture. But in the case of our own country, the overall effect was essentially salutary because those groups who came here en masse were composed of individuals, three of my four grandparents among them, who were for the most part eager to embrace American culture and who had no interest at all in attempting to impose the culture of their countries of origin on the citizens of the nation that granted them refuge and took them in.

The accused shooter is an Australian, which adds a strong dollop of irony to his fear of replacement given that both Australia and New Zealand are dominated by cultures brought to those places by imperialist immigrants from Europe who rode roughshod over the actual culture of the actual people they found living in those places when they arrived en masse in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But I’m thinking that the real issue isn’t whether cultures do or don’t, or should or shouldn’t, evolve as time moves forward and the ethnic or racial make-up of the populace alters. On a more fundamental level, the issue has to do with the ability to see strangers as individuals rather than as a faceless horde.

The fear of being overwhelmed is probably a natural response when newcomers are seen not as individual men and women—people with children, who need jobs, who want to play a useful and meaningful role in society, who like to swim or to paint or to make music or to cook, who have their own set of fears and anxieties—but solely as part of the groups to which they belong.  And there is irony in this anxiety-driven world view as well because, by refusing to see others as individuals, such people eventually start thinking of themselves in that way as well and end up retreating deeper and deeper into their own communities. This in turn leads to the phenomenon that Canadian author Hugh McLennan once famously called “two solitudes,” a baleful situation in which contiguously situated groups have almost so little contact with each other that they quickly forget that the people on the other side of the line are individuals with whom they could easily engage if they wished. And so the path is laid for once-great countries to become balkanized shadows of their former selves as the sense of national identity that once held the citizenry together slowly erodes and becomes ever more fragile. Eventually, the nation collapses in on itself and something else emerges from the ruins…but the chances of that new entity somehow not facing the same issues of mutually antagonistic solitudes within its borders is nil. And so begins the spiral down towards dissolution and disunity born of fear. It does not—perhaps even cannot—end well!

In the history of the West, the Jews have played the role of the perennial other, of the tolerated alien. The outpouring of sympathy in the Jewish community over the last week for the Muslims of New Zealand—a community that I seriously doubt more than half a dozen Jewish Americans even knew existed before last week—derives directly from that sense that, in the end, what drives the kind of violent animus against Muslims gathering for prayer that exploded last Friday in Christchurch is different only in cosmetic terms from the kind of explosive violence so often directed at Jews. So we add Christchurch to the list of gun-violent massacres in religious settings that already includes (to reference only attacks within the last decade) Charleston, Pittsburgh, Sutherland Springs, and Oak Creek. And we brace for the next attack, which will surely come unless we can find a way to force the haters to look directly at the objects of their antipathy and see, not a faceless horde, but men and women made in the image of God. That sounds so simple when put that way, and so obvious. But you cannot make blind people see merely by forcing them to open their eyes and face in the right direction….

[freedom-of-fanfic]

Christian anon here, & I was dismayed when a recent reblog post stated in regard to Christian sexual morality & I quote "“all sex outside of marriage is evil” . This is at best a very poor interpretation & I apologize to the poster if they have been exposed to this mindset. For us, sex is something very sacred, so sacred that we reserve it to a man & a woman who have, via Matrimony, promised before God & each other to love, honor and mutually obey each other. 1 of 2

Outsideof marriage, it doesn't make sex "evil", but it does make a sin,something we strive to avoid, not always easy because humans are inherentlyflawed and fallible. Sadly, there are far too many Christians caught up in thepurity culture mentality who make a bigger deal out of sexual sin than theyshould about other sins (sins against social justice as a big for instance). Idon't like this mindset either, and thankfully, there are more Christianspushing back against it. 2 of 2

Hi,Christian anon. I understand where you’re coming from because I am alsoChristian (a queer Christian, which makes for an interesting life sometimes).And I agree with pretty much everything you’ve said here regarding a truly Christian perspective on sexoutside of marriage vs the purity culture bullshit (my point of disagreement isthat I think ‘sin’ and ‘evil’ are usually treated as synonymous).  It is, in fact, the least Christian thing inthe world to go around trying to control people’s behavior.  

But. (there’s always a ‘but’ with me.)

I spent a huge chunk of today writing this and cutting it back because it kept turning into a theological dumping ground, which I don’t want it to be. but I’m throwing the majority of this post behind a cut because it’s inevitably sensitive stuff, considering how much pain (and death, tbh) Christianity-as-law-bludgeon has caused.

tl;dr: Christianity and secular law don’t mix well. Whenever it’s tried, things get real hellish real quick for a lot of people. Especially for people who are judged as ‘sexually immoral’. 

(warnings for binary/cisgender language b/c the Bible doesn’t really address being nb or trans in particular.)

In thepost you are responding to, I called the Catholic Church the source ofanti-prostitution law in the United States. I said that it was because the US legislationwas founded on Western Europe legislation, and Western Europe legislation wasfounded on the legislation of the Catholic Church. And to be fair this is aglib and simplistic illustration of cause & effect – for starters, it skipsover Protestantism and the Age of Reason – but I’ll stand by the heart of it.  Laws about sex work – sexual interactions ofany kind between consenting people of age, actually – in Western Europe &the US find likely origin in the inevitably disastrous mixture of Christianityand lawmaking, which originated in the institution of the Catholic Church.

Christianityas an organized religion does not playwell with the power to make law. 

The inevitable product of trying toenforce Christian values via lawmaking is purity culture, authoritarianism, andviolence. This is because human law cannot enforce having moral character: wecan only judge actions and behavior, not thoughts or feelings. We can’t makekindness or uprightness into law: what is kind and upright behavior towards oneperson may be cruelty to another. (Not to say that Christianity is the only religion that mixes poorly with law,but Christians often deny that a religion founded on benevolence andforgiveness can be totalitarian. But the joke is: totalitarian law is no lesstotalitarian because its author wrote it to encourage ‘morality’ and ‘righteousness’.The joke is: God never forces His morals down anyone’s throat, so who are you to do it on His behalf?

I mean: theologicallyspeaking, one of the central tenants of Christianity is that law is insufficientand ill-fitted to guide our complicated, morally gray human existence. To methis seems like a huge giveaway that Christian principles and the law arefundamentally incompatible concepts.)

In its mostmature iterations, Christianity-as-law is

sexist

misogynistic

patronizing

anti-intellectual

controlling to the point of micromanagement via fear and shame

emotionallyabusive and denigrating individual worth

unforgiving of moral failings

hypocritical

judges others by assumptions about their thoughts and motivations

holds peopleto unachievable standards of ‘morality’ without kindness, and

punishes disobedience/noncomplianceviolently and without mercy. 

It takes on God’s role as implacable judge, jury,and executioner, and holds the benevolent forgiveness promised by Jesus hostagein exchange for good behavior. How is the law God supposed to have mercyon you when it’s clear you’ll just abuse that mercy? Prove your worth first. (spoilers: you’ll never be approved.) 

TheCatholic Church, born of Christianity shaking hands with the power to make lawvia Constantine's outreach, is my Exhibit A. at the peak of its legislativeinfluence and power, it severely set back human health, education, and wealthin Europe and West Asia and presided over multiple military excursions into theMiddle East in the name of conquering Jerusalem on God’s behalf (the literalCrusades, yes). 

And I’d argue that this conquering spirit has been Christianity’sAchilles Heel ever since: a thread of shitty, shitty colonialist bullshit,through Anglicanism and Protestantism and Puritanism, that even now is buildingits latest thunderhead in the shape of ‘dominionist’ Christianity here inAmerica (if you are not familiar with it, suffice to say it is a secretive butwell-spread cultish thinking that straightforwardly holds that Christianitymust be legislated into place all over the world or Jesus can’t come back. Youcan’t make this stuff up.)

Bringingit back into to the sex thing, though: the Old Testament has multiple mentionsof laws forbidding sex work, and the New Testament, at least 50% written by theunmarried apostle Paul, has a lot of recommendations about being married toprevent being tempted by sex outside of marriage and the like. Extramarital lustand sexual immorality are also credited with multiple instances ofjump-starting unfortunate Biblical events and described by Paul as the only ‘sinagainst the body’ (1 Corinthians 6). In fact, Paul was kinda ‘eh’ on the wholehaving sex thing in general. In the same verse, he mentions in passing that itwould be better for men to not have sex at all if it’s possible for them.

Christianity-as-law is thus morally obligatedto make sex outside of marriage and anything that tempts people into sexoutside of marriage illegal. It’s the moral thing to do. Sex work has to go. Andbecause Biblical marriage can only be between a (cis) man and a (cis) woman*, same-gendersex has to go too. And extrapolate Paul’s offhand ‘male celibacy is ideal, tbh’into the harshest and narrowest form of lawful judgement that you can and youget ‘anything that makes men want to have sex is clearly dragging (cis) men down fromthe best possible person they could be. (people cis men see as ) women being beautiful makes men wantsex! (perceived) women are bad! Punish women formaking men want sex!’

Is thiswhat God calls for? I don’t think so.But historically speaking, this is what we get when Christians try to take thelegislative reins on God’s behalf.

And it’sfrankly hilarious that supposed Christians are acting as if it’s possible tosave people from their own sin by making sinillegal. When you check in with Jesus on the interaction between God’s lawand secular law, his response is simply ‘follow both’**. He also hung out withsex workers pretty much constantly during his ministry, never condemning them fortheir line of work even though it was explicitly against Jewish law to be a sexworker, because he recognized that human-enforced law – even law laid down byGod – can’t account for all the circumstances of human life or account for thereasons people do things that are, on their face, unlawful. That grace –literally the opposite of law – was kind of the point of his being born in thefirst place.

 *Regardlessof what one’s opinion is about how the Bible defines marriage, that doesn’tmean that secular law has to share that definition. Especially when it createsa religious discrimination against LGBTQ+ people for completely secularmarriage benefits like tax breaks and visitation rights. (that’s the entire pointof this essay, oh my god.)

**ReferencingMark 12:13-17. Jesus also calls out the people asking him for trying to get himin trouble with the Roman authorities.

[arcticdementor]

Hello all, from Siena, one of the most beautiful cities in the world. I’m spending the night here before heading out tomorrow with a friend to make a pilgrimage, more on which tomorrow. Meanwhile, Ross Douthat’s column today makes for extremely sobering reading. He writes that America looks like a declining empire (an observation that I have heard again and again over the last eight days from worried European conservatives):

…

Are we Rome? I have had that question front to mind for at least twenty years, I guess. Sixteen years ago, when I first started writing about the idea that became my book The Benedict Option, the concept of America as an exhausted imperial power seemed kind of insane. We were the globe’s hyperpower, and though we had walked into a buzzsaw in Iraq, most people would not have taken seriously the late Imperial Rome comparison. To refresh your memory, what gave me the Benedict Option concept was philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s comparison of our time to the last days of the Roman West, and his claim that people of virtue today – those who want to hold on to the old traditions of the West – should make an exit of this dying civilization and form communities within which those virtues can be lived out.

When he said that we await a new and doubtless very different St. Benedict, he meant that we need a figure like Benedict of Nursia, who can respond creatively to the crisis of our time, and forge a new way of living fruitfully under these circumstances. My own claim is that all of us faithful small-o orthodox Christians must be Benedicts of the 21st century. This dying empire is not going to be saved, so the best we can do is figure out concrete ways to keep the Christian faith alive through this new dark age, preserving the light for the rebirth we pray will come, though surely long after we pass from this earth.

My project received what I counted as a tremendous vote of confidence in 2015 when, visiting the Benedictine monastery in Norcia (the saint’s hometown), the then-prior, Father Cassian Folsom, heard me out, then said that any Christian family who expects to endure through the coming storm will have to follow some version of the Benedict Option.

I published the book in 2017, as you know, and it engendered immediate controversy. I expected that, and some of the debate was good. After all, I could be wrong, and if so, I want to know it. But most of the griping was from people who had not read the book, and were sure that I was simply saying to head for the hills and pull up the drawbridge. As I made clear in the book itself, I don’t believe that there is any real head-for-the-hills escape available to us, but we must nevertheless figure out ways to live with a disciplined faith even as we remain embedded within society.

The example I point to is Shadrach, Meshech, and Abednego, the three young Hebrew men from the Book of Daniel, who were so embedded within Babylonian society that they were advisers to the king. But when that king ordered them to worship an idol, they all chose the prospect of martyrdom before apostasy. For us, the Benedict Option lesson is to figure out how those faithful Hebrew men lived in Babylon without letting Babylon live in them. If we can master that, we have a chance.

…

In 2021, the late Roman metaphor is a lot less extreme than it seemed in 2005, or even in 2017. Again, read the Douthat column. I fully agree with him that the US had to withdraw from Afghanistan, but that the withdrawal, and the hubris that led America to attempt nation-building in the first place, reveals us to be a nation in imperial decline. One can be grateful that we are moving away from empire – I certainly am – while also recognizing that such a decline will have seriously bad consequences, or at least is closely associated with seriously bad consequences.

It seems increasingly clear that this century belongs to China. I don’t like this at all. China has figured out what neither Mao nor Stalin knew: how to be rich and totalitarian. The Chinese also seem to be figuring out from watching us how to avoid some of the things that are leading to our own disintegration. Did you notice that the Chinese have now banned young people from playing video games for more than three hours a week during the school week? When I read that, I thought about my physician friend telling me a couple of years ago that he is starting to see in his office a parade of young men from good middle class families who are failing to thrive. All they want to do is play video games and smoke pot. The Chinese also have taken a harder line against LGBT thought and expression, banning LGBT accounts from the WeChat service.

…

One worries about this behavior because that sort of instability makes it harder to form stable families, which are necessary for the continuation of civilization. But that’s not all of it. The Hungarian woman told me her son and all his friends say that they don’t want to have children. They are all terrified of climate catastrophe. Imagine that: this boy’s grandparents and great-grandparents endured World War II; his grandparents and parents endured Communism. He was born into a free Hungary, one that was growing more prosperous than the previous two generations could have dreamed, and yet he, and his generation, are losing the will to live, and dissipating themselves in hedonistic chaos and despair.

…

China is facing a population crash. Its leaders understand that the future of their country depends on its people being willing to produce future generations. They do not want to encourage Western ideologies that make that task more difficult.

In 1947, Carle C. Zimmerman, head of Harvard’s sociology department, published his book Family And Civilization, which deserves to be rediscovered. In it, he traces in history the connection between family structures and civilizational thriving and decline. Zimmerman found that the strongest family form is what he called the “domestic” family: one that offers more freedom to the individual than its predecessor, the “trustee” family (i.e., the clan), and one that is stronger than its successor, the “nuclear” family. In studying ancient Greece, Rome, and the Middle Ages, Zimmerman found that family structure goes in cycles: trustee à domestic à nuclear. Then there is civilizational collapse, after which the cycle begins again. Zimmerman writes of our own time:

There is little left now within the family or the moral code to hold this family together. Mankind [by which he meant Western man] has consumed not only the crop, but the seed for the next planting as well. Whatever may be our Pollyanna inclination, this fact cannot be avoided. Under any assumptions, the implications will be far reaching for the future not only of the family but of our civilization as well. The question is no longer a moral one; it is social. It is no longer familistic; it is cultural. The very continuation of our culture seems to be inextricably associated with this nihilism in family behavior.

…

Zimmerman wrote this in 1947. He missed the Baby Boom, but otherwise he is right on target. Moreover, as I wrote last year, David Brooks authored an essay pointing out that we are living through the most rapid change in family structure in human history. Brooks quotes academic experts who observe that in America (and I would say the West generally), people see marriage now in terms of adult self-fulfillment, not primarily about raising children.

…

Ours is a culture that wants to die.

Similarly, I am always struck when I visit Europe by how passive most Europeans are in the face of waves of migration washing over their continent – waves that are going to turn into a tsunami in this century, given the African birth rate. We saw this in ancient Rome too, with the barbarian invasions. Romans lost the capacity and the will to prevent other peoples from taking their lands. Central European peoples – Hungarians and Poles, in particular – seem to be the only ones who are willing to fight for their own existence as a people.

Three years ago, in a speech to university students, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said:

A situation can arise in one country or another whereby ten percent or more of the total population is Muslim. We can be sure that they will never vote for a Christian party. And when we add to this Muslim population those of European origin who are abandoning their Christian traditions, then it will no longer be possible to win elections on the basis of Christian foundations. Those groups preserving Christian traditions will be forced out of politics, and decisions about the future of Europe will be made without them. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the situation, this is the goal, and this is how close we are to seeing it happen.

I’m telling you, Viktor Orban is perhaps the only Western leader who has such a clear vision about the crisis of our time. It is not just a political crisis. It is an existential crisis for Western civilization. The fact that Orban understands what so many of the rest of our leaders do not, or will not, and the fact that he has the courage to say these things in public, tells you why I think that the future of the West, if we have one, depends on Hungary more than we know. Americans who don’t know a thing about Hungary repeat the moronic allegation that it’s a “fascist” country — something even Orban’s Hungarian critics don’t do.

Unlike Orban, who is not ashamed of his culture, Western European elites – and American ones too – can only describe Western civilization as a catalogue of horrors leaving suicide as the only honorable option available to Westerners. For example, I learned just the other day that Cambridge University, one of the oldest and most venerable in the West, is on its way towards “decolonizing” its Classics department.

If the Soviets or the Nazis had invaded Britain and forced this on Cambridge, we would know exactly what we were seeing: an attempt to subjugate the United Kingdom for a totalitarian ideology by erasing its historical memory. This is happening now – and it is being done by people inside Britain – by a thoroughly corrupt elite that seeks to destroy the foundations of their own civilization in the name of utopia.

For civilizations, patricide is suicide. We know this. We are watching it happen. We execrate the fast and abandon the future. We have concluded that ours is not a civilization worth defending, and propagandize our young to believe the same thing.

I will not defend a social and cultural order that despises the Christian faith, despises the traditional family, despises our common civilizational heritage, and that is working to punish, even persecute, those who will not take a knee before its idols. I will not fight for this culture of death. Will you? Should you? How can we defend America, our home, as patriots, without defending what decadent America has become? Is it possible?

These questions are going to come rushing to the fore domestically as American power recedes. In Italy these past few days, and again in Hungary this weekend, I have heard the same refrain from Catholics: the belief that Netflix in particular and American popular culture in general is corrupting their children. They grew up admiring America, and what we stood for; now they see us as an agent of their own destruction. How are they wrong? The culture producers who are doing this to the Europeans are doing it to us Americans too, and doing it to the whole world. Two years ago, at a Benedict Option conference in Massachusetts, I heard a Nigerian Anglican bishop talk about why his country needs the Benedict Option. I found this hard to understand, but he explained that the influence of US popular culture, pumping its morals into the heads of Nigerian youth through their smartphones, was alienating the next generation from the Christian faith, and Christian morality.

I want to say one more thing about Viktor Orban, drawing on that 2018 speech I cite above. When I tell you that the American media lie constantly about what Orban is, this is what I mean. They say he’s a fascist. Tell me, does this sound like a fascist to you?

…

You can say this is illiberal – and Orban would agree with you. But “fascist”? Give me a break.

You see maybe why I think that with the possible exception of the Poles – I don’t know enough to say one way or the other – Viktor Orban is the only Western leader who reads the signs of the times, and is prepared to fight against the dying of the light. American conservatives ought to stand with him, and with Hungary. The alternative is the decadence and dissolution we see around us – and that is also coming to Hungary, borne by pervasive Anglo-American pop culture. Maybe Hungary too will capitulate. But it’s not going down without a fight.

Part of that fight has to include the formation of Benedict Option-style communities, as places of spiritual and cultural regeneration. To that end, I was thrilled to see that PM Orban recommended the Hungarian translation of The Benedict Option to his people. That’s it, second from top:

…

MacIntyre is not telling us to created these little communities for the sake of shoring up the imperium. He is saying that the crisis is too deep for that. Read in light of Sherrard’s lines, we see that to save what we can, we have to begin with our own repentance, our own turning away from the wicked city of the plain that is in the process of destroying itself.

[cabiba]

Occasionally, my nine-year-old son and I indulge in something we call the “Misunderstanding Game”.

Thomas: “Mom, I want another round of Among Us.”

Me: “Of course, darling, you are absolutely welcome to be among us, you know you don’t have to ask.”

Thomas, giggling and rolling his eyes, patiently explains yet again that there is a computer game called Among Us. In other words, he wants more screen time. I carry on pretending not to understand what he wants. Games, I say, what a good idea. Which one would you like to play? On and on it goes, as I keep on deliberately misunderstanding him.

I do, of course, have a hidden agenda: all this time that he is fooling around with me means less screen time. He also enjoys the maternal attention. I think of it at times as a useful activity, at times as amusing and entirely harmless.

When I listen to people discuss today’s encounters between Islam and the West, I am reminded of this game. The only problem is that these conversations are rarely useful and not in the least amusing. Quite often they lead to more harm than good.

The best illustration of this Misunderstanding Game relates to the issue of immigration from Muslim countries and how European societies should absorb Muslim immigrants.

The first deliberate misunderstanding is the pretence that unskilled immigrants with little formal education are absolutely necessary for advanced economies. With Europe’s shrinking populations and falling fertility rates, the woke and Leftist enablers say, surely no one can argue that enticing young and vibrant people to immigrate is a bad thing. Those terrible xenophobes who fixate on cost/benefit exercises — how much, in monetary terms, immigrants cost society versus how much they contribute — simply don’t get it. Those who point out the large-scale welfare dependency of those immigrants and even of their children a generation later, let alone the emergence of an underclass of ethnic and religious enclaves, are met with cheerful accounts of benefits that cannot be quantified in material terms: the cuisine, attire, sights and sounds of new exotic cultures that locals can now sample at leisure.

Related to this wilful misunderstanding is the argument of compassion. Let’s reject the economic immigrants, say some, and only allow in those who qualify for asylum. In any case, it is just a temporary measure until their countries return to normal. But this approach raises myriad questions. How on earth do we design a vetting process that can distinguish those in search of economic opportunity from those who are true victims of civil strife? When will their countries return to normal? What will they do in the meantime? And who will pay for it all?

Those adept at playing the Misunderstanding Game, however, have some very compelling distractions. Empathy is required, they say. Imagine if it were you or your family who had to endure the ravages of war and upheaval. It wasn’t that long ago that Europe was going through such turmoil. Would you have turned away Jews fleeing what would become the Holocaust?

In any case, we’re told, it is our own fault that these societies are falling apart because we colonised them in the first place. Worse, we even profited from the slave trade before and during the colonial years. Here the conclusion of the Misunderstanding Game is made clear: the moral atonement for historical wrongs is more compelling than any rational attempt to analyse the issues on the table.

A third version of the Misunderstanding Game is the assertion that immigrants are all the same. This approach is partly a response to those such as Dutch sociologist Professor Ruud Koopmans, who has questioned why is it so much harder for immigrants from Muslim societies to integrate into Western countries. Why, for instance, are Lebanese Christians Lebanese more likely to become fully assimilated in Australia than Lebanese Muslims when their circumstances of arrival and departure are practically the same? Or why do Bangladeshi and Pakistani immigrants struggle to integrate in the UK, while their Hindu and Sikh counterparts flourish and, in some cases, even do better than the natives?

Koopmans has compelling data to explain these trends. But who is interested in such questions, let alone such tedious things as data? The game is to misunderstand, to mix up and muddle. So Mr Koopmans, they say, let’s talk about your intent. Your work may be empirical but it is your underbelly that matters: for even though you claim to be a Social Democrat, you are in fact a racist. Busted. You can’t hide behind that pro-labour façade when you defame the true workers of the world with your anti-social science.

Finally, when played at its most mischievous, the Misunderstanding Game simply insists that we all want the same things. We all want to be free and equal; we all want to abide by the law; we all share the same basic values and we all want to respect the dignity of others. For those of us who are men and women of faith, in the end we all pray to the same God. For those of us who are secular, we are all led by our reason. Save for a subset of misfits — and every society has those — we are all just human beings.

To this kind of argument, I always have the same response: not everyone’s concept of God is identical. How else would you explain the existence of Islamist sermons of hatred? Or the harassment of women, gays, Jews and others? What would you say to the victims of the Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs or the Muslim girls who are forced into marriage? If we all pray to the “same” God, then what about the knife attacks, the beheadings and the use of trucks as weapons of murder by perpetrators screaming Allahu-Akbar? What about ISIS and Al-Qaeda? Radical views exist and we urgently need to grapple with them.

Hold it right there, the misunderstanders reply. Didn’t we already make it clear? There are misfits in every society, including ours. Sexual violence against women is universal. And look at the latest report from the UK Home Office. It concludes clearly — after an allegedly long and rigorous research process — that the whole gory business of grooming gangs had nothing to do with Pakistanis and absolutely nothing to do with Islam.

So who is playing this Misunderstanding Game? A class of undergraduates doing a workshop on Public Policy? No. It is in fact our elected political leaders, as well as senior editors from highly regarded news outlets, professors from reputable universities and think tanks, senior civil servants and, at times, EU leaders. These conversations on the thorniest issues facing Europe are taking place in parliamentary committees, debating chambers, international seminars and on national television.

Scrutinise the transcripts of these talks, replay the recordings, read the numerous reports, books and articles generated over the last three decades on immigration, Islam and integration, and the picture that emerges is the same: it is an endless version of the Misunderstanding Game.

Meanwhile, the numbers of immigrants in Europe from Muslim-majority countries has swelled to… who knows? In 2017, the Pew Research Center projected that the Muslim share of Europe’s population could rise from 4.9% to between 7.4% (if there is no more immigration) and 14% (if there is a lot) by 2050. Even if there is less blitheness today about the wonderful ways immigrants from Muslim countries will enrich Europe — especially in France — an end to immigration is not in sight. Europe’s borders continue to be porous, the reasons that compel people to leave their countries get increasingly compelling.

It is, perhaps, a disappointment to those who have always insisted that we humans are all the same to see so many Muslim groups form organisations and movements with the objective of isolating their communities from the rest of society. In some countries, like France, they have succeeded enough to alarm the president to introduce new legislation that signals he has had enough of the Misunderstanding Game. And yet President Macron can hardly be said to be leading a Europe-wide change of sentiment. In most countries, the Misunderstanding Game goes on. Why?

One theory is that there is a genuine desire within the European political elite to atone for the past; today’s leaders don’t want to repeat the mistakes of their ancestors. Another possibility is that Western leaders have simply lost confidence in Western Civilisation. It has all been one long tale of horrors: slavery, oppression, colonialism, genocides, misogyny and massacres. Hence there are no values to protect from large numbers of outsiders and certainly nothing worthwhile to ask immigrants to integrate into. A third explanation is that some European leaders genuinely wish to do away with borders. For them it is a matter of principle and they couldn’t care less who pays the price for the pursuit of a borderless planet.

But I believe there is one more reason: incompetence. Quite simply, none of the leaders whose job it is to resolve the issues of Muslim immigration and integration has a clue as to how to go about it. These politicians around the table who do have the right sort of principles but lack the ability to persuade the others. Some grasp the fine details of the issue but are incapable of seeing the big picture. And as with all policy areas of this magnitude and complexity, there are also those leaders who parrot the interests of organised groups who benefit from the status quo. It is they, I assume, who enjoy the Misunderstanding Game the most.

The incompetence of each set of leaders is often masked by an eye-catching political photo-op expressing a grand gesture or a soundbite along the lines of “history will be our judge”. But, as they know all too well, history does not vote; it does not promote or appoint a politician to a senior level. So let it judge away.

In the meantime, the flow of migrants has abated somewhat in the past few years, but large numbers of people still attempt to reach Europe, even during the pandemic. Last year Europe saw more than 336,000 first-time asylum applications and, from January to November, 114,300 illegal entries.

Looking forward, it seems inevitable that as European countries emerge out of Covid lockdowns and their economies reopen, some countries in Africa will face food shortages and other economic problems arising from pandemic-induced disruption. You don’t have to be a sage to foresee masses of young men heading towards Europe. As they attempt to cross the Eastern and Southern points of entry into the EU, be ready for European politicians to speak of a sudden surge and an unforeseeable crisis.

Then watch them play the Misunderstanding Game once again.

[brianjaeger]

2020 Academy Award Best Picture Nominees Guide For Those Who Haven’t Actually Watched Them

The 92nd Oscars are here and it’s time yet again for all of us to lord over one year’s worth of millions of people’s passions with the certainty of a judge at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show (which ironically takes places one day later) and say aloud, “This art is and forever shall be known as better than that other art!” 

Throw the notion that expression through the medium of film can exist simply to reflect a myriad of emotions and varied experiences right into the wind. We gotta know what that BEST art is, son!

So with mere hours left before Sunday’s spectacle, you’re probably asking yourself one question. “Brian, why do you keep doing this?” No, not that one. “Brian, Tumblr? Really? Does that still exist? Why don’t you spend the slightest amount of time to find a better medium for this?” No, not that one either. “But Brian, I haven’t actually watched any of these films. What am I going to do?!” Ah, now that’s the one. But fear not. I’ve got you covered. For the 6th time, I’m here to give you a rundown of what I think all of these movies are about without actually seeing them, along with some pithy little talking points to take into your Oscar parties to sound like a goddamn genius.

Ford V Ferrari

In this epic clash of man vs. nature set in the den of Harrison Ford’s summer home in Plano, Texas, the extremely hungry aging star has just had a large pie from Ferrari’s Pizzeria, located at 3949 Legacy Drive, delivered…and now it is time for battle. On the About Us section of their website, Ferrari’s Pizzeria makes a “promise to our customers to provide the best Italian food using recipes handed down from our Italian grandmothers.” Hold on to your Italian grandmothers, kids - that promise is about to be put to the test. (Yeah, it’s real.)

3 Things To Casually Inject Into Conversation To Prove You Saw The Movie And Sound Like An Expert:

That cameo by Mater from Cars is really what pushed this film into Oscar contention.

Christian Bale's car in Ford V Ferrari is also an unwavering method actor and remained in character as a car for the entirety of production.

Who won? I'll give you a hint, in the long run, it was not the quality of life for the American working class!

The Irishman

In this gritty thriller, Lucky the Leprechaun’s father, Frank Leprechaun, an immigrant who worked as a farrier making horseshoes in Ireland before coming to America, wishes on a shooting star for a way to make a better life for his family. He finds that chance by doing hits for the mob and we see his first job take place under a pale moon, when he shoots a diamond store clerk in the heart, blood red ballooning out onto the green grass, like crimson and clover. Later, an aging Frank Leprechaun kills union leader Jimmy Hoffa and as he dies, he divulges the secret that Hoffa’s body is buried on a plantation in Lexington to Lucky. The young boy looks back and makes a firm promise to his dying father. “They’ll never get Kentucky farm.”

3 Things To Casually Inject Into Conversation To Prove You Saw The Movie And Sound Like An Expert:

The de-aging technology used in The Irishman was so advanced that, while you can’t see it, De Niro's testicles are actually two inches higher in the first half of the movie.

The run time of the movie is 3 hours and 30 minutes which is also the average amount of time Netflix users scroll through options before deciding to just watch the same episode of The Office again.

In Ireland, this movie is known as The Man.

JoJo Rabbit

From M. Night Shyamalan comes the story of a scared young boy who claims to see Jewish people. While adults around him are trying very hard to see them too, it’s Adolf Hitler who helps the boy to overcome his fear and actually communicate with the Jews to understand them and realize that the reason that he can see them is because he can help them. And then at the end we realize that Hitler was actually a Jew himself THE WHOLE TIME!  

3 Things To Casually Inject Into Conversation To Prove You Saw The Movie And Sound Like An Expert:

I thought it was just a bit on the nose that Taika Waititi chose to have JoJo sing her hit “Leave (Get Out)” at all the Nazis during the Allied occupation of Germany.

While juggling roles in Marriage Story and JoJo Rabbit, Scarlett Johansson would often get confused resulting in one day on set when she tried to cut Sam Rockwell’s hair in a bathtub.

Of all the nominated films, when it comes to winning Best Picture, this is…Nazi one! (Cough. Look around. Place your drink on the table. Slowly collect your coat, walk to the door, pause as if to turn, sigh, leave.)

Joker

It’s 1964 and Cesar Romero has established himself as a force in Hollywood. A multi-talented performer and veteran of WWII, Romero has amassed an impressive body of work playing roles as a versatile character actor, when he gets a call from his agent.

Agent: Cesar, I’ve got something that I think you’d be perfect for.

Cesar Romero: Is it a complex villain in a new Western? A dark turn as a gangster in a noir? A comedic foil in a Sinatra vehicle?

Agent: No. Better.

Cesar Romero: What is it?

Agent: Get this. An evil clown Batman nemesis…on TV!

(Silence.)

Cesar Romero: Um.

Agent: You’ll be kind of like a sidekick to Burgess Meredith! And guess what he is?

Cesar Romero: (Deep breath.) What is he?

Agent: Like a half-man, half-penguin sort of thing…I think. But he’s also evil! Oh, and you’ll also get to star alongside Julie Newmar!

Cesar Romero: Oh, well that may have legs. So, do we have a “will they, won’t they” dynamic?

Agent: Not at all! But she is evil too. And also part cat!

Cesar Romero: I do not understand any of what you are saying.

Agent: And it’s got Frank Gorshin!

Cesar Romero: And what is he? Let me guess. Like an evil frog person?

Agent: No, no! He’s The Riddler. It’s sort of the same exact deal as your character, only he doesn’t wear any makeup. Isn’t this wonderful?!

Cesar Romero: (Pause.) You have to be joking.

Agent: No, Cesar. YOU have…to be joking.

3 Things To Casually Inject Into Conversation To Prove You Saw The Movie And Sound Like An Expert:

We still have a little bit of time for Joaquin Phoenix to die and win a posthumous Oscar for this role and keep with tradition. Then in 11 more years, a woman will win Best Supporting Actress for playing the Joker role and then in another 11 years the actual Joker will direct Joe Kerr in a reboot co-starring the Impractical Jokers…and win an Oscar.

I found the end scene touching when Arthur’s wife delivers his child and asks, “Arthur, what do you want to name your son?” And he replies, “Béla.”

Todd Phillips only made this big flashy blockbuster for the studio so that they’d let him do his deeply personal, intimate art house project, The Hangover IV.

Little Women

In a fresh take on a movie that I think is about some nuns living in a cottage during, fuck, I dunno like 1845? 1912? Aught 5? but there’s like a mean one, and a smart-and-sort-of-pretty-but-not-too-pretty one, and they probably have a dog, oh and a horse, and they have fights about vying for the love of the same boy they grew up with who is now some hot stud with poofy hair and poofy shirts and a nasally British accent, oh and there’s 2-3 other sisters that really just serve to further the main sister’s plot, and there is like fucking grass everywhere and how is all that grass not staining the shit out of those long flowy dresses that they always wear on their farm – or is it a glen? can you live ON a glen? – but later the guy marries the right one and he’s a strong man but is totally cool with her writing about some bullshit about being like a female doctor pioneer or something – oh and she’s wearing a straw hat with like a ribbon that’s always flapping the fuck around behind her – I forgot also that they only have one parent, the other is definitely dead and that comes up a little too often, and my mom and two sisters have to have tissues near the goddamn couch while they watch this seemingly 14 hour fucking miniseries or movie or Hallmark marathon because even though each of them could goddamn recite the dialogue from memory they still cry every…single…time…and OH MY GOD, CAN THIS ANNE OF GREEN GABLES, SOUND OF MUSIC, LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE OR WHATEVER THIS GIRL STUFF IS PLEASE BE OVER SO I CAN HAVE THE LIVING ROOM TV BACK TO WATCH BOY STUFF!

3 Things To Casually Inject Into Conversation To Prove You Saw The Movie And Sound Like An Expert:

Not many people know this fact but on her death bed, Louisa May Alcott’s final request was that if a woman ever directed a film adaptation of Little Women they would absolutely under no circumstances be nominated for a Best Director Oscar. So, really, that’s on her.

To ants, these are very big women.

Alan Dershowitz and Prince Andrew's favorite film.

Marriage Story

Dr. Ellie Sattler has established her second career as a divorce attorney after years as a paleobotanist and now fights so that “woman inherits the earth”...or at least gets primary custody and more than half of the assets.

3 Things To Casually Inject Into Conversation To Prove You Saw The Movie And Sound Like An Expert:

The roommates of Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig have become increasingly annoyed listening to several minutes of the two repeating, “No I hope YOU are recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with the Academy Award for Best Picture…and hang up first,” before ending their long phone calls every night.

While juggling roles in Marriage Story and JoJo Rabbit, Scarlett Johansson would often get confused resulting in one day on set when she tried to hide Robert Smigel in the attic.

Variety reports that a remake of Marriage Story is now slated for fall of 2026 with Colin Jost in the role originated by Adam Driver in a version of the story that will be produced by real life.

1917

The seventh and final installment of the 1910's saga follows the previous successful box office hits 1911: The First One, 1912: Now There's Two, 1913: Why Not Three, 1914: Get It? Years Are Sequential. That’s Really All This Joke Is, 1915: This Is The Fifth One (But Fourth Sequel), and 1916: 19 Fast 16 Furious.

3 Things To Casually Inject Into Conversation To Prove You Saw The Movie And Sound Like An Expert:

Originally, the movie was supposed to have a ton of cuts between scenes but after saying, “Action,” a producer whispered to Sam Mendes that they only had budget left for one single take after hiring every single recognizable British actor still alive – so Mendes started screaming, “Run! You there, start shooting at them. Keep rolling! Keep running! Jump down that waterfall! Let’s go, people, keep up! Hide in those trees now! Oh look, more bad guys! Pew pew! Duck! Run over that way! Do not…stop…shooting!”

If this movie was called 2017, Colin Firth would have just pulled out his Samsung Galaxy Note 8 and texted, “Call off attack,” with a GIF of Admiral Ackbar saying, “It’s A Trap!” Then, mere seconds later he would have received, “lol k thx”.

1917 earned Benedict Cumberbatch a nomination for “Most Distressingly Off-putting Mustache”.

Once Upon A Time In Hollywood

Once Upon A Time In Hollywood harkens back to a time long, long, long ago in Hollywood's history when the majority of top actors were white, the majority of directors were old men and individual parts of women's bodies were oddly objectified and sexualized. We’ve come so far since then!

3 Things To Casually Inject Into Conversation To Prove You Saw The Movie And Sound Like An Expert:

Please don’t ruin the fun and let Brad Pitt know that a movie was actually being filmed around him from June to November 2018.

I didn’t think the film was particularly that great but every single person I know who lives in L.A. and is either in or adjacent to the entertainment industry corrected me that it actually is.

Oh, I’m sorry – I think you’re in the wrong place. This is the once upon a time where a man is burned alive with a blowtorch. If you’re looking for the once upon a time where a man’s eyes are drilled out of his face, well then, pal, you’re gonna want to go to Mexico.

Parasite

Oh. I’m sorry. I accidentally put a Best For'n Language Film here at the end of this list of the best ‘Murican films.

3 Things To Casually Inject Into Conversation To Prove You Saw The Movie And Sound Like An Expert:

Parasite was, by far, the best movie I read this year!

나는 기생충을 진심으로 감사 할 수 있도록 한국어를 배웠습니다.

Bong Joon-ho's Parasite might leave you asking who are the real bottom feeders in the black comedy about social structures. There's plenty of food for thought as this picture is deeper than than what it may seem like on the surface…is the word-for-word review from Rotten Tomatoes Super Reviewer Aldo G that I just read to you out loud after pulling it up on my phone here.

[humorepoch9-blog]

What Your Sons and Daughters Will Learn at University

Universities in the 20th century were dedicated to the advancement of knowledge. Scholarship and research were pursued, and diverse opinions were exchanged and argued in the “marketplace of ideas.”

This is no longer the case. Particularly in the social sciences, humanities, education, social work, and law, a single political ideology has replaced scholarship and research, because the ideology presents fixed answers to all questions. And, although the most important thing in universities today is the diversity of race, gender, sexual practice, ethnicity, economic class, and physical and mental capability, there is no longer diversity of opinion. Only those committed to the ideology are admitted to academic staff or administration.

Universities have been transformed by the near-universal adoption of three interrelated theories: postmodernism, postcolonialism, and social justice. These theories and their implications will be explored here.

There Is No Truth; Nothing Is Good or Bad

Postmodernism: In the past, academics were trained to seek truth. Today, academics deny that there is such a thing as objective Truth. Instead, they argue that no one can be objective, that everyone is inevitably subjective, and consequently everyone has their own truth. The correct point of view, they urge, is relativism. This means not only that truth is relative to the subjectivity of each individual, but also that ethics and morality are relative to the individual and the culture, so there is no such thing as Good and Evil, or even Right and Wrong. So too with the ways of knowing; your children will learn that there is no objective basis for preferring chemistry over alchemy, astronomy over astrology, or medical doctors over witch doctors. They will learn that facts do not exist; only interpretations do.

All Cultures Are Equally Good; Diversity Is Our Strength

Our social understanding has also been transformed by postmodern relativism. Because moral and ethical principles are deemed to be no more than the collective subjectivity of our culture, it is now regarded as inappropriate to judge the principles and actions of other cultures. This doctrine is called “cultural relativism.” For example, while racism is held to be the highest sin in the West, and slavery the greatest of our historical sins, your children will learn that we are not allowed to criticize contemporary racism and slavery in Africa, the Middle East, and the equivalents in South Asia.

The political manifestation of cultural relativism is multiculturalism, an incoherent concept that projects the integration of multiple incompatible cultures. Diversity is lauded as a virtue in itself.  Imagine a country with fifty different languages, each derived from a different culture. That would not be a society, but a tower of babble. How would it work if there were multiple codes of law requiring and forbidding contrary behaviors: driving on the left and driving on the right; monogamy and polygamy; male dominance and gender equality; arranged marriage and individual choice? Your children will learn that our culture is nothing special and that other cultures are awesome.

The West Is Evil; The Rest Are Virtuous

Postcolonialism, the dominant theory in the social sciences today, is inspired by the Marxist-Leninist theory of imperialism, in which the conflict between the capitalist and proletariat classes is allegedly exported to the exploitation of colonized countries. By this means, the theory goes, oppression and poverty take place in colonies instead of in relation to the metropolitan working class. Postcolonialism posits that all of the problems in societies around the world today are the result of the relatively short Western imperial dominance and colonization. For example, British imperialism is blamed for what are in fact indigenous cultures, such as the South Asian caste system and the African tribal system. So too, problems of backwardness and corruption in countries once, decades ago, colonies continue to be blamed on past Western imperialism. The West is thus the continuing focus on anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist sentiment. Your children will learn that our society is evil, and the cause of all the evil in the wider world.

Only the West Was Imperialist and Colonialist

This ahistorical approach of postcolonialism ignores the hundreds of empires and their colonies throughout history, as well as ignoring contemporary empires, such as the Arab Muslim Empire that conquered all of the central Middle East, North Africa, southern Europe, Persia, Central Asia, and northern India, and occupied them minimally for hundreds of years, but 1400 years in the central Middle East and North Africa, and occupy them today. China, once the Communists took power, invaded Inner Mongolia to the north, Chinese Turkestan to the west, and Tibet to the south. Once in control, the government flooded these colonies with Han Chinese, in effect ethnically cleansing them. Postcolonialists have nothing to say about any of this; they wish to condemn exclusively the West. Your children will learn to reject history and comparisons with other societies, lest the claimed unique sins of the West be challenged.

Western Imperialism Was a Racist Project

Postcolonialists like to stress the racial dimension of Western imperialism: as an illustration of racism. But postmodernists are not interested in Arab slave raiding in “black” Africa, or Ottoman slaving among the whites in the Balkans, or the North Africans slave raiding of whites in Europe, from Ireland through Italy and beyond. Your children will learn that only whites are racist.

Israeli Colonialists Are White Supremacists

A remarkable example of this line of thinking is the characterization of Israel as a settler colonialist, white supremacist, apartheid society Allegedly white Israelis are oppressing Palestinian people of color. The (non-postmodern) facts make this a difficult argument to sustain. As is well established by all evidence, Jewish tribes and kingdoms occupied Judea and Samaria for a thousand years before the Romans invaded and fought war after imperial war against the indigenous Jews, and then enslaved or exiled most of them, renaming the land “Palestine.” Then, five centuries later, the Arabs from Arabia invaded and conquered Palestine, going on to conquer half of the world. The Jews returned to “Palestine” after 1400 years; most were refugees or stateless, so not colonists from a metropolis. Almost half of Israelis are Jewish Arabs thrown out of Arab countries, not to mention the Ethiopian and Indian Jews. Furthermore, Arab Muslims and Christians make up 21% of Israeli citizens. So to characterize multicolored Israelis as “whites” oppressing “Palestinian people of color’ is an imaginary distinction.

Canadian? You Have No Right to Stolen Native Land

If indigenous Jews are deemed to have no claim to their ancient homeland, then Euro-Canadians, Asian Canadians, African Canadians, and Latin Canadians are colonialist settlers without even an excuse. You have stolen Native land. The only moral course, according to postcolonialism, is to give everything back. At the very least, in order for “decolonization” to be implemented, the First Nations must be ranked above the interloping settlers, must be given special preference in all benefits, the law must make special exceptions for them. First nations must receive ongoing grants, pay no taxes, be given special reserved places in universities and government offices, and they have a veto over any public policy and be ceremonially bowed to at every public event.

As we are guided by postcolonialism rather than by human rights, we can disregard the human right of equal treatment before the law. That is just a rule of foreign settlers anyway. And the cities and industries and institutions built by the settlers, so the decolonialization story goes, really should belong to the natives, even though they lived in simple settlements or were nomads, depending upon simple shelters, with limited hunting or cultivating subsistence economies. There was no civil peace among the many Native bands and tribes, with raiding, enslavement, torture, and slaughter common.

White Men Are Evil; Women of Color Are Virtuous

Social justice theory teaches that the world is divided between oppressors and victims. Some categories of people are oppressors and other are victims: males are oppressors, and females are victims; whites are oppressors, and people of color are victims; heterosexuals are oppressors, and gays, lesbians, bisexual, etc. are victims; Christians and Jews are oppressors, and Muslims are victims. Your sons will learn that they are stigmatized by their toxic masculinity.

Individuals Are Not Important; Only Category Membership Is

Social justice theory has taken university life by storm. It is the result of the relentless working of Marxist theory, adopted by youngsters during the American cultural revolution of the 1960s, then brought to universities as many of those youngsters became college professors. Marxism as an academic theory was explicitly followed by some in the 1970s and 1980s, but it did not sweep everything else away, because the idea economic class conflict was not popular in the prosperous general North American population. The cultural Marxist innovation that brought social justice theory to dominance was the extension of class conflict from economics to gender, race, sexual practice, ethnicity, religion, and other mass categories. We see this in sociology, which is no longer defined as the study of society but has for decades been defined as the study of inequality. For social justice theory, equality is not the equality of opportunity that is the partner of merit, but rather equality of result, which ensures the members of each category at equality of representation irrespective of merit. Your sons will learn that they should “step aside” to give more space and power to females. Your daughters, if white, will learn that they must defer to members of racial minorities.

Justice Is Equal Representation According to Percentages of the Population

As there is allegedly structural discrimination against all members of victim categories, in order for equality of result to prevail, representation according to percentages of populations must be mandated in all organizations, in all books assigned or references cited, in all awards and benefits. Ideas such as merit and excellence are dismissed as white-male supremacist dog whistles; they are to be replaced by “diversity” of gender, race, sexual preference, ethnicity, economic class, religion, and so on. (Note that “diversity” does not include “diversity of opinion”; for only social justice ideology is acceptable. Any criticism or opposition is regarded as “hate speech.”) Academic committees now twist themselves into pretzels trying to explain that “diversity is excellence.”

Members of Oppressor Categories Must Be Suppressed

Of course, the requirement of representation according to population applies only one way: to members of victim classes. If whites, men, heterosexuals, Christians, etc. are underrepresented, that is fine; the fewer the better. For example, females now make up 60% of university graduates, although in the general age cohort males are 51%. There is no social justice clamoring for males to be fully represented.  Members of disfavored oppressor categories are disparaged. The classics of Western civilization should be ignored because they are the work, almost exclusively, of “dead white men.” Only works of females, people of color and non-Western authors should be considered virtuous. So too in political history. The American Constitution should be discarded because its writers were slaveholders.

Victims of The World Unite!

“intersectionality” is an idea invented by a feminist law professor. It argues that some individuals fall into several victim categories, for example, black, female lesbians have three points in the victim stakes, as opposed to male members of the First Nations who receive only one point. Further, on the action front, members of each victim category are urged to unite and ally with members of other victim categories, because sharing the victim designation is the most important status in the world. This leads to some anomalies. Black victims of racism are urged to unite with Arab victims of colonialism, even though Arabs have been and still are holders of black slaves.

Female victims of sexism are urged to support Palestinian victims of “white” colonialism, even though Palestinian women have always been and continue to be subordinated to men, and are subjected to a wide range of abuse. Your children will learn that to be accepted, they must assume victim status or become champions of victims, and ally with other victims.

Being Educated Is About Being on The Right Side

As Karl Marx said, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” The objective of a university education today is to ensure that students chose “the right side” in changing the world. The idea that it probably makes sense to try to understand the world before attempting to change it, is rejected as outmoded, modernist empiricism and realism, now superseded by postmodernism and social justice. If there is no Truth, and whatever one feels or believes is one’s truth, then trying to gain an objective understanding of the world is futile. Anyway, Marxist social justice offers all the answers anyone needs, so no inquiry or serious research is required. Be confident that at university your children will learn “the right side” to be on, if little else.

Source: https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2018/09/04/what-your-sons-and-daughters-will-learn-at-university/

[chriscanwell]

If you're trying to seduce a girl who's younger than you and she pulls away, what should you do? This article will show you what to do and the pitfalls to avoid.

First, let’s take a look at an email from a reader who is going through this exact same problem. My response can be seen below in bold.

Note: all names and personal information have been changed for privacy reason.

I'm a man of 40 and 6 days ago I kissed a woman of 25, who lives in my same apartment complex (we kissed at a bar though). Being so near means that we've hung out every day since then, no sex yet. 

It’s great that you kissed her and escalated the physical attraction. However, you don’t want to hang out every day even if she does. It’s important to give the “illusion” of being busy and to remain a challenge. Also, remember that until you’ve had sex then you have no real leverage over a woman or power.

The power and control is still firmly in her court, so you need to continue to seduce her the right way and make sure that you remain a challenge.

We have been on a blanket in a park, in my apartment and in hers but not in her room. There has been some cuddling, kissing, and some partial undressing. She seems a bit uncomfortable/inexperienced about her physicality.

She said she is a virgin, got close to sex a few times but always stopped the guys just before, mainly because of her Christian faith, although she says she is now ok to have sex before marriage if “she is in love”. She is a bit stone cold when she undresses (just the top and not fully). However, she snuggles up against me spontaneously when we see each other. She sometimes initiates kissing. She seems in an exploratory mode. 

She’s obviously attracted to you and desires you, there’s no doubt about that; however, her Christian faith shouldn’t be a big problem if she’s come this far.

But whether she is a virgin, a Christian or a party girl doesn’t matter—you have to treat all women the same and remain a challenge and be mysterious. Don’t be too available for this girl. And continue to push for physical intimacy.

It’s also incredibly important to mirror her actions. When you feel her start to pull away from you and cut contact… then you do the same and pull away and wait for her to reach out to you.

When she is really into you and wants to see you, simply mirror her and see her too, around 75% of the time. This is to make yourself busy and more scarce.

I have never in all my years dealing with thousands of clients, seen a woman who doesn’t respond to challenge and scarcity in a positive way.

She tells me "you are different" (in a positive sense), so indeed my approach with a girl is more physical and romantic than the average guy (as she herself pointed out, appreciatively).

She typically replies to calls or texts, and occasionally has even texted first.

We do NOT use endearing terms with each other, and the second day we agreed that we didn't need to define what we have since it's so early. 

It’s time to switch things around here. You say that she “occasionally” texts first. You have broken the ice with this girl and kissed her and become somewhat physical with her. It’s now time to let her chase you. You need to transition from being the one who is texting her first to allowing her to come to you.

Also, make sure that when she does come to you that you are fun and light and continue to be romantic and flirty.

But you want to always give the impression that you are a busy man and that a woman has to work to see you. She is attracted to you, there is no doubt about that.

The only way you can screw this up is by over pursuing this girl and coming on too strong (texting too much, being too available and wanting to see her too much).

Today (six days later) she is pulling away, replies to a sweet message ("good morning beautiful girl") but does not reciprocate the sweetness (she just writes "thanks, lol"--I found the "LOL" curious) and then cancels on our plan tonight (exercise together in the gym and then go somewhere).

My best guess is that, us living so close, she is either: needing space to keep attraction, testing if I am strong, or she just hung out with me because she enjoyed the attention of an older guy and she could brag about it with her friends. I did not reply to her last message (the cancellation) and I intend to keep her wondering. But what would you suggest?

Should I just reply "sure, no problem" to act confident or just total silence? Wait until she gets in touch, or until I bump into her? What if she does not get in touch? It's obvious that I will see her sooner or later anyway (remember, we live in the same building!), but what would I do in that case? 

In this situation, you have to understand that you guys both live in the same apartment building.

This girl is probably thinking that if she gets too close to you right now so quickly, then she is going to feel suffocated and in a difficult situation because she will have to see you, like you say, even if she doesn’t contact you.

So what do you do? It’s easy. You mirror her, again, and completely back away. You have to let her know that you aren’t going to suffocate her and always be trying to see her. You need to sub-communicate to her that she can still have her own private space and that you won’t mind if she doesn’t see you all the time.

I’ve been in the same situation as you before, girl living in same apartment building, and you have to let them come “Knocking” on your door when they’re free and ready. So she cancelled the date, just ignore it and say something easy going like, “no problem. Enjoy your day/evening.”

Don’t worry she will get in touch with you again as long as you don’t chase her too hard and always be the one reaching out to her. And if you do run into her, just act cool and ask her how she’s been doing.

She’ll say something predictable like she’s been busy, then she’ll ask how you are and you just have to say that you’ve been really busy yourself and that you guys must catch up again sometime when you’re not so busy.

It’s an interesting situation when a guy is dating a younger woman because there are some important principles to keep in mind. I want to share these with you here because I think they will really help you get into the right type of mindset with this girl.

Dating Younger Women

Most men can only dream of dating a younger woman, even though it’s been found that the older we get as men, we still want to date younger women.

Fortunately for us men, the opposite isn’t true. As we get older, younger women still find us desirable and want to date us.

This is great news for men and it’s always great to know that as we get older, we still have many options with women (assuming you don’t let yourself go and become overweight and excessively out of shape).

That being said, there is nothing like a bit of an age difference to bring out the insecurities in a man in a relationship. 

If you’re dating a girl 10, 15 or 20+ years younger than you then you, then it’s often natural to feel that this is too good to be true and the relationship won’t work out.

But the truth is, the only reason relationships with an age difference don’t work out is because one of the partners in the relationship becomes obsessed about age difference and can’t let it go.

Dating younger women, however, is very different to dating an older woman. It’s not always easy and it takes a confident man to date a much younger woman and keep her around for the long-run.

Once you know what you’re doing though, dating a younger woman is incredibly easy and has a lot of advantages.

In every culture and society in the world, younger women are attracted to older men. However, in Western society this is often frowned upon (mostly by older women who see younger women as a threat).

The fact remains, despite what feminists and modern society tries to tell us, younger women will always be attracted to older men because it’s written into our biology. Despite what many people like to think, human beings are hard-wired this way. 

Age Attracts Youth

Older men are naturally attracted to younger women and younger women are naturally attracted to older men.

But a lot of men that I speak to feel ashamed that they’re dating a younger woman. They worry what their parents will think, what their friends will think and what strangers and society as a whole will think. They also worry what their girlfriend’s friend will think and they worry that people will laugh at them.

The reason you shouldn’t feel ashamed to date a younger woman, however, is because it’s completely natural.

Women and men are attracted to each other for different reasons. Men are attracted to a woman’s youth and beauty and femininity. And women are attracted to a man’s strength and resourcefulness and masculinity.

At no point in time does a woman find herself attracted to a man because he is young. If anything, youth works against men as many young guys will tell you… they can’t get laid despite their best efforts.

A woman’s nature understands that young men often lack true confidence, strength and masculinity. They also often lack experience and worldly skills that women find so endearing and interesting when they date older men.

In fact, a young man’s naivety and lack of real world experience can be a very real and dangerous threat to a woman’s existence and the man’s ability to protect and provide for his woman.

Again, a woman’s nature implicitly understands this and this is why women so often gravitate towards older men.

This is nothing to be ashamed about, instead it is something to be embraced and accepted. And despite what people will tell you, women usually hit their prime between the ages of 18 and 25. Whereas a man doesn’t hit his dating prime until around 35+ years old.

Unfortunately, most men are completely out of shape by the time they reach 35+. They’re overweight, badly dressed and they look 50 years old from drinking too much alcohol, smoking too much, and eating too much junk food.

If you look like a slob it doesn’t matter who you try to date, women in general just won’t be interested.

It’s important to realize that if you keep in shape as a man and take care of yourself, then you can easily date younger women well into your late 60s.

Women Like Older Men

Before I get into the “How To” of dating a younger woman, it’s important to take a look at some of the reasons why younger women want to date older men.

This is so we can understand why younger women find older men attractive.

- Older men are more emotionally stable.

- They have more resources (money and assets).

- They are more committed and more likely to settle down.

- They take the relationship more seriously.

- Older men will value a younger woman more.

- They are more likely to protect and nurture a younger woman.

- They are more refined and elegant than younger men.

- They are usually more confident and strong (in mind and body).

- Older men are more street wise and worldly.

Just remember that dating a younger woman takes a certain level of strength and mastery, especially when it comes to maintaining the relationship.

In every relationship there are problems and tension. This is felt even more acutely in relationships where a large age difference exists.

The greater the age gap, the more the man and the woman will wonder if age difference is okay or if it’s actually going to be the ruin of the relationship.

I have successfully dated women 15 years younger than myself and I have seen other men successfully date women 25 years younger than themselves.

That is just the successful 10%. The other 90% never go the distance and the age barrier always causes a problem, even though it shouldn’t.

When you’re dating a younger woman you have a choice: either you can talk about the age difference and make it an issue or you don’t.

Is Age Just a Number?

I’ve seen guys try to reassure their younger girlfriends that age isn’t a problem, when it obviously is… only to them. These same men make the age difference an issue and it’s always in the back of their mind.

If you start worrying about the age difference between you and your girlfriend, your girlfriend is going to worry about it too, and before you know it… age has suddenly become a problem.

Now there will be times when your girlfriend will worry about the age difference in the relationship. This is normal and it’s what women do, they worry. 

When this happens it’s important not to be worried or disturbed by what she says. Simply laugh it off and tell her that you don’t even notice the age difference because you already have a strong emotional connection with her. 

The less you worry, the less she’ll worry about the age difference. Men who are most successful dating younger women don’t even worry or care about age difference. And if they do, they definitely don’t make it an issue or a problem.

If you’re dating a younger woman it’s tempting to fall into the role of “substitute father.” Women love this to a point, but it’s also very easy to fall into the trap where you try to educate your girlfriend about life.

Stay Young at Heart

It’s understandable that your protective instincts kick in and you want to help guide your girlfriend through life, but if you try to tell her what she should and shouldn’t do, and if you try to explain to her how the world “really” works, you’ll end up coming across as just another boring older guy.

The only time you should give advice is if your girlfriend asks for it. She wants to feel equal in the relationship, she wants to have a strong emotional connection with you. If you start lecturing your girlfriend, you’ll only end up driving her away from you.

Also stay young at heart. Now you’ve probably met guys in your life who are in their 50s but act like they’re twenty years old.

There’s also a lot of young guys in their 20s who have the mind of a fifty year old and are very serious about everything.

When you’re dating a younger woman it’s important to embrace your younger self.

Just because you look forty or fifty when you look in the mirror doesn’t mean that you have to act like you’re forty or fifty.

You can still be a very refined and intelligent older man, but find joy, excitement and humor in life like a lot of younger guys do.

Dating a younger woman will require you to have a good sense of humor and zest for life. Your younger girlfriend’s still most likely experiencing the world and excited about life; it’s important that she can share that joy and excitement with you.

I had one friend who was dating a girl fourteen years younger than himself. This girl ended up breaking up with him because whenever she wanted to go to a new place or try something new he would say it’s boring and he’d already done it.

If you want to kill your relationship, there’s no better way than to be a killjoy.

I’ve also seen a lot of guys date younger women and literally worship the ground that these women walk on. It’s kind of understandable that a lot of guys act like this.

A lot of men get out of bad divorces or have have spent the last ten years in a relationship with a woman their own age, when, suddenly, they find themselves dating a much younger woman who looks great naked and has a fresh and innocent view on life. The younger woman isn’t jaded and she doesn’t have baggage.

The natural reaction in this kind of situation is for the man to treat the younger woman like she’s something incredibly special.

Sure she is special, especially compared to a lot of older jaded women out there, but you don’t want to let her know that.

The moment a woman thinks that she’s special in the relationship is the moment she starts to think that she’s higher value than the man. This is danger time. 

If a young woman gets a sniff that you might value her much more than she values you then she’s going to start testing the hell out of you and she’s going to make you jump through hoops to please her.

You need to establish from the beginning that as the older man in the relationship that you are higher value than the woman, regardless how old she is or how beautiful she is.

Masculine Attracts Feminine

This last part is very important. You must be very masculine when dating younger women…

If your find yourself dating a younger woman then there’s a very good chance that your girlfriend is extremely feminine.

In fact, the bigger the age difference the more feminine your girlfriend is likely to be. Truly feminine women always seek out older men as partners because this relationship dynamic feels more natural to them.

When a woman is extremely feminine she is much more likely to be physically smaller and to also have a softer “girlier” personality.

Because of these traits a feminine woman is much more likely to seek out a man who is older and more capable of protecting her.

Younger, more feminine women always look for more masculine men to be with as this is the perfect compliment to her femininity. 

This means that as a man you have to fully embrace your masculinity and be an “alpha male” if you want to keep your younger girlfriend attracted to you.

You have to make her feel that you can protect her both physically and emotionally. You also have to exude strong masculine traits like leadership, confidence and decisiveness when dating your girlfriend.

Your girlfriend will also expect you to be fully in touch with your masculinity. Where younger guys are known for their indecisiveness, uncertainty and false confidence, you must stand out with your boldness and real, true confidence. 

Women Want Alpha Males

If your girlfriend senses that you aren’t really sure of yourself and that you aren’t internally strong and confident enough to date her, then she will start to pull away from you and seek out a relationship with another man who is strong and confident.

The same applies if you try to seek reassurance from your girlfriend that she loves you and really is attracted to you.

I’ve seen a lot of guys date younger women and it ends up brining all their insecurities and vulnerabilities to the surface.

These guys worry that they look too old when they’re with their girlfriend. They worry that their girlfriend will leave them for a younger (more handsome) man.

They worry that things are too good to be true and it’s only a matter of time before their girlfriend realizes that she with an “old man” and dumps him for someone closer to her own age.

If you start to think like this then you’re literally opening up Pandora’s Box and creating a world of trouble for yourself. Remember, your thoughts will materialize into real life actions.

If you start to doubt yourself and your relationship, your girlfriend will start to sense this.

Her immediate response will be to test you, and a younger woman will always try to test your masculinity to make sure that you’re strong and certain and sure of yourself.

The important thing to remember is that staying strong and embracing your masculinity is exactly what you need to do to keep your girlfriend attracted to you.

Age isn’t a real problem unless you make it a problem and start obsessively focusing on it. It only becomes a problem if you start to doubt yourself and act insecure over the age difference.

Guys who are successful dating younger women never focus on age difference. They keep the relationship light and playful and fun and don’t try to lock their girlfriends down into a committed relationship.

At the same time, these guys are very masculine and confident and they don’t let small things like “age difference” and uncertainty get in the way of a great relationship.

And believe me, dating younger women is one of the most amazing and pleasurable dating experiences you can have! If you find yourself dating a younger woman, make sure you enjoy it, embrace it and cherish it.

Keep in mind that a woman pulling away is completely normal and nothing to be scared of. Instead it should be embraced because this means she’s into you and is simply testing your masculinity before she proceeds to a full physical relationship with you.

[myareopagitica-blog]

Rape in India: A HUMANISTIC APPROACH

[Disclaimer: This essay may hurt religious sentiments. Read and share at your own risk. Hurting religious sentiments is unlawful and an offense in India cause no matter how many people get murdered or raped, you can’t talk against religion as someone’s feelings might get hurt; even if you’re looking to start a discussion about a solution to uplift our misguided youth and prevent the rape of India’s daughter, mother and sometimes grandmother.]

 The Bengaluru Mass molestation shocked India, the Nirbhaya case shocked us and rapes against women and minors shocking us since, our Ministers shocking us with their comments, the shocks that we’ve endured as Donald Trump becoming President-Elect (never gets old) and 470 people shockingly dying of shock that their Chief Minister Jayalalithaa had died absolutely un-shockingly after staying in the hospital for 75 days. As a young Indian I can’t help but notice the degrading state of our states that begs a change of state of mind.

I’m a feminist, I‘m a humanist! I’m a 24 year old educated male who is blown away every day by the deeds of my country’s citizens. Citizens who meaninglessly ranted the pledge that all Indians are their brothers and sisters throughout their schooling but grow up and do not even show them the courtesy of living things.And according to me…Our religion, tradition and culture are the biggest reasons why females are treated differently. This may come as a shock to you but bear with me, I have some logical inferences.

During ancient times, most jobs were manual labour related and depended on physical strength rather than the current demand for intelligence. In retrospect, our ancestors were right when they preferred men over women for these jobs cause let’s not deny the fact that men naturally have more muscles than women. This was the origin of the “preference of boy over girl” culture. The male creators and authors of religions were embedded in this culture and spawned a story that reeks of sexism.

Let’s start with Hinduism, the religion that brought us Sati and untouchability, most of the Gods are males. Brahma the creator, Vishnu the protector, Shiva the destroyer; all the jobs are completed by men. Why do we need women? Krishna is famous for his infidelity yet he’s worshipped. Do you imagine the same happening if Krishna was a female. In Ramayana, Sita gives the agni-pariksha while Ram just stood there trying to get the concept of him, a man, giving agni-pariksha. In Christianity, Jesus again is a male. His mother Mary was a virgin. No mention of his father Joseph’s virginity, it’s not important at all. He may have had premarital sex but what’s important is that the mother had to be pure.Somehow using one of our body parts to fulfill that part’s only function makes us (mostly women) impure. In fact throughout the bible most of the prophets and saints are males if not all. In Islamic communities and the Koran, the subjugation of women is so obvious that no one needs to be reminded. But let me remind you anyway. Mohammed married a six year old girl, the Imams and Maulvis are all men, men can marry thrice and divorce the wife by saying “Talaaq” thrice, burkas and hijabs, the sharia law that a woman needs three male witnesses to prove that she was raped and so on. If I share all the religious references I know that support my point, I can write a book bigger than the Song of Ice and Fire.

Our highly held Indian traditions have flaws too. Our girl child needs to learn cooking, needs to be a virgin till marriage, need not study much, need not be as healthy and nourished as a son, needs to prove to everyone that she’s not a prostitute by not wearing western outfits or by not smoking or by not drinking or by not walking the streets after 9pm.When a society has developed through the centuries symbiotically with the morally malnourished ancient religions and traditions, there are bound to be repercussions.

Now after reading this you guys maybe wondering that if religion and tradition are the reasons for crimes against women then why are they not so rampant in western countries where religion and tradition are also widespread. That’s some good wondering because thinking never hurt anyone. Developed countries have a higher literacy rate among females and overall, poverty and population under control and lesser dependence on orthodox traditions to run your life. Now I’m not saying that all Indian traditions are flawed or that we should abandon our culture. If you’re a woman and want to spend the rest of your life wearing a sari covering your head and face and cooking in the kitchen, it’s perfectly fine. I don’t have a problem with that. I’ll have a problem with you if you force your girl child to do the same. You may have given birth to her but you do not own her.

Education and awareness has done a great deal of good for India. The Independence movement, democracy in India, abolishment of untouchability owe greatly to the educated leaders and aware citizens. Stating the obvious, only literacy can turn a closed minded burka/ghunghat laden woman into a space suited astronaut or black coat/gown wearing judge.  

Overpopulation and poverty go hand in hand and is a factory of criminals and low lives where civility, if any, is kept hidden as bad rep, gang strength and physical might is the way of the world. A quick internet search will show you that rape is done by people who want to feel powerful. What gives you more justification to use power on the victim than your own upbringing? Women can’t walk on the street without being stared at and objectified. Political leaders stating that these things happen. Elders believing that somehow it’s the female’s fault for getting raped.

A concoction of male dominated religions, traditions, culture, poor education, overpopulation and poverty has made India to harbor the insensitive specie of Homo sapiens. How do you expect to rise up intellectually and morally as a species if you’re too busy hurting a person who doesn’t share your kind of genitalia? If you don’t treat your kids equally? If you differentiate based on caste? Just try and imagine the social stigma a woman goes through when she elopes with the love of her life, when she’s a divorcee or returns to her parents’ house, when she’s raped or molested. None of these are crimes committed by the woman. This just proves my point of how sick our society’s state of mind is!

For believers, if you honestly believe that God made this world and all its inhabitants then why destroy his creation. Why insert things in the anal cavity of his children. Don’t you wanna go to heaven? Or Do you want to be born as a dung-beetle in your next life?

For non-believers! You are a non-believer for a reason. Maybe because you’re logical and reasonable or maybe because you don’t care about religion, in any way you’re governed by the golden rule of morality “Treat others as you would wish to be treated”. So are the religious but they needed to be told in their language.

And now for the lesser evolved insensitive specie of Indians, with the advent of technology, internet, social media, education and western culture, your time will soon come to an end. You’ll be a lost tribe and not even like the ones who practiced woodoo which got covered in the history books; just surgically removed from the civilized society like a malignant tumor of a kind and no one even cared. Of course some of you would always exist because even though nature and the process of evolution were fabulously designed by time, it hasn’t got rid of the viruses i.e. the likes of serial rapists and sexual predators.

The biggest obstacle in this change of mentality is that we are stuck to the thinking that is prevalent in our current society. In India, we tend to look at the positive side of any religion, religious communities and groups and we tend to ignore the negative damaging side because we find it impolite. We need to see the two-faced monster in the eye. Maybe our parents, grandparents and forefathers did not have the ability to look at things with a critical viewpoint but with the advances in science and technology, we just can't turn a blind eye to this topic.

The simpletons who have somehow managed to reach this paragraph without getting distracted by NaMo’s tweets or getting swept away and swayed by his childish pompous speeches, let me make the solution simple to you. If you love your country and want it to progress, empowerment of women is the only way to go. We shall have twice as many educated people who have control over their lives, bringing wealth to their families and smartly calculating the number of babies they can afford. It will bring down population, poverty, rapes and increase India’s GDP per capita, India’s contribution to the world’s knowledge pool and our respect for fellow citizens.

This essay is my opinion on things and if you feel that it is illogical, has even a fraction of lies, a small shred of misinformation, a political or personal propaganda, you may not share it. If you feel it’s just a desperate attempt at understanding the current situation of intolerance and crimes against women and doesn’t deserve credit, you may not share. But if you agree with every word that I’ve said then there is no excuse to not only sharing the essay but also changing your lives. Don’t just feel sorry about the incidents; shock your patriarchal society and exercise your rights as an independent equal citizen. Take part in repair, improvement and development of the psyche of the Indian culture and society.

[ptsdtrbl1]

You Want Us to Join Your Pain? You Must Join Ours

By Deborah C. Tyler

June 9, 2020

As a practicing clinician, from time to time it's useful to explain to clients the division of responsibility in psychotherapy. I say, "Your job is to put your bottom in the chair, and my job is everything else."  I tell clients they can talk about whatever they wish for as long as they need.  Every feeling, every memory will get us where we need to go.  They don't have to find the mot juste or write a term paper about themselves.  If something makes them uncomfortable, please tell me as soon as you can, even if you have to circle back to it.

A few days ago, a client said to me, "You do not understand how I feel when I see the video of George Floyd."  I said, "It's true I don't understand your experience."  That response is called joining.

Several schools of psychotherapy employ joining as validation to advance the therapeutic relationship.  Joining communicates to the client that every aspect of your experience is indispensable.  In fact, during therapy, nothing else exists.  Joining can be simply staying quiet and listening to another's pain, which is what decent people do all the time.  Narrative therapy creates a momentary, healthy, healing narcissism in which the client's experience is all that matters.  After my client had poured out all to be said, I sealed the session by saying, "I was also heartbroken when I saw what happened to Mr. Floyd.  It's true, I don't understand as you do, but I have been through the pain of tragic death as his family is going through."  I did not mean, "OK, now let's talk about me."  That will never happen.  I said it because I believed that the client could accept the message that beneath our differences, there is a unifying reality of suffering that we all must experience.  The client's provisional, therapeutic narcissism can then resolve into the shared experience that unites us all.

I believe that connection through our shared suffering as Americans is gone.  American society has ruptured into two irreconcilable camps with no evident path to being reunited as one constitutional republic under God.  That brutal rupture happened in 1973, when the left embraced the doctrine of disposability of the youngest human beings.  Since then, all that's been happening is the inevitable spreading of infection through the body politic.  The path ahead to defend the Constitution and preserve traditional morality is either armed revolution or organized socioeconomic secession and apartheid.  The third path is surrender to those who hate us, while swiping our cards to pay for their abuse.

One way of conceptualizing the psychodynamics of this schism is that the left wing has become the collective psychotherapy client of the right wing, while being too immature to reciprocate the attention and emotional joining it demands.  That one-sided, permanent narcissistic assumption, which never resolves into a mutual understanding of both sides' pain, has destroyed our society.  The left wing disgorges its blame, rage, and discontent, believing that its bile deserves recognition and joining, while viewing our anguish and anger at the persecution of our great president, the desecration of our dearest constitutional rights, and the destruction of our national sovereignty as not worthy of understanding, but rather a symptom of the right wing's stupidity and hatefulness.  Furthermore, the shrieks and groans expectorated by the left about racism, sexism, "homophobia," kids in kages, global gorming are rarely based on any form of direct knowledge, much less on personal suffering.  In fact, it has been my experience that people who have actually suffered racial trauma, generally older like my client, are most capable of forgiveness, while pampered, wannabe victimlettes, sporting liberation fashion statements, are revenge-seeking blood-lusters in their histrionic wailings and gnashings.

Psychotherapy often begins with emotionally painful presenting problems.  Here are a few of the deep wells of pain that tens of millions of Americans deserve to be joined.  We are sick of your verbal abuse of calling us racist.  We are so nauseated by being guilty until proven innocent of racism that we could vomit.  So gagged by being called privileged, you can add bulimia to the presenting problems.  

The most race-privileged people in American history are Barack and Michelle Obama.  We are angry at your multifarious criminality in persecuting our great president.  We are enraged by your schemes to nullify our votes, to disenfranchise us, to cheat us with fraudulent elections.  We are tormented by your relentless attack on the U.S. Constitution, on our right to bear arms, our free exercise of religion, and the enslavement you envision for our grandchildren in the banana republic you are building.  We grieve every life your evil abortion philosophy has ended.

Barack and Michelle Obama have done more to damage race relations in America than any human beings since the end of legal segregation.  Their respective booties — one skinny, one super-sized, extra fries — have been in a ginormous therapy chair sharing the pain of how racist Americans are, which amounts to verbal abuse of the American people.  On May 29, Barack sauntered from one of his mansions with a tall shaker of salt to rub in our wounds.  His lesion-salting ended by encouraging us "to work together to create a 'new normal' in which the legacy of bigotry and unequal treatment no longer infects our institutions or our hearts."  See, normally you are a racist swine with an infected heart from the legacy of bigotry.  Thanks for sharing, Barack. 

Oprah Winfrey's bountiful butt cheeks have been crammed into the client's chair so long that she can't stand up straight.  Oprah emotes passionately about her pain and is unaware of yours.  On the death of George Floyd, Oprah writes: "If the largeness of a soul is determined by its sphere of influence, George Floyd is a mighty soul."  If largeness of soul is determined by sphere of influence, then Hitler, Stalin, Mao had gigantic souls.  Tragically, George Floyd's sphere of influence has already resulted in the bloody murder of at least five black people.  Oprah will not publicly grieve for federal officer Patrick Underwood or police chief David Dorn.  She may believe they were smaller souls according to her methods of spiritual calculation, though Underwood sacrificed his life for his oath to the Constitution and Dorn died protecting a friend's store.  Right-wing people tend to be equally pained by all tragic deaths; for the left wing, someone murdered by a cop is more tragic.

Oprah writes of George: "While pouring coffee, lacing my shoes, and taking a breath, I think: He doesn't get to do this."  So many babies won't ever draw a breath because they were murdered in the womb.  So many souls, so many black boys, won't ever learn to tie shoe laces because of that cataclysm of killing.  Oprah doesn't join that ocean of pain.

For many, our worst suffering is due to the destruction of the Constitution, for what that portends for our grandchildren.  The Constitution is near death.  First it was cut open to harvest its organs for abortion and "gender-neutral" marriage.  Now there is a knee on the neck of the Constitution, asphyxiating the black-letter rights of the First Amendment.  

More than anything, the left hates Christianity.  It has exploited and perverted and now is simply murdering Christianity.  When Americans assert their free exercise of religion, the eunuch John Roberts kneels before a radical left-wing governor and degrades the Supreme Court as "an unelected federal judiciary" which may not "second-guess" the restricting of church worship.  Where does he think he works at?  The Jiffy Lube?  It is especially sickening because the so-called science on the Wuhan virus (which figured in his capitulation) is a pile of trash.

When will our fellow Americans, so sensitive, so aggrieved, let us sit in the therapy chair?  When will they join our pain?  Never.

Dr. Deborah C Tyler, PHD,MA, is a Clinical Psychologist specialist in Little River, South Carolina. She attended and graduated from Case Western Reserve University School Of Medicine in 1977, having over 43 years of diverse experience, especially in Clinical Psychologist.