#if you don’t know Jordan Peterson this won’t

[itspileofgoodthings]

anyway I don’t have the whole Jordan Peterson dating propaganda rebuttal fully locked and loaded but basically it’s just never about statistics. never was, never will be. and I’ll say that while acknowledging that the statistics can be objectively bad, especially for certain specific sub-groups, people with strong and specific convictions, highly intelligent people etc. but it doesn’t matter because the fundamental truth is that it’s always “one in a million the chances of feeling the way we do” etc. etc. and always was?? things are hard right now, on the dating scene, because life is hard right now and it’s hard to make money and find a stable situation that makes you happy. things are extra hard because society is incredibly fractured on the basis of both belief and vibes (lol) so the odds of finding someone just out in the great wide world of indiscriminate datings apps who’s going to believe what you believe and have the same set of cultural values (if that’s the word I want) are incredibly low. It’s not going to happen! And if you’re out looking you’re going to run into those obstacles over and over and over. But it kind of doesn’t matter? Because love is still real, people can still feel it, God brings people together. And I actually don’t think you need to do anything except continue living your life and doing things because they’re good for you, if and when you can, like having as much of a social life as you can and is feasible. The rest, in my humble opinion, is out of your control and you should just let it go! Yeah we’d have an easier time if our culture was more unified, if we fundamentally believed the same things and shared the same values. But even then the stars aligning of it all in terms of liking each other and wanting the same things and being in the same place and communicating in a way where we can actually understand each other is just out of our control and the answer is trust, love, and patience. And also a willingness to accept that you might just be alone, romantically speaking. So start filling your life up with other things and start getting used to the burden of it. Because what is there else to do? Except NOT accepting it and growing increasingly desperate. In any case, and to return to my point, this is my answer to the fundamental lie of the Peterson dating discussions. And it’s just that statistics have nothing to do with ANYTHING when it comes to finding love and happiness. It is never statistical; it’s always beyond that. My parents’ love story, my friends’ love stories, coworkers love stories—it can’t be quantified because they did x. On some level it just happened to them. They were lucky enough to find it all. (Or you know they forced it and are now unhappily married. Happens a LOT. But presuming that we’re talking about ending up happy.)

AND.

ON ANOTHER NOTE (that is still sort of related)

That same study of statistics doesn’t apply because it only takes one. So his whole tired repeated take about how intelligent women have the hardest time finding husbands because men are scared of their intelligence? Might even be true! But it doesn’t MATTER because nobody should want to marry everybody! If that makes sense! It’s always personal. I have felt the fear/lack of interest that he’s talking about as an intelligent woman (hey-oh!) walking through this world and I don’t give a damn because a man being afraid of me is proof that he is not FOR me. He is like my students except that I am not in the position to take him by the hand, metaphorically speaking, and walk him through David Copperfield. If someone ever wants to marry me, they will be delighted by me and confident that they have something to offer me. Period. And I used to think that that was true only for me but I think it is and should be true for everyone!!!! Peterson might be even stating something true or at least COMMON when he talks about this fear but his fundamental premise is faulty a) because we never have to marry a whole group of people and b) Because he acts like this is a problem for people, specifically women, to wrestle with and it just isn’t. There is nothing to do WITH the problem. As far as our list of actionable items goes it doesn’t make the cut. Or close to it. It doesn’t matter because that lack of interest and fear is not something to be engaged with and “solved.” Literally: go with God. Yeah, maybe you get your hopes up or get hurt because you think there is a chance and then turns out there wasn’t. That sucks and is painful! But. There is still nothing to do with that except move on. A person interested in me (in you, in anyone) would not react in this way is what you gotta tell yourself. It’s just a sign it isn’t right; it’s clear communication from the universe. (The person, God’s Plan etc.)

And. This isn’t even getting into him saying things like “the average age gap between men and women who marry is 4 years” for no clear apparent reason. So the fuck what Jordan? What does this have to do with anything??? (Sorry for swearing.) Yeah I can believe in some circles that’s a common number that occurs. I also know lots of people who are not in fact four years apart. I am actually having trouble thinking of a married couple i currently know who are four years apart. Like. So. What is even being said????!??? What is the purpose behind it????? Except an attempt to fear-monger, spread a lack of hope, sow discord. But honestly sometimes I think he’s just yapping.

He’ll also contradict himself by saying things like “you only have five people to try on statistically speaking” (the hell??? Jordan???) “so choose wisely” while also saying things like “a relationship isn’t something you find, it’s something you build.” So like … which is it? Because I think solemnly choosing someone in this objective way and trying to settle into building a relationship is going to lead to a lot of needless frustration. Like. You can’t build a relationship, IMO, until the opportunity to do so appears. And feels right to both of you. And you both take it. And you cannot manufacture that, force it into existence, call it into being. I mean you can TRY. But it won’t end well. The happy right comfortable good ones are just times where the opportunity is given and both people want to take it. He won’t admit the role of grace here and I think the role of grace is everythinggggg. And this Not even getting into him referring to marriage as being handcuffed to a person and unable to walk away which is imo the wrong vibe.

Which is kinda my too-long point. It’s the wrong vibe. Things are not bleak if you look at them right. They just are what they are. I actually think the more specific of a person you are the more likely you are to find someone capable of making you happy. And yeah maybe that process will be easier for people who are younger and just sort of around people who share the same values as them etc. though even then, even !!!!! then !!!!!!!!! there’s a mystery to who finds someone and who doesn’t at certain times because you’re dealing with the human soul and free will and all its mysteries in addition to everything else. It’s always kind of a miracle. It’s always one in a million. It’s always specific, singular, personal. And once again: we desperately want to believe that there is something we can do about this to bring it about and I guess there might be, indirectly. But we can never manufacture the opportunity into existence, or study the problem away, or analyze the difficulties out of being and into our power. We just need to let it go, if we can. Jordan’s rhetoric preys on that fear in a ridiculous and ultimately contradictory way and I hate to see people believing it, being affected by it, quoting it, spouting it, internalizing it. In conclusion he can’t scare me but he can deeply annoy me. Thanks for coming to my ted talk.

[micah-mohammed]

THIS ESSAY WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE IF YOU LET IT.

Ever since I was capable of deep thinking, I’ve wanted to share my insights in the hope they would help others as they’ve helped me. But I never seemed to follow through. It felt as if something was holding me back, preventing me from taking action. I thought maybe I just wasn’t that interested in writing, so I did what many others do—I chalked it up to “this isn’t for me” or “I’m just procrastinating.” And just like that, I’d fall into inaction, letting unproductive days pass by, each filled with the anxiety and resentment that lingered beneath the surface, whether I realized it or not.

The problem wasn’t some dark, magical force like procrastination conspiring against me. It was something deeper: a short-term, failure-oriented mindset. In my case, I wanted to be a writer, but I was stuck in a mindset where all I could see were potential failures. I imagined uploading my work only to see zero views, no followers, no likes—maybe even some demotivating hate comments and scrutiny. I focused on all the reasons not to act, from biased algorithms to intense competition.

You might say, “But those concerns are valid. Your first content likely won’t gain much traction, and established authors have years of experience.” And you’d be right, to a point. But here’s where the logical fallacy lies:

I was viewing results at a fixed point in time, like looking at a single dot on a graph without considering the trajectory. I didn’t see that success isn’t about instant results; it’s about perseverance over time. Every pursuit has its initial ‘test’—a period where you get little to no results despite your efforts. This test filters out those who merely wish for success from those who are willing to act and make sacrifices to achieve it. Who knows how many journals a writer must write before gaining traction, how many songs an artist must create before building a fan base, or how many paintings a painter must produce before receiving the recognition they deserve?

The result of this test determines whether you’re deserving of success. If you don’t pass, it’s likely due to a failure mindset that focuses on why things won’t work out and fixates on the initial period of no results. But if you pass, it’s because you embraced a winner’s mindset. You see the upward trajectory, understanding that the initial quiet period is just a filter to separate the deserving from the undeserving. With this mindset, you view obstacles as opportunities. What others see as demotivating comments, you see as valuable critiques to help you learn and improve.

Only those with a winner’s mindset can have hope, and with hope comes belief, and with belief comes action. Action develops vision—the ability to see the upward trajectory. Vision leads to growth, and growth breeds confidence. This confidence transforms you into an unstoppable force.

A wise man, Dr. Jordan Peterson, once said that the purpose of life is found in the pursuit of excellence. I invite you to start pursuing whatever art you admire—whether it’s pottery, painting, singing, dancing, or music creation—and do it as if your life depends on it, because your legacy does. I recommend watching the movie Whiplash (2014), which delves into the role of obsession in achieving greatness. Remember, those who don’t pursue their dreams and merely exist are like walking corpses. As Benjamin Franklin said, most people die at 25; we just don’t bury them until 75. Every day a mediocre person lives, he becomes more bitter, filled with hatred, regret, and resentment because deep down, he knows he’s not being the person he could be if he just took action. These emotions only grow stronger with age as the realization sets in that time is running out.

Whoever you are reading this, know that you don’t need to create a famous piece of art to be a winner or one of the greats. To the mothers reading this, you are already a creator—you’ve created life. To the fathers, you are winners too, having built stable, healthy, productive families. Recognize the art you’ve already created in this short life. Remember this if you forget everything else: We Are All Creators. The extent to which you are a creator is within your control. It’s up to you whether you craft trivial or profound, noble art pieces worthy of who you are. So go on now—better your life, and create, and create well.

Author: Micah I.H. Mohammed

Journal Entry: 21/08/2024

[tellthemeerkatsitsfine]

Okay, I have a number of things to go on about, and they’re vaguely related so I’m going to see if I can tie them together in one post.

It’s related to the extremely irritating issue of offensive material in comedy, and how much of it can be justified with irony, and whether intent matters. If anyone wants to understandably skip that because it passed the point of “re-hashed too many times” about thirty years ago and is somehow still going, then I understand. It’s a topic I’ve previously re-hashed on this blog, but not for a while, really, and I think that’s good. I think the good way to go through life, for the sake of my own emotional state and for just not contributing to a world that gives too much attention to toxic shit, is to enjoy what I like and ignore the rest.

In general, I do that much better than I used to. I used to have a bad habit of hate reading/watching things. When the Jordan Peterson issue comes up and people say “Well the people who criticize him haven’t even listened to him!” I can say actually, fuck you, I’ve listened to hours and hours and hours of his lectures on YouTube, just so I could say I don’t criticize things without knowing exactly what I’m talking about. Don’t do that, by the way. Waste of time. The people who think none of his critics have ever actually heard his arguments won’t be swayed by little things like the fact that it isn’t true. And getting the painstakingly long full context doesn’t make any of the soundbites seem more reasonable. Contrary to what everyone says, the full version of him is the story the soundbites tell, but in a form that’s mind-numbingly boring and pointlessly convoluted.

Anyway. That is not the point, this post isn’t actually about Jordan Peterson at all. The point is that I don’t do shit like that anymore, at least not regularly. Not for a long time. Not usually. It’s a waste of time, so I don’t. Usually. But in the last few weeks, I have done a bit of watching people be assholes on YouTube, specifically of the comedy variety, and I have some thoughts about that. So that’s this post. Feel free to skip it.

So, it started with Alun Cochrane. I was watching his clips from back when he was doing fun observational material about locking families in his basement, and from there, ended up on the side of him that’s started to go darker. I went on about that trajectory in another rambling post a few weeks ago, so no need to go over it all again now. The summary is that he used to do apolitical stuff (as apolitical as anything can be, at least) and generally seem pretty cool, and in about 2019 he started going a bit “well we have to consider that the bigots who don’t believe in food for low-income children make some good points, lets be fair and centrist about this”, and seems to have gone quite a bit further that way over the course of COVID.

In trying to work out what happened there, I ended up following him to the Comedy Unleashed YouTube channel, and a performance he did for them. I won’t link to it, or even get specific about anything else in this post, because I really don’t want to give them more attention. I already gave them some clicks and views, and that’s more than enough. All I need to say is it’s a YouTube channel for a promotion that puts on comedy shows for the free-thinking free speechists or whatever. They bill themselves that way, and everyone understands that it means it’s a place for comedians who are too right-wing for the regular comedy circuit, and comedy fans who are tired of comedy not made by assholes. Oh, and it’s for comedians who couldn’t make it as far as they wanted on the regular comedy circuit, and would like to enter a smaller and less competitive market. How do you tell the difference between that and the first type of comedian you see there? There are ways to make a guess, signs that could point one way or the other, but really, you can almost never know for sure. Does it fucking matter? Not really, I’d argue.

If someone is performing at a gig like that, and actively courting attention, laughs, and ticket sales from the sort of people who attend a gig like that, it doesn't really matter what their internal motivations are. The two options are different. In one case they’re just a shitty person from the beginning, and in the other case they’ve cynically sold out on a moral level. They're shitty either way. Neither type is justified, even if they're different.

But I am interested in the difference between people who’d knowingly do a gig like that, and people who might do that kind of material, without thinking about its wider implications. Or maybe they have thought about its implications, and they truly believe it’s justified, it’s not appealing to people who truly believe shitty things, we all get the irony, we get that it’s just a joke.

I’ve heard a million times that “intent is irrelevant”, when it comes to impact, and that’s true. I like this analogy about stepping on someone’s foot – it doesn’t matter if you meant to do it or not, you still hurt them and still need to stop. But if someone steps on my foot, I do care whether they did it on purpose. Not because if it was an accident, I’ll just let them keep standing there. I’ll tell them to stop, and if they say, “How dare you woke SJWs tell me how to live my life?” and step on it harder, then they can fuck off. But if they say, “Oh shit, sorry, didn’t see you there,” and get out of the way, then that’s a helpful thing for me to know. My foot hurts just as much as it would have if they’d done it on purpose, but I have useful information for the future. I know I don’t need to avoid this person, because they don't go around trying to step on people’s feet. I might get along with this person. It’s not a fundamental flaw in their character, it’s not a person who’s looking to hurt people. If I’m ever going to see them again, I want to know that.

I used to give people the benefit of the doubt a lot more than I do these days. It used to be that if I saw something shitty, I’d immediately make the most charitable assumption, and then try to prove it right. But every time that gets proven wrong, I get quicker to judge.

So, back to how that applies to comedy. I’d love to say my view of offensive comedy is that I just don’t like anyone who says mean things on stage, across the board. But that isn’t true (for me, at least – any comedy fans who do feel that way are probably better off). It can be really funny when someone’s an asshole on stage, if we know they don’t mean it. But if that’s the rule, then intent does matter. I need to know whether they meant it, whether they live that way.

A couple of years ago, when I first watched the Big Fat Quizzes, I remember using one of Jimmy Carr’s autocue jokes as an example of that. He said: “It’s incredibly important that we stop polar ice caps from melting. Because if they disappear, where am I going to hunt polar bears?” It’s not a great joke, but I have to admit, it’s all right for a Jimmy Carr joke. Made me laugh a bit. I posted a screenshot of it at the time, saying this can illustrate how to judge whether it’s acceptable to say shitty things in comedy. As it stands, that’s an all right joke. If it ever comes out that Jimmy Carr actually does hunt polar bears for sport, or if that joke were told by a different person, and that person actually did hunt polar bears for sport, then it wouldn’t be funny. So context does matter, even context that goes beyond just what happened on that stage before and after the joke.

That is my, admittedly flimsy, justification for why I can laugh at some of the most horrifying things Frankie Boyle said on early Mock the Week (my love for Frankie Boyle would be so much easier to justify if I could say I only liked him after he got older and made his act more targeted at those who deserve it, but I’m sorry to say I like it all), but not like it when Jimmy Carr says almost the same thing. Yeah, Jimmy Carr doesn’t really mean it any more than Frankie Boyle does, but Jimmy Carr courts ticket sales and laughs from people who do really mean that stuff, in a way that I don’t think Frankie Boyle ever did, even back in the day. I think. It’s not a perfect justification, but it’s what I’ve got right now. Though a few YouTube comments on old Frankie Boyle videos are enough to disprove it pretty fast. I might need to come up with something better.

Okay, how’s this for a justification? I think Frankie Boyle is an example of someone who does go around thinking about whether he’s stepping on people’s feet. Who used to truly believe that he wasn’t doing harm, and then thought about it more, and now takes more care. I believe that’s what happened because it’s what he told us happened. You either believe that’s what happened or you believe Frankie Boyle’s been lying for years (which some people do believe, and I can understand why someone could think that), but I haven’t made it up. He has written lots of articles about how he started reconsidering his targets, the way almost all his comedy came from hating “the system”, and he tries to think about the fact that hitting already vulnerable targets isn’t railing against “the system” that he hates, it’s playing right into its hands. And he doesn’t want to do that, but he does want to still make comedy that does something with all his anger, and he cares about doing that right.

This sort of thing is why Frankie Boyle appeals so much to me personally, as a woke SJW who wants to protect the vulnerable, but is also a big fan of angry vulgar comedy. There’s not a lot of crossover between angry vulgar comedy and comedy that is responsible in the way I care about, but Frankie Boyle is trying to work out how to do it, and I love that. There’s a bit on one of his DVD shows in which Frankie Boyle says he wishes we had a totally equal society, just so he could say horrible things about absolutely everyone and it wouldn’t be playing into the system’s hands, because the system isn’t trying to hurt anyone. He said that maybe someday he’ll do a gig in Sweden, known for its equitable living standards, so he can just unload on everyone. But in the meantime, he has to take context and marginalization into account.

That’s a better explanation I have for why I like Frankie Boyle, but it really only covers a certain era. It doesn’t justify the version of him that said horrible things to the mother of a kid with Down Syndrome, and then called Mark Watson a cunt for suggesting that they should do the exact thing that Frankie Boyle started talking about doing just a few years later, which is think critically about targets and who comedy hurts. For the record, I have never tried and would never try to defend that specific action from Frankie Boyle, my only defence for why I can like him despite that is I don’t think he’d stand by it today.

Anyway. My ongoing efforts to justify Mock the Week-era Frankie Boyle (to justify my enjoyment of him, I should say – I have no desire to justify him generally to anyone who doesn’t like him) are not what got me to write this particular post. What got me to do that was I ended up watching a bunch more Comedy Unleashed videos, after I first went there for Alun Cochrane. I know I shouldn’t have, I know things like that thrive on a hate watch-based view count, I don’t do this much anymore, but I did do it a few weeks ago. I wanted to see what they were saying. I wanted to see if I could understand where any of them were coming from. I wanted to try to guess who was there because they really believed in the ideals and who had gotten so sick of waiting for Mock the Week to call that they’d decided to just sell out.

Honestly, it’s not a bad game. I mean, it’s a bad game for the world, but it’s not bad as a way to pass the time. Watch the comedians who aren’t playing the game anymore. The ones who aren’t saying offensive shit and then justifying it with, “No, come on, it’s ironic!” They don’t need to justify it, because that’s what the crowd came to hear. This gig was advertised in a way to draw in all those shitty people who want to see their voice in the media. You can watch it and play Guess The Comedians’ Motivations. How many years did this person spend waiting for a call from Mock the Week before they gave up and started doing this shit?

There are context clues that can help with that game, and I sometimes find it genuinely interesting to see what they used to be. I guess the big one, the guy who was way ahead of the curve, jumping ship before it was cool, would be Andrew Lawrence. The guy whose YouTube videos start appearing in my recommendations if I do too much hate watching of anything. YouTube already knows I’m into British comedy, so if I watch a bunch of right-wing bullshit, it becomes convinced that what I what to see is British comedy and right-wing bullshit. And then my recommendations become a sea of Andrew Lawrence and Russell Brand. And – and this is interesting, as it’s a phenomenon that started relatively recently but is noticeable – the Russell Howard’s starting to increase alongside them. But that’s another issue.

I find the Andrew Lawrence story genuinely interesting, from the messed up part of me that finds any of this interesting. Because he used to be a regular comedian! He was trying to make it in the same circuit as everyone else for a long time. Then on one day in 2014, he decided to go on a Facebook rant (I won’t link that either, if you don’t know the story you can Google it, or better yet, don’t bother), and in one fell swoop cut off all his mainstream options. It’s a hell of a decision, one full of some very specifically targeted shots at Mock the Week, so that’s why I’m using “gave up waiting to get invited on Mock the Week” as my go-to example for why a comedian would go that way. Because it could not be clearer that that’s what pushed Andrew Lawrence over the edge. Got mad that he didn’t get asked on there, spewed a bunch of vitriol about how it’s the fault of the women and the people of colour (he did not use the term “people of colour”), made it so he could never do that sort of thing, but did gather an audience of all the right-wing people who don’t have a lot of comedians to enjoy these days. It’s a smaller audience, but there are fewer comedians competing for it, so it’s an option for people who don’t think they can make it otherwise.

Incidentally, Andrew Lawrence did make a hilarious video right after it was announced that Mock the Week would end in 2022. He calls multiple regulars out by name. He references Frankie Boyle, who hasn’t been there since 2009. He calls the host “Dara O’Brien”, really leaning into the “ii-en”, even though obviously he knows how to pronounce Dara’s name, it’s a name that’s clearly been keeping him awake at night for fifteen years. I won’t link to that either, but if you want a good laugh… I normally don’t recommend giving more views to that bullshit, but this one is so funny that it’s worth breaking that rule. It’s incredibly fucking funny. I won’t link it but you can look it up if you want to laugh.

The thing that actually got me writing this post is I was listening to an old recording of a multi-act comedy show from 2014, and I heard someone who’s on Comedy Unleashed in 2022. I was initially surprised to hear his name, but I thought about how long ago it was, and how much things have changed. If you watch Stewart Lee’s Alternative Comedy Experience TV show, Andrew Lawrence’s name is often on that sign that appears outside the comedy club at the beginning of the episodes. The list of names changes, but Lawrence’s name is there a lot. Which is weird, because he doesn’t actually appear in the show. I read somewhere that he recorded material for the show that didn’t make the final cut, which does seem likely, given that his name is all over it.

That show aired in 2013 and 2014, just before he went on his Facebook rant. Actually, now that I think about it, that coincides so closely that learning he’d been cut from that TV show could have been part of the reason he decided to burn his bridges. There was also a split with his management company or something, I don’t know exactly, but I do probably know too much about the situation.

The point is that lots of comedians who are doing the unapologetically right-wing thing these days were doing mainstream shows in 2014 (Stewart Lee would argue that that was not a mainstream show, but it was on TV and run by one of the most popular comedians of this generation, whether he likes it or not). If I’m using Alternative Comedy Experience as an example, Tony Law was all over that show, and he’s on Comedy Unleashed now. Same with Alun Cochrane, for that matter. Those two are both the sort of people who, in 2014, were also doing the type of gig that I was listening to today. The particular one I heard today featured Lewis Schaeffer, another comedian who’s on that right-wing circuit now. He’s gone properly that way, more than most. He’s on Comedy Unleashed and on GB News.

I’m avoiding writing too many specifics, partly because I try to avoid writing about any of the less-than-above-board comedy recordings I’ve been hearing lately (though I am four pages into this post and pretty confident that pretty much no one is reading it, I could say anything here, James Acaster is very good but a bit overrated, my brother’s told me some good gossip about Daniel Sloss that I wish I could make a post about but I don’t because I try to be responsible - see, doesn’t matter, I can admit things like that because no one’s here), and partly because I don’t want to give it more attention. Obviously this post in itself is lots of attention, but I don’t want to get too into the specifics of the shitty things he said, because there’s no need to amplify that shit. Basically, the stuff he said on Comedy Unleashed involved trans women. It wasn’t good.

I heard him come on to this gig from 2014, and I realized it made sense for him to be on that respectable stage back then, because it was before he went off in that bad direction. Can't blame them for having him on, they didn't know what he'd become. But then I heard him tell almost the same story he told on Comedy Unleashed. The one about trans women.

At first I was very surprised, because this is a show by people I respect, and I didn’t expect them to condone that sort of comedy. But then I listened more closely, and realized that if you strip it of context, I can see how it sounds okay. If I didn’t know this guy would go on to be a GB News pundit and everything else, if I didn’t know he’d go on to tell this same story in front of an audience that was genuinely out for trans people’s blood, I could read it as ironic. Also, there were a few differences. In front of the right-wing crowd in recent years, he made a few more direct references to the “trans movement” or whatever, being more explicit in what he was saying. When he told the story years ago, he was more ambiguous. He played on a couple of harmful tropes, but he didn’t tie it to larger issues. He suggested that he was the butt of the joke, not a marginalized group. It was essentially the same material, but with a few more layers of irony and some of the most clearly bigoted comments not included.

That, to me, is such a stark example of how thin the line is between “ironic bigotry” and genuine bigotry. I think if I’d been at that gig in 2014, I’d have thought I understood that he wasn’t actually talking about transgender people, he was just making a joke. I might have found it funny, if I’d seen it stripped of context. In this case, that context was some shit that wouldn’t happen until years later. That context was me seeing him tell the same joke, with just a few modifications, in front of an unironically transphobic crowd, and get laughs from it. That makes me reconsider any “ironically bigoted” jokes that I might enjoy when they get told today, that I’ll listen to with charitable assumptions, believing those people don’t really mean it.

When I was in high school, my friends were into The IT Crowd. I didn’t watch all of it – I didn’t end up watching the whole show until 2020 – but I did watch a few episodes of it with my friends back in the day. One of the episodes that I watched when it aired in 2008 was the one in which Matt Berry dates a trans woman. You know, the horrifying one. And the one that started it all for Graham Linehan. It's worth remembering that all of Graham Linehan's bullshit started with backlash from just one episode of The IT Crowd.

In high school, my best friend was a trans girl. She came out to me in 2006 and we graduated in 2008, and while 2022 is still not an easy time to be transgender, 2006-2008 was worse. She and I both watched the IT Crowd trans episode, and we cringed our way through it. It wasn’t good. But we didn’t let it ruin our enjoyment of the show. And at this point, I’m mostly including her perspective to try to justify why I was willing to overlook it – I know it’s bad, but my friend who actually was trans was overlooking it too. It was just how things were, because it was 2008. Not that that was okay - fuck anyone who says, “This was okay back then.” It wasn’t okay. But it was normalized. It seemed okay, because there was nothing better.

It was normalized enough so I could watch it, even in 2020, and say, “Well shit, this is fucking bad, but, okay, I guess they hadn’t thought about it.” That was my charitable assumption. When I re-watched the episode in 2020, I cringed again, it was really bad, but I watch lots of bad stuff that makes me cringe. I just think, “Okay, they’re probably not setting out to cause harm, just get through this bit and move on.” In 2008, there was so little trans visibility that it is conceivable that the episode was written by someone who just hadn’t thought about the fact that it took aim at real people. He could have just stepped on a foot by accident. That means someone’s foot still got hurt, but it doesn’t mean it was written by someone who goes around intentionally hurting people.

Obviously, that is not the case. Not long after I finished re-watching The IT Crowd in 2020, I came across the whole fucking Graham Linehan mess, and learned that the foot-stepping was very much intentional. Or maybe it still wasn’t, at first. He may well not have originally written that episode for the purpose of being an asshole. But he’s the person who steps on a foot by accident, gets told to get off the person’s foot, and says, “Fuck you, I’ll step wherever the fuck I want.” And then goes a giant campaign to step on every foot possible, in the most painful possible ways, specifically targeting the most vulnerable and marginalized feet. He dedicates his whole fucking life to stepping on feet, just because someone asked him not to.

But without context, that episode seemed… overlookable. It seemed bad, painfully transphobic, but I could gloss over that for a good show (the fact that The IT Crowd isn't really that good a show is a separate issue). I could make charitable assumptions, and guess that he didn’t mean to hurt anyone. Like with the Lewis Schaeffer bit in 2014, when he told that weird story about a woman with a penis, left the stage, and got praised by people I respect. People whom I truly believe would not have been cool with it if they knew he would go on to use that bit to intentionally spread hate. I think I would have seen it as acceptable, back in 2014. Not because I didn’t care about trans people back then, but because I’d have believed it was ironic.

Okay, that’s what I’ve got on this subject. I’m not sure if it’s quite coherent, and I don’t know if it comes together to make my point very well. But I think my point is that I’m finding my tolerance for ironic bigotry getting lower than it used to be. I don’t know. I’m thinking of the Marc Maron joke in which he claims all men want to have sex with teenage girls, which I initially thought was actually a decent joke – as someone who works with a lot of teenagers, I find that an accurate parody of the sort of gross stuff that gets said by men who creep on teenage girls. Good send-up of men like that, solid joke. Is what I thought, until I learned that Marc Maron does have a reputation for dating much younger women. Right, okay, it wasn’t a send-up, it was a comedian expressing his actual views. Well fuck you then. That’ll teach me to make charitable assumptions.

I think that’s my point. I recently posted a Josie Long quote: “There is no space for irony in these dark times. Stop ironically saying the words, we’re all just hearing the fucking words.” I think my point is that Josie Long is right. It’s fucking jarring to think something’s ironic and then realize it isn’t. And if comedians want to say terrible things “ironically”, it should be on them to prove that they don’t really mean it, instead of on us to prove they do. I think my point might just be that Josie Long is right about everything.

Still working on how to square this point with how much I like to get drunk and re-watch Frankie Boyle-era Mock the Week. But, genuinely, my answer to that is that he has gone on to show he cares about this stuff. If Lewis Schaeffer or Graham Linehan can retroactively make their stuff unjustifiable by proving they really did hold those awful views, then surely Frankie Boyle can retroactively show he really was always being ironic. Doesn’t explain the time he called Mark Watson a cunt for questioning him, though (I single that out as particularly indefensible not because I think it's worse when he's mean to other famous people than to marginalized groups, but because the Mark Watson thing is something he said while not "in character", while not joking, while not claiming there was any irony, and while being several different shades of hypocrite about it). I’ve got nothing on that. If anyone wants to hate Frankie Boyle for that alone, I dan’t blame them for one second.

[alfredtangphoto]

In-home newborn lifestyle session // Baby Andreas, The Eriksons

When I first started my photography business, I set to carve out my brand to be one of telling emotionally-invoking stories of human connections through photographs that stood the test of time. Connection session (aka engagement sessions) and weddings helped fulfilled this and thus steered my brand towards this portion of the market. But as I watched my clients and friends add members to their families, and as I thought about my own childhood and relationship with my mother, I began to realize something I’ve already known: having and raising children in it’s own is a different type of emotional love story that is usually unconditional. And one, where both parents learn a lot more about themselves and one another. These new parents are literally carrying out the words spoken during their wedding vows of committing to being by each other’s side on “this crazy journey called life”.

“Children are the reintroduction of the unsullied paradise of being.” - Dr. Jordan Peterson

All this to say that this is why I don’t advertise family sessions as they’re typically the standard family-posed type of shots that doesn’t really tell an emotionally invoking story that “fits my brand” (but still are important to the family!). These sessions are typically reserved for previous wedding clients, friends or from personal referrals. But then, an email from Helena’s mother led to a session that would alter the way I viewed the interpretation of my brand and my journey of telling love stories.

I’ve worked with Helena & Jasper a number of times, documenting some of their most special life events (even took Jasper’s headshot for his med school application!), so when I was presented the opportunity to document the new addition to their family, I was ecstatic! Not just because Helena & Jasper are sweet and awesome people who deserve nothing but the best, but because becoming new parents is a very transformational pivot point in their lives - teaching you things about life and love that no other life experiences can. I wanted to document the beginning of this unconditional love and bond with their 8-week old human.

Let me tell you, this half hour session was one of the most sweet, tender and magical moments I’ve ever had the privilege to witness. I won’t say why as I hope the images from this in-home newborn lifestyle session will do all the talking. Thank you Helena & Jasper for inviting me into your home and photographing another intimate and pivotal point in your lives. You guys will be the best parents and I already know Andreas will be the best big brother other siblings will be jealous of!

“The family you create is more important than the family you came from.” I said what I said! While this statement is subjective and debatable, there’s an awful lot of truth in it.

If you have enjoyed this Portland newborn lifestyle session, I’d appreciate a comment or a share! If you’re interested in working together on your family session, click the button below to get in touch with me!

[orphancookie69]

Dr Jordan Peterson: 12 Rules

I have recently really began to appreciate Dr Jordan Peterson lately, and I can’t get enough of him. I stumbled upon a Tiktok video of him explaining his 12 Rules for Life, a book my sister is also currently reading. While I can’t wait to read it, let’s make a post about it! 

12 Rules for Life: 

Stand up straight with your shoulders back

Treat yourself like someone you’re responsible for helping

Befriend people who want the best for you

Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not the useless person you are today

Do not let your children do anything that would make you dislike them

Set your house in order before you criticize the world 

Pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient

Tell the truth, or at least don’t lie

Assume the person you are listening to knows something you don’t

Be precise in your speech

Do not bother children while they’re skateboarding

Pet a cat when you encounter one in the street

So, the first one is a no brainer. This is basic salesperson training 101. If you do not smile and sit up straight like you are the most confident person in the world before you pick up that phone, you are fucked. Just because the person can not see you, does not mean they can not hear your lack of confidence. Try slouching and looking down while answering the phone, then try sitting straight up smiling. 

Second one, this one is amazing to hear. I know that I am a generally really helpful person to others, but I am not so quick to take my own advice. If it treated myself, the way I treated other people...I would listen to myself more and love myself more. Really. 

Third, befriend people who want the best for you. Friends are the family you choose. You are a reflection of the people you surround yourself with. If the people around you don’t want the best for you, they will never help you climb the mountain. 

Fourth, I love this one from the point of view that one tends to look at the past longingly. Myself for instance, I used to be bolder in school and taking roles of leadership and doing presentations. As I got older, I got more shy and prefer a “behind the scenes” role but complain when I don’t get credit. Use the “yesterday you” to be a better “today you” everyday. 

Fifth, I can’t say I can totally identify with this rule. I am someone’s child, I don’t have kids. I would like to think my parents are proud of me, and that I hope to not do anything to make them dislike me. 

Sixth, yes yes yes. So many people, especially young people, are quick to criticize the world when there own house is not in order. Focus on getting your own house in order before you focus on things you can’t control. It also helps to give your opinion legitimacy when you do spit it out all the time. 

Seventh, according to some ways of thinking-you only have one life. Make this life count, and don’t give in to this trap of instant gratification. It’s the journey, not the destination that matters. 

Eighth, if you tell the truth with others...it’s more likely you are honest with yourself. If you can’t be honest with yourself, you are your own worst enemy. 

Ninth, this one to me speaks to having an open mind to another person’s insight. It is easy to put people in a box and use interactions with them to justify the box you put them in. If you approach people with an open mind and assume they know something you don’t, you won’t disqualify them before they have a chance to speak. 

Tenth, say what you mean. Know how to say what you want, and have the courage to do so. One, the other, and both can be hard. But making the effort to know how you feel and have the balls to say it, will get you farther than you think. 

Eleventh, let kids be kids. Some adults don’t ever grow up, and sometimes its because they were not able to be kids. The learning phase of youth is so instrumental to being an adult. 

Twelfth, pet a cat! Obviously as a cat mom I love this. From a bigger picture point of view, animals speak a different language. Some would say they don’t speak at all, but notice how some cats won’t approach some people, but the kind ones get all the animals attention? How is it they know a good heart from a bad one? Be nice to all creatures, it will come back to you. 

The book is available on Amazon, if this sparked your interest in reading it. I know I can’t wait! Which rule resonated with you most? 

[dovahnap]

(Radfem Jordan Peterson voice): Also the Barbie movie was 100% a psyop to brainwash millenial women off the internet and into procreation (“what was I made for?” *goes to gynecologist implying that Barbie has done the doll equivalent of reaching menarche. GROSS!!!)

But also somehow she’s supposed to do this by becoming a poly family with America Ferrera (note how they bonded by singing classic Indigo Girls banger—is this a queer subtext?) and her husband rather than helping Manchild Ken self actualize.

I know I already ranted about this months ago in my secret diary but the cinematic dualism of Barbenheimer lingers in my mind like a message from the collective unconscious itself.

But obviously there’s some kind of birthrate “crisis” going on (read: women don’t want to have baby) (to all the mothers reading this: I am in no way trying to devalue your decision, good moms are the most amazing people and I genuinely appreciate you, and I hope your kids will too!!!) and presumably this plus the educational failures of the US are a national security issue. Are we headed for war ???? 😮🤯🤢😡🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

Seriously though, I think the progressive left is having trouble squaring the circle of progressive values plus having a large, educated workforce. There’s also simultaneously some kind of backlash against “tradwives,” calling them fascists or victims of patriarchy, etc.

My Catholic neighbor has like eight grandchildren, btw.

I don’t love it here. I’m whiny but who cares, as far as I know no one is listening to me. If my imaginary friends won’t do me the favor of acknowledging me I see no reason why I should try to make myself palatable to their sensibilities.

/schizo

[femenaces]

Okay, like I said he seems to be a liberal journalist so you can’t claim he’s a Nazi or Jordan Peterson, and in his posts he goes out of his way to contact legitimate experts in the field to gather their opinions. But if your stance is you won’t read anything from anyone with an opinion that differs from yours, I think that’s honestly kind of sad. I know for me, if someone presents a link that goes counter to my initial perspective, I really can’t relax until I’ve thoroughly looked into it and formed my own opinion. I don’t like to live with cognitive dissonance, even if that means having to confront something I didn’t know and change my mind. Which you saw that I did in my response above, and learned more about both sides in the process.

If this article is so dumb and unreliable, and the points he makes are in error, I would seriously like to know exactly why and how, because I read the entire thing and found it reasonable and don’t want to spread misinformation. Maybe I missed some things. That’s why I gave it to you to look over. I read your 36 page Yale document from start to finish, so it’s disappointing that this conversation seems to be a one way street.

A high rate of suicide is often tied to being trans, but I can’t help but wonder if it’s actually the other way around. My friend group in high school consisted almost entirely of severely mentally ill and suicidal young teenagers. As the years went on, more and more of them became trans until it was the majority of the group. They were suicidal and trans, yes, but they were suicidal long before discovering a trans identity. What are the odds that 80% of the people in one group all happened to turn out trans? Is it really reasonable to argue it was an undiscovered trans identity that made them all suicidal long before any of them “discovered” they were trans? Isn’t it more likely that when you are a mentally ill, unstable teenager, you may be more likely to adopt a trans identity as a way of reinventing yourself, rebelling, and gaining instant sympathy and community?

[kentucky-daisey]

a rant about family and dated beliefs, alternatively titled “I’m so tired of trying to explain why people should care about other people and maybe do a little research sometimes”

The holidays are weird because you see family you haven’t seen in months and there’s always a bit of reconciling the person you remember with the person in front of you.

I love my dad, but every time he expresses his opinions about certain things, I realize he’s not quiet as liberal as he insists he is. He’s not a bad person, but his opinions are definitely coloured by his age. It also doesn’t help that he starts each expression of his beliefs with “I haven’t dug too deep into BLANK, but--”. 

This specifically came up when he bought a book about Harry Potter for white elephant and he was surprised no one wanted the book because, you know, JK Rowling is a huge transphobe. A few days later, we were out walking and he brought the book up and, when I explained why no one wanted it, his response was: “Now, I don’t know a lot about JK Rowling, but I respect how she stands by her convictions.” According to him, people are too easy to give in to pressure and apologize when they don’t actually mean it. To which I pointed out that people are upset with her not just because she’s a transphobe (which is shitty and an entirely valid reason not to support her) or that she won’t apologize (which is also shitty), but she’s now doing it unprompted and has apparently discarded her reputation of beloved children’s book author for aggressively transphobic woman who won’t shut up about her deeply upsetting and harmful opinions. There are plenty of shitty people in the public eye who haven’t apologized or who have done so disingenuously (Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, Johnny Depp, etc). The difference is that I recognize their shittiness and they have, for the most part, faded into the background, oftentimes shamed into backing off at least enough to be easily ignorable. JK Rowling is not in the same camp. We all know she has awful opinions. People have told her as much. instead of keeping those opinions to herself, as most reasonable people do when they are told that said opinions are entirely out of line, insensitive, and have actively ruined millions of people’s relationship with an important piece of media that was a world wide cultural phenomenon (this is JK specific), she’s doubled down. 

It’s disappointing. On multiple fronts.

1. I’m almost thirty (ugh) and haven’t read Harry Potter in at least a decade. I’m just not interested.

2. JK Rowling’s been very public in her hate and the blanket “people should stand by their convictions” is old fashioned and doesn’t take into account the impact certain people’s convictions/opinions can have and how damaging they can be. How crushing. It’s not that hard to look up.

3. When you’ve got two queer kids, you think you’d be a little more considerate. I’m admittedly not out in an official capacity, but it’s a pretty open secret in my family and this certainly doesn’t make me want to tell him any time soon.

He also doesn’t get why my sister and I are adamantly against Jordan Peterson and tends to makes light of it every time he brings it up (I’m never the one to do it because why the fuck would I?)

While I entirely believe people have a right to their opinions and can totally stand by them however much they want, not all opinions are created equal and I have every right not to listen to said opinions if I don’t want to. It’s when people’s opinions are harmful or damaging or outright wrong that I have an issue. I am not perfect, but I will always try to do better, and I am not a better person by simply ignoring transphobic or misogynistic or xenophobic etc. opinions, especially when voiced by people with influential and highly visible platforms such as JK Rowling or Jordan Peterson or Marjorie Taylor Greene or Jason Kenney or whoever the fuck else. This is even more important now. The Overton Window has shifted dramatically to the right and people are becoming more and more comfortable saying things regardless of the impact they might have. 

My mum is of the same mindset and even has some questionable opinions when it comes to trans people that are generally exhausting to listen to. The difference is I see her far more often and have gotten very good at steering the conversation away any of the above (she’s very much out of sight out of mind and feels my sister and I are overreacting to the JK stuff without making any effort to look into it). Unfortunately, they are both baby boomers and they’re go to move is to get angry whenever someone disagrees with them.

All of this is to say that everyone has the right to their opinions, but it doesn’t mean they are free from consequence. Things change, society changes. What used to be acceptable, might be looked at in a different light than it used to. If someone has a valid reason for not supporting someone, respect that. Cancel culture is not “that guy disagrees with me about my favourite book/movie/pair of pants”. If a person is getting cancelled (and I really hate using that term), it’s because they’ve done something considered socially/ethically/professionally etc. unacceptable. If a person hates a whole group of people simply for using gender neutral pronouns (Jordan Peterson), not is confused by, but actively hates, they are an asshole and deserve your anger. If a person refuses to acknowledge a person’s chosen gender identity and views them as less than human for it (JK Rowling), they are an asshole and deserve your anger. If a person takes over a company, allows people who were banned for hate speech to return and removes any safeguards that were put in place to make said company usable for as many people as possible while standing up against those who are actively trying to cause harm (Elon Musk), they are an asshole and deserve your anger.

You can love people even if you disagree with them. You can (should) even create boundaries for yourself to maintain your relationships in a way that keeps you safe and comfortable. I would encourage it! It’s up to you to decide what you’re willing to let go and when things have gone a step too far. But it is important, if not necessary, to stand up for what is right and protect those who need it, including yourself. 

Boycott that book/movie/social media site. Punch that Nazi. Vote in your local, provincial, and federal elections. Just make sure to do good, be good, and always try to make the world a little bit of a better place.

Happy holidays.

[paidiea]

Risky Play

Risky play is a challenging thing for many parents. We want to keep our children safe, but we also want them to be able to make risky choices for themselves. When allowing our children to engage in risky play, it is important to keep in mind

The Zone of Proximal Development

Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development

Glasser’s Choice Theory

“If you’re gonna make your kids tough, which they better be if their gonna survive in the world you can’t interfere when they’re doing dangerous things carefully.

Thank about it. That specifically: ‘Dangerous things carefully’. That’s such a place where kids learn.

That is the only place they learn. That’s where everyone learns everything. When you’re doing dangerous things carefully. Man, that’s where you learn and so you interfere with that, you interfere with the process by which your children expand their competence and it takes courage not to interfere with that.  

When you see your 3 year old daughter climbing up the monkey bars (our daughter used to do that in our backyard). She was 3 and the monkey bars were 8 feet high. She liked to go right to the top and climb across them. We’re watching out the back window thinking *nervous*. But what do you do? We run around out there. ‘Be careful!’ She lost concentration and she fell. There’s a bit of malevolence in that. ‘Oh my daughter is worrying me. I’ll go out there and take care of her but I’ll startle her and she’ll fall. That’ll fix it. She won’t do that again. She won’t make me nervous.’ You gotta watch those things.  

It’s not about them. It’s about you.  

Yes that’s for sure. That’s what you gotta ask yourself. Am I taking care of my child? Or am I just afraid to be afraid for them. There’s no excuse for that.”

Dr Jordan B Peterson “Dangerous Things Carefully, 31.12.2021

This was a TikTok that went viral. Very soon parents were using the sound to demonstrate their children doing “dangerous things carefully”. If you have a TikTok account, I would encourage you to go watch these videos.

What Dr Peterson is referring to is that children need to be given the space to make their own mistakes and realise the consequences of those mistakes. This is a concept that they need to use in every aspect of their life.

By engaging in risky play, you are allowing your child to build upon their critical thinking skills. They are able to problem solve and use trial and error to make the appropriate choice. This ties back into Choice Theory. By giving children the space to do “dangerous things carefully”, they are meeting their survival, fun, power and freedom needs. If they do it with other people they are also meeting their love and belonging needs.

Here are some strategies you can utilise as the parent

Sit back and watch - When your child is engaging in risky play, don’t speak to them, don’t stand near them. Just sit back and watch.

Establish ground rules – Talk about ways to minimise serious injury

Offer a helping hand if your child asks for it – Sometimes they might struggle to know what the next step is, so they might ask you to show them. Try and model for them what it looks like or move their body so they know what it feels like.

It is also important to remember to be aware of actions that can lead to serious bodily harm. If you feel that a situation is extremely unsafe, this should be communicated to your child. There will be times that as the parent you will need to intervene to ensure your child does not become seriously injured. If you must intervene, clearly explain to your child they need to stop and attempt to redirect. If they become upset (which is highly likely) reinforce the boundary.

This is an article from our NSW Kindergarten Homeschool Curriculum. For costing and prices, please send me a private message.

[star-anise]

Thank you for your reply. My ask was kind of all over the place. (I've done some dbt before with a previous therapist and it helped! But that therapist was not a good fit I'm at a new one now tho).

Random thing, you mentioned bpd I heard in my abnormal psychology class that a lot of therapists won't treat someone diagnosed with bpd??? It was the teacher who is a grad student studying to be a therapist who said it. And like. I don't understand. They sound like a very in need population who was often abused and there's a whole huge book of treatment resources written by someone with bpd. I've heard they're "hard to treat" and talked about like they're hopeless. but like why be a mental health professional if you don't like mentally ill/different people?

This is also the same professor who insisted trauma is only the few things listed under dsm ptsd definition as traumatic events.. like she said parents getting divorced isn't a traumatic event because you aren't physically in danger... that class really scared me about the mental health field because of all the awful people in it aspiring to be therapists including the teacher.

Sorry for all the asks I love the work you do on this blog

Ahahaha, what IS it about undergrad abnormal psych professors? Mine said he wouldn't touch clinical practice with a ten-foot pole, and told a story about how once a student told him she had schizophrenia, and he knew that she was lying because obviously nobody with schizophrenia could actually manage to attend university.

(It's seriously untrue. I've had both friends and clients with psychotic disorders who succeeded in university. He was being an ableist bastard. Like, I know psych students can tend to over-identify with a disorder they're studying without actually having it, but that doesn't mean no psych student is ever entirely correct about their deal.)

Okay so, BPD. The thing about BPD is that it requires a special skillset that does not come standard in most clinical training. If a therapist who doesn't have that skillset tries to treat someone with BPD, the therapy will not be very effective and the process will be very frustrating for both them and their client. To be very frank, it's just as true that ordinary therapists are bad at treating BPD and don't like feeling stupid, as it is that people with BPD are hard to treat.

(And training to deal with people with BPD clinically is often not included in grad school education. DBT training is expensive and they won't accept you unless you have an adequate clinical placement.)

Also, part of dealing with BPD in particular is... people with BPD often have trouble seeing authority figures with anything more nuanced than "adoration and compliance" or "fear and loathing". As a therapist, you're signing up as an authority figure. Part of the work means letting your client express all their feelings about you, and helping them work to something more nuanced and sustainable, like, "I am furious and enraged that I'm in pain and I wish my therapist could take that pain away, but I realize that's not within her power. I have to admit that she's not being an evil villain here, so I can feel my resentment but let it go."

Which can be stressful to deal with, as a therapist. You have to live with a lot of hurt and anger and rage headed your way, and keep your perspective. Be empathetic without getting carried away in those emotions. You have to be able to face that pain and say, "I can't take that away. I can only help you learn to bear it."

Basically everyone I know in grad school had a nervous breakdown somewhere along the line because we go to therapist school because we're smart and capable and feel good about helping people, so when we encounter a person we can't help, or are put in situations where we have to stop helping, we tend to have existential crises and end up sobbing in the student lounge about What Am I Even Good For Now. I was lucky because I had a version of that breakdown before I entered grad school, and my therapist warned me to get a new shrink when I moved for my Master's, "Because if you don't need one at the beginning, you'll definitely need one by the end." So I was more equipped to help classmates for whom this was a wholly new experience.

In my opinion, the healthy way to approach the problem of A Person You're Not Good At Helping is to practice humility, set reasonable boundaries, recognize the limits of your competence, and see where you can learn and grow. But many therapists and helping professionals use what I consider to be an unhealthy approach, labelling such clients as "defensive" and "resistant" and "hard to treat" and blaming them for the difficulty.

Which like, I get that "practicing humility" is like "doing exercise", sometimes you're tired and cranky and don't want to go for a run. Sometimes you just want to blame the other person for not accepting your magnanimous help.

Anyway, within the field of mental health psychotherapy, complex trauma is a unique sub-speciality that many therapists don't want to touch at all. I had many classmates say, "Woof, you're into complex trauma? You must be so tough, I could never." 🙄

(Technically I have the ethical obligation to represent my profession in the best possible light to encourage public confidence in the field of psychotherapy. But I think it's not undermining the profession to admit what everyone already knows, which is that some therapists are oblivious assholes who do bad work. I've seen it, I've met them, I want them to piss off forever. Jordan Peterson is a blight to our names and Phil McGraw can go choke.)

So people who are on your wavelength about BPD and trauma and What Therapists Are For are out there. They're just a little rarer than the usual run of therapists. For what it's worth, I've found they cluster more in areas like complex trauma, DBT, Narrative Therapy, and the Hearing Voices Movement. Next year (knock on wood) I'l be going to a conference on the treatment of complex trauma with a friend, and this sounds weird given that it's a weekend all about child maltreatment, but I expect it to be a blast, because I'll get to be among My People, talking about the work that fills our souls.

I really wish that as an undergrad, I'd spent more time hanging out with Social Work students, and going to conferences and trainings. Those are where I met some of the coolest people I really clicked with. And in grad school, I had the extreme pleasure of meeting other people who were a lot like me. Those friendships were especially rewarding because as skilled helpers, we ended up playing a game of Needs Chicken, where each tries hide their own needs and caretake for the other, which finally ended up in a standoff where we had to agree to put down our caretaking skills and just be honest about what we wanted, even if that felt new and scary and raw.

(Support me: Patreon and Paypal.)

[lordascapelion]

Apologies for the tradcath flippancy, but there are a lot of larpers around who are more invested in the identity and appearing good than the actual nuts and bolts of a lifestyle. But that’s hardly exclusive to tradcaths.

The core of my argument though is that most dudes aren’t consuming porn as some sort of pinnacle of existence. Jordan Peterson said “there’s nothing heroic about masturbation” and frankly, I agree. But most guys just get a buildup of that energy and just want to release it so they can go on with their day.

The pervasiveness of sex is something you could complain about. I am of the opinion that the constant bombardment of sexual imagery is probably not great. You should be able to opt in or out of sexual material. But human nature is what it is and I find my eyes being drawn to sexy things even while my brain is actively telling me that it’s a trick. For this reason it is unlikely that sexual material in everyday life is going to go away anytime soon.

On the other hand, current generations are becoming less and less involved in sex. Millennials and Zoomers are having less of it and if you’ve been around this webbed site for long enough you’ll have seen a contingent of pretty young fans becoming irrationally outraged at even mild sexual content, despite there being opt-out mechanisms. On the other other hand books aimed at 16-year-old girls feature graphic sexual content in their pages so who knows.

There may be something to the constant stream of pornographic material that one can access- you don’t have to sit through an entire video you can just scrub to the moment you like, which is pretty unlike actual sex, so I could see that as possibly causing sexual dysfunction, though I’m not sure if actual research bears that out.

Fetishes, though, are actually not really caused by porn and most of the time you just acquire them through neuronal accidents. I think that fetishes are an evolutionary adaptation to match up pairings that would otherwise not exist. Or maybe they’re just a random bug, who knows. Without data it’s hard to make any definitive claim, but I could see how someone might go down a rabbit hole and never come up. But if you’re on the track of requiring constant escalation of stimuli, something else probably happened that contributed to it (the aforementioned lack of intimacy.)

I don’t really think that the “world is your brothel” effect is at all a widespread thing (once again, I have no data on hand). Most guys turn hard to porn because normal sex seems just so utterly out of reach. They don’t feel entitled, they feel forbidden! If you’re never going to have normal intimacy, why not just consume porn? Why not feel something for five freaking minutes? I think some of them then turn rabidly anti-porn because they blame it for how miserable their prospects of intimacy look.

There are the dudes who will tend random women online to make an OnlyFans which is, of course, repugnant. But I don’t think that’s really widespread (outside the “show bobs and vagene” crowd.)

I’m not going to defend the labor practices in porn because there’s nothing to defend. It’s probably never going to be any good. OnlyFans seems to alleviate some of these ethical issues but is overall much more destructive because of its social effects that I won’t get into because it’s an extremely deep rabbit hole. I would say that drawn porn circumvents this pretty well, though.

As an aside, if all porn disappeared tomorrow, I think you’d have a brutal uprising of young men within months. I’m sure some more revolutionarily minded individuals would like that, but like the OF conversation, it’s so deep a topic that it would swell this long post even more.

I don’t really intend to be some kind of passionate defender of smut. I would never be able to say that porn is good, because it isn’t. It’s like coffee or alcohol or weed- a vice that makes life a little more tolerable for a few moments and lets off some of that pressure that would drive you insane. (You could, perhaps, make the case that erotica could be classified as good, though. But even then people would disagree about it.) people wanting to ban pornography is what doesn’t sit right with me. I think that a certain level of personal autonomy should be kept from the government’s hands, even if people use that autonomy for self-destructive purposes.

Got some great news for all the anti-porn people out there

You can just

Not watch it

[tellthemeerkatsitsfine]

I try to be internally consistent about things. I try to hold myself to my own standards. Sometimes, this results in things that are annoying. For example, when I was in high school, I talked a lot of shit about the Twilight books, both to people I knew and on the internet, because I’d heard enough about them to know they were terrible. One day, someone on the internet asked me if I’d even read them. I said no, I just knew the plot points. They replied that this means I don’t have the right to criticize them. And I replied… God fucking damn it, fuck I hate saying this, but you’re actually right. That’s exactly what I’d say to someone else who criticized something I liked if they hadn’t read or watched or listened to it. Fuck!

That was the first time I ever conceded to losing an argument on the internet, and that sort of thing stayed with me, as my teenage pride did not appreciate the hit. It also stayed with me because I then did borrow all four Twilight books from a friend of mine and fucking read the first three. I let myself off the hook on the fourth one – it was so long, and I justified by saying I got the fucking idea from three. Also, after reading them, I was able to get back on the internet and talk way more shit. It turned out that the stuff I’d heard before had only scratched the surface of why they were so awful. Once I read them, I learned about how bad the writing itself was, how bad all the minor characters were in addition to the major characters being bad, levels of underlying sexism and just weird traditionalist nonsense that the articles I’d read hadn’t been able to talk about because they were too busy with the overt stuff. I learned that the books were far worse than I’d thought, and I said so repeatedly. Because when I was a teenager, I still thought getting into arguments online was a good use of my time. The people had to be educated about this scourge that was sending awful messages to young girls and destroying the entire genre of fantasy novels, and they absolutely had to learn it from me.

A few years after that, I did sit down and realize the joke sort of was on me, since I was the one who’d spend hours and hours of my life reading books I hated just to make a point. I wish I could say that was the worst example of me wasting so much time on something so pointless, but it’s actually only the second worst. The worst was a few years ago, when I finally broke under the amazingly well-coordinated army of people, both in real life and on the internet, declaring that no one is allowed to say a word in criticism of Jordan Peterson unless they’ve listened to every single thing he’d ever said, straight from his mouth, or else it’s twisting his words out of context.

I watched so many videos. So many fucking videos. Multiple multi-hour lectures that I watched in full because I did want to be told I had taken anything out of its full context. I learned a hell of a lot more about Jordan Peterson than I’d known before. I learned that there was more to him than just a contrarian asshole who refuses to respect his transgender students. I learned about the deep levels of sexism and racism and homophobia and how he couched all those things in layer after layer of traditionalism (weirdly, I guess I’ve found something Twilight and Jordan Peterson have in common) and fairly cheap tricks that you won’t notice unless you take 30 seconds to Google some stuff. Allusions to things that don’t have bearing on the situation and disingenuous claims to not see subtext. Clever mixing in of advice that’s rooted in something genuinely helpful, pandering to the types of people most likely to be taken in by the messaging, and a whole lot of bullshit that sounds intellectual unless, again, you think for like 30 fucking seconds.

And you know what? It didn’t help anything. It didn’t help me talk the teenage boys I coach out of some of the bad paths they’d started down – paths that range from the way they treated their female teammates to the way they suddenly all talked about beef diets – paths they justified, when asked why they felt that way, by saying it was something Joe Rogan and/or Jordan Peterson had said. The only thing that’s ever helped with that has been having honest conversations with them, listening to how they feel, trying to use reason and understanding. Watching Jordan Peterson videos really has nothing to do with it. It has truly never helped, and I mean that as a general statement about the whole world.

So after that, I’ve tried to stop letting this happen. Stop letting my own deep need to justify everything I do or say lead me to get tricked into wasting hours and hours and hours of my time on things that suck. There’s no point. There is absolutely no point. Just move on.

That’s what I normally say. Today, I am in bed all day with some sort of flu-like thing (tested negative for COVID this morning, which I know is no guarantee but it is a relief), so I know I’m not going to hugely enjoy this day no matter what. And the new Ricky Gervais special is only an hour, I’m not losing days or weeks this time to stuff I hate. And I’ve already shared a few things criticizing Ricky Gervais, while feeling vaguely guilty for doing that because I do still think it’s not right to criticize a piece of media that you haven’t seen/heard/read. And I hate to be a hypocrite.

I guess I’m curious about how far the articles have blown things out of proportion, if at all. I really hate the whole clickbait entertainment news thing (I mean, it’s even worse when they do the clickbait thing with real news, and everything I’m saying about how your opinion should be based on engaging with the actual thing rather than just reading a biased article about it applies 100 fold if we’re talking about real issues rather than this bullshit, protect responsible journalistic sources with your votes and your money and your time all you can, but I digress), I hate how often people learn about media through clips or through articles that describe it instead of getting into the whole thing. I hate how easy it is to take one little thing that happened and boil a whole piece of media down to that. One comment about one thing and then it turns into “[Person] does an entire comedy special about [thing]!”

Now, if that’s been the case with Ricky Gervais, I still think that’s bad. If Ricky Gervais made one quick transphobic joke at the beginning of his new special, then did an hour of funny material, I still think it’s right to draw attention to that bit at the beginning and call him a fucking asshole for it. There’s no outcome here that will make me think he doesn’t deserve all this criticism, unless it turns out the articles have been straight-up lying about what he said, which doesn’t seem likely. But I am curious as to how much of the bad stuff there was, what the rest of it was, what he actually said.

Basically, I figure I may as well take an hour out of a day on which I feel like shit anyway to earn my right to criticize Ricky Gervais’ new special if I want to, because I’ll have actually seen it. If it turns out he’s being canceled unfairly by a woke mob that just reads articles that take one innocent comment out of context, I’ll let you all know. I mean, I think me ending up with that opinion is less likely than Frankie Boyle becoming the Tories’ new business secretary, but technically, you never know.

[toshootforthestars]

In his I’m-Sorry-if-You-Were-Offended apology posted on Sunday night to Instagram, podcaster Joe Rogan tried to smooth over the fact that he’s been broadcasting dangerous misinformation on his show, The Joe Rogan Experience. The requirement for him to do anything at all arose only after musicians including Neil Young and Joni Mitchell asked that the streaming service Spotify remove their music after 270 medical experts demanded that the platform establish a clear misinformation policy rather than allowing its shows to “damage public trust in scientific research and sow doubt in the credibility of data-driven guidance.” As Young put it at the time, “They can have Rogan or Young. Not both.”

Spotify, which had bought the exclusive streaming rights to The Joe Rogan Experience in a deal reportedly worth more than $100 million, at first did nothing, then pulled the lever for Rogan. Spotify thus proceeded to pull down Young’s work, and Mitchell’s, and to stand behind its guy, whose show reaches about 11 million people an episode. In the disputed episodes, Rogan has amplified multiple known falsehoods about the dangers of vaccines, touted the benefits of ivermectin (strongly disputed by the FDA), and promoted an “expert” vaccine skeptic with lethally discredited views.

*       *      *       *       *       *

The hope may be that “truth will out.”

But the problem is: It won’t.

Truth won’t out because the market wants what Rogan is selling, and what Rogan is selling is doubt.

That is also what Carlson is selling and what the GOP is selling, and that is what Donald Trump has been selling for six years. The beauty of “just asking questions” as a rhetorical frame is that it provides cover for some of the foundational work of authoritarianism—it casts broad and enduring doubt on government, on science, on fact, on vote tallies, and on science. The current democracy-on-the-cusp scenario we all live in now is the result of this tendency: People are running for secretary of state positions across the country because they rose to prominence after “just asking questions” about the 2020 election; Donald Trump pushed real plans to seize election machines because he was just probing “both sides” of the Big Lie.

Under cover of having all sorts of interesting and entertaining questions, actual fact has been subordinated. That which is neutral has been politicized, and that which is abhorrent has been normalized, all in the name of just asking tough questions.

I’m not calling Rogan an authoritarian. Carlson surely is, as is Trump. I am saying that when grown adults say they have no responsibility whatsoever to learn or understand or contextualize fringe ideas, they are doing the work of authoritarians, and at minimum, they are absolving themselves of any responsibility to check the tide of it.

What Rogan well knows, and what Spotify has flawlessly commodified, is that pretending that you just aren’t smart enough to understand your own guests, the reach of your show, the consequences of your bookings, your lack of preparation, and your amplification of untruth (and also casual racism and climate denialism and misogyny) lets you get away with all of it. And it forces your listener to either do all of the above for themselves, or to accept your work as truth.  And to be perfectly fair, even blaming Rogan, Spotify, Alex Jones, Jordan Peterson, or all the brave askers-of-questions also misses the point.

The problem is that there is a market for what they are selling—the problem is that it is too profitable to stop. This is what we seem to want, to believe ourselves the final arbiters of all that is knowable. It soothes us, this devaluation of knowledge or scientific consensus or expertise. It rewards our sense of self, reassures us that ours is the only science, the only law, the only experience that matters.

Truth isn’t going to “out” because we don’t want to believe in it.

Which is why we’re not only getting exactly the truth-tellers we deserve—we’re actually paying them to lie to us.

Dahlia Lithwick:  The market wants what Rogan is selling, and what Rogan is selling is doubt

Slate   /   3 Feb 2022

[infinitelytheheartexpands]

Responses from the Opera Screencaps Captioning Quiz

Hello, everyone, and thank you for taking my quiz! I had SO MUCH fun reading your captions-- there were several times I literally started crying from laughing so hard at the amazingness of your work! With that in mind, the captions (which I will continue to add onto as more people take it):

(also, thank you to @dichterfuerstin​ for translating the German captions I got)

originally taken from: the Wiener Staatsoper’s 2020 production of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail, featuring Regula Mühlemann (center) as Blonde, Michael Laurenz (right) as Pedrillo, and an unnamed extra (left) as the Grim Reaper

Responses:

(Backstage warm-up) “ok so someone dropped the pulse”

me and my friends watching the fire burn after doing arson

Introducing the polycule to the parents

*boom* ... did...you guys hear that too?

Ma Signor !

Knight in whinging armour gone wrong, look at how he holds the egg. Polyamory with weird knight and death.

the father, son and the holy ghost are very gay

the gays meeting for brunch, 2021, colorized

chicken lady forces death and a very flamboyantly homosexual anthropomorphized pink bird to be parents of her egg (they dont want to be)

That’s just me and my friends on our night out (before covid rip)-- closest

A Good Friday night

good omens (2019)

["the pocket guide to boy/girl/mischief" meme] who's the boy and who's the mischief though????

Papageno and Papagena take their first-born egg trick-or-treating

Angry Birds - The Musical. A pig stole an egg and the bird unites with death to take revenge.

I love my bird wife

Someone got murdered during the funky chicken dance

throuple murders child and steals sibling of said child

When you and your friends have widely different tastes in literature

angel leading twink to his rightful place (hell)

draco malfoy from a very potter musical and a death eater are very much in the wrong show

What have I gotten myself into

Mlm/wlw solidarity but I’m not telling who is who

A woman stands with a pink dipshit with an egg and a reaper.

A bird-couple makes a pact with Death, sacrificing their first-born bird-child in order to bring good luck upon their unborn bird-baby

There are three types of people on Halloween:

Uh oh, I don’t think the mother hen is very happy about this...

oh god, they’ve invented seussical. It’s too early!

gay brunch

Three little maids from school are we

guys maybe if we dress gay enough we can distract everyone from the dead flapper bee in the back

those three killed a duck for her egg and are facing the conswquences.

Duck has egg with human, shocked and upset due to biological impossibility

When you bout to make a banging omelet so you invite your fellow queers

"No mortal man could pass that egg, but heaven shall repair your rectum."

originally taken from: the Salzburg Festival’s 2007 production of Hector Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini, featuring Maija Kovalevska (left) as Teresa Balducci, Laurent Naouri (center, in chimney) as Fieramosca, and Burkhard Fritz (right) as Benvenuto Cellini

Responses:

“In this same interlude it doth befall That I, one Snout by name, present a wall; And such a wall, as I would have you think, That had in it a crannied hole or chink, Through which the lovers, Pyramus and Thisby, Did whisper often very secretly. This loam, this rough-cast and this stone doth show That I am that same wall; the truth is so: And this the cranny is, right and sinister, Through which the fearful lovers are to whisper.” - a midsummer night’s dream, act v scene 1

"ah yes a prime specimen. see here, right in this box is our one of a kind hob goblin that can be all yours for the low low price of your soul"

what, YOU don't have a special eavesdropping chimney window?

Hänsel und Gretel plotting against the witch

man takes a wrong turn and ends up in a chimney, catches his girlfriend cheating-- closest

when you end up third wheeling the straight couple

lady cheats on her leather jacket wearing scummy boyfriend and when he unexpectedly comes home she hides the lover in the chimney

A straight girl and her gay best friend gossip about stuff idk

Idk Shakespeare?

experimental couples therapy feat. the chimney mf from mary poppins

Area Couple Inadvertently Traps Santa-in-Training in Chimney as they Attempt Rooftop Flirting

Landlords laugh over student renter's misfortune

I never asked for this

Ay yo lil mama lemme whisper in your ear

voyeurist listens to sandy and Danny from grease

Psssst! Did you hear about Susan? You won’t believe it!

lady and the tramp meets beauty and the beast?

human trafficking

And for just $30 you too could have your own tiny brick cage!

Psst I’m wearing assless chaps under this dress

A couple tortures a man in a box.

It's all fun and games being stuck in a chimney until your greasy uncle steals your crush from right above you-- okay ngl this could actually be a great Don Pasquale concept

Taking eavesdropping to the next level

Will you two stop being lovey dovey and let me out? SUMMER LOVIN, HAPPENED SO FAST— 

overhearing how people talk about you when they think they're alone puts you in the shithouse 

Does he know we can see him?

dear god, i am so fucking hungry, yall please just do whatever heterosexuals do so i can go eat a popsicle 

the human version of the trash man from sesame street is realizing that those two are going to fuck on his trash can 

Tmw you capture an angry short dude and start trashtalking him where he can hear 

Omg what if we kissed but we actually kissed the lil goblin man under us

"Remember, don't feed him after midnight"

originally taken from: the Théâtre de Capitole du Toulouse’s 2017 staging of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Le prophète, featuring Leonardo Estevez (right, on fake horse) as Le Comte d’Oberthal

Responses:

“When I said we needed to drain the swamp I didn’t think there were people actually living there”

horse? what horse? no sir i dont know what horse youre referring to.

definitely don't have a napoleon complex going on

King stole La Scala‘s Lohengrin set

king breaks all his horses, has to use statue dragged by servants as transportation because he’s too kingly too walk

Emperor Söder and his subjects on a carnival procession

man on horse makes a big deal out of being on a horse

That’s not Zeffirelli because the horse is not alive

Who the fuck put a horse on the stage

isn't this that picture of napoleon on the horse

Area Count Thinks Citizens will be Intimidated by his Extremely Fake-looking Horse Statue-- closest

Everyone wants their turn on the giant plaster horse. Police are there to make sure everyone waits their turn.

Night out with the lads

Local royalty horrified at the state of his own damn kingdom

gay army fights different gay aesthetics-- hi author how does it feel to be the funniest fucking person on this quiz

Well at least I LOOK badass

ceasar if he hadn't gotten stabbed (colourised)

some soldiers jumped out of my kindergarten fairytale collection book to burn the don carlos flemish deputies at the stake

It’s just a model

Is that how you feel pulling up in your Honda Civic, Madge?

Someone rides a horse statue in public.

Just a normal party with the bros.

what is this, some kind of crossover episode? 

Terribly sorry for all the fuss, it’s just, that is, my horse is afraid of neck ruffles. I’ve tried to talk to him about it, but he’s—whoaaa there—he said he was a french courtier in a past life and he’s allergic to English fashion 

Horse seller, listen to me! I am riding into battle. I need your strongest horse. - We have horses at home. - The horses at home: 

All hail Incitatus the king 

we are not ripping off shakespeare’s henry viii. what the fuck. this is about lenny xi you uncultured swine, go drown in a pit of your own farts 

oh god is that hamilton 

Guy Removed From Art Museum For Sitting On Statue, more at eleven 

Gay <3

Officer: This horse... is a virgin! Crowd: *cheers*

originally taken from: the Parma Verdi Festival’s 2017 staging of Giuseppe Verdi’s Stiffelio, featuring Maria Katzarava (left) as Lina and Luciano Ganci (right) as Stiffelio

Responses:

That One kid in class

its a mEntAL BreAkDowN *final countdown but kazoo*

*record scratch* yeah, that's me. you're probably wondering how I got here-- closest

Dad keeps monologuing, teenager is done

left: all of my concerned friends, right: my emo ass having a very public mental breakdown

the demons in the corner of my room when im just trying to sleep

lady gets mansplained to (do i need to say more, we've all been there)

It’s probably an area baritone telling off an area soprano-- sorry; it’s a tenor. soprano is right though.

That was a fake horse in the last photo right?

child comes out as gay to father at a particularly bad time

dissociation solves everything

I can't believe it's not butter

Honey we talked about this

My sleep paralysis demon is Crowley from supernatural

child has nightmare of boring job

When you start dating a singer but he won’t stop practicing at night

just an average day in a hetero marriage

what do i do my wife's having period cramps again

Stop having an existential crisis. It’s time to sing!

“No son of mine will kin Gomez Addams under MY roof”

Crowley stares into space while a teen has post nut clarity.

When he wont stop reciting jordan peterson monologues!!

Do you realize how effed you are?

Ugh, not this lecture again! Dad’s Practicing For His Experimental Indie Band Again 

asking your parents for help with your own personal situation and them just ranting off about what they went through instead of helping in any way 

Will he shut up already!

no one tell him he’s yelling in the wrong direction, no one tell him plnsbdjddhdj 

this kid is tired of his dad listening to rush limbaugh (a man who claimed to be pro life but died anyway) 

Me internally vs externally 

Daddy issues

originally taken from: the Grand Théâtre de Genève’s 2020 staging of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots, featuring several chorus members

Responses:

It’s the deadly eye Of Poogley-pie. Look away, look away, As you walk by, ‘Cause whoever looks right at it Surely will die. It’s a good thing you didn’t … You did? … Good-bye. - shel Silverstein

why the fuckith? my good sir, i beg of you to put your pants back on

I hate this itchy hat

Titanic Extras hear that they have to do extra hours

people waiting to board the titanic watch someone fall off the plank

pov: you’re a time traveler

guy in the flatcap is embarrassed by patriotism and pathos

No idea. For some reason Le Marseillaise comes to mind

Is this from Harry Potter?

disneyland main street usa workers on strike

local tries to hide behind Newsies cap to avoid unpleasant but inevitable conversations. meanwhile, some very fashionable ladies look on.

"Thank fuck, 2020 was just a dream after all"

“We gather here today because this bitch got exactly what she deserved” “heaven!” “Stfu Stephanie she’s going to hell and we all know it”-- not quite but this basically happens later on in the opera (and act) so yeah (except the person in question very much Did Not Deserve It)

dc movie filter on bridgerton

america?

looks like my history teacher paused the prohibition documentary again

Who still wears page boy hats bro?

Coming out to a room of people who Already Knew That

Bitches are relieved at some party.

Several drunk people exiting getting off the subway attempting to seem sober and rational but realizing they have somehow lost all of their possessions

How tf do I act natural in this situation-- closest

“do you think any of them noticed that I don’t know the pledge of allegiance” 

It's too fucking hot outside for this outfit 

?

when hyyh yoonkook ending just hits different 

pedestrians watch in horror as the triangle shirtwaist factory burns and the workers throw themselves out of the windows from a dozen stories up 

Starting the pledge of allegiance be like 

He's having a heart attack oh no oh god oh fuck

originally taken from: if I remember correctly, the Semperoper Dresden’s 2018 semi-staging of Johann Strauss II’s Die Fledermaus, with Jonas Kaufmann as Gabriel von Eisenstein

Responses:

“William Shakespeare wrote: "To thine own self be true And it must follow, as the night the day Thou canst not then be false to any man" I believe this wise statement best applies to a woman A blonde woman Over the past three years she taught me And showed us all That being true to yourself never goes out of style Ladies and gentlemen Our valedictorian: Elle Woods!” - legally blonde the musical

eat ass, suck a dick, and sell drugs

woooooorrrrd

Finally Jonas has graduated! It’s about time, considering he’s an international star.

what my professors think they look like

Prof. Dr. Dr. When someone tells him there are more than two genders

'and since you've now graduated high school, you'll be entering college etc. blablabla' .........meanwhile, there's a whole row of graduates daring each other to chug the cheap vodka one of them has brought in gallons (yes that happened at my graduation, lol)

Jonas darling baby <3-- can’t argue with that

I just realized I have no idea what the actual fuck happens in an opera

ok this one is just what jonas kaufmann always wears you can't fool me.

"as valedictorian i will share with you the importance of loving the floor"

"Yes, mother, my art degree will make me money!"

Graduation speakers are out, singers are in

Senior year takes a new meaninbg

mansplainer professor explains the concept of feminism to women

Your Prof when you finally turn in that missing assignment be like

younger boris johnson (derogatory)

jonas kaufmann retires from opera and takes up motivational speaking

What a fine graduation evening we’re having today

-70 points for slytherin you all have no swag

A man with a college hat sings.

An obviously greying actor trying to play a university student in a low-budget porn parody

How it feels to graduate high school after being held back for years

East High is a place where teachers encouraged us to break the status quo and define ourselves as we choose. Where a jock can cook up a mean crème brûlée, and a brainiac can break it down on the dance floor-

I may not have been "cool" in high school, but in ten years you will all be working for me!

I finally got my GED!

that one guy in ur intro to cultural anthropology class who mansplains to the professor somehow fucking graduated

he;s just graduating and taking his speech too serously idk

Graduation speeches with that one dude who got held back 3 times

Smrt

originally taken from: the Metropolitan Opera’s 2011 staging of Gioachino Rossini’s Le Comte Ory with Joyce DiDonato (left) as Isolier, Diana Damrau (center) as Countess Adèle, and Juan Diego Florez (right) as Le Comte Ory (disguised as a hermit)

Responses:

There is something very [disturbing grunts] About polyamorous couples - polyamorous, Chris Fleming

jinkies

femme fatale (including to herself)

I’ll have a threesome soon !

Hot guy walks by, everyone swoons.

thirdwheeling friend does not realize the other two are having sex

When your girlfriend had „just two beers“ again

jesus is exasperated about having to drag the two ladies towards doing what he needs them to do instead of purple dramatically declaring suicidal intent over the smallest trivial matters and red being equally dramatic about declaring that it's not the way! stay alive! i love you!!

The throuple is thriving

Get off the milf

orgy

my last three braincells because im a horny slut

countess receives too much love and is confused on how to react

Rasputin's lesser known romp with a much older czarina of russia

Woman's soul leaves body

Jesus and co. are worried after another woman gets pregnant without having sex

bisexual looks at photos of celebrity couples

When you go to the party to socialize with new people but your weirdo friend group starts getting clingy

Jesus cumming

one of those weird church christmas pageants but everybody's drunk

What have I done

Hozier??????????

Jesus assfucks some purple lady being hugged.

This time, the chick IS the magnet

An affair/threesome gone awry (2019 colorized)

What do you mean they canceled GLOW?

“I TOLD you it was cashmere!”

Are you wearing the - - The Gucci dress? Yes I am.

It's not what it looks like!

jesus is fucking that one cheerleader who grew up to be a suburban mom with one (1) super cool dress she stole from her kid who is desperately hugging her middle begging for it back because the spring fling is coming up and jason might actually make eye contact with her for more than three seconds.

jesus and mary magdaline and some other bitch

I’m at a bar and these drunk girls are flirting with me, do I lOOK GAY?!

Shrek 5, jesus's return

c. 2025 First attempt of an Officer and his Wife with a Handmaiden (colourized)

just about all of these are close lol

originally taken from: the Bolshoi Theater’s 1993 staging of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s The Maid of Orléans, featuring Nina Rautio (left) as Joan of Arc and Vyacheslav Pochapsky (right) as Thibaut d’Arc

Responses:

Don’t look, I’m still pooping

yall, the audacity of this man. he fuckin talked to me

*i can't even tell you how wrong you are* *it would be insulting to ME*-- closest

Cospeto!

„No I’m not talking to you, you keep cracking bad jokes!“ - „But I got another!“

when you’re mad at him but he says he’ll buy you food if you cheer up

When I’m wallowing in self-pity but my friends won’t comfort me

right: wanna fuck ;) left: yeah, fuck OFF lmao

Her face is screaming “don’t tell me what to do”

Yeah I got nothing

gay man tries to hit on a lesbian bc he thinks she's a twink. she's not amused but she's watching this happen anyway

me tired of MET's bullshit and them organising a Netrebko, known blackface apologist, a recital during Black History Month. (sorry im still fucking salty lol)

"stop smiling at me like that I'm trying to pout over here"

"I got fleas, you got fleas... wanna fuck?"

I have the best idea!

Haha nooooo don’t hit me with that bat you’re so sexxyy

lesbian is bothered by dilf

Me trying to flirt

if call me by your name was hetero and set in america

how many more dad jokes can i take before i explode

So. You’ve gotten yourself in a little pickle again.

What if we fought in the Russian revolution together ✨???????... unless??

Two people flirt in a poor place of town/

"If you ask me what I've got under this dirty, shapeless tunic one more time I swear to god I will kick your rotting teeth in"

You look like ur gonna kill me but ok

Really? You again?

Okay, I’ve been sitting here for 20 minutes, do you think it’s safe to—oh god, he’s still there.

Have you seen Godot?

she is tired of everyone’s shit. she has done so many derivatives it physically pains her to see a variable. dont test her. ur icarus rn.

idk pick better pictures-- I HAVE DIED THE SHEER AUDACITY AND HUBRIS I LOVE THIS

200% done with your crap 

Homeless man has fucking legs of steel n is gonna show off his Russian dance moves

originally taken from: the Théâtre de Capitole du Toulouse’s 2019 staging of Paul Dukas’ Ariane et Barbe-bleue, featuring Sophie Koch (right) as Ariane and I don’t remember who the person on the left is rip me

Responses:

The knight who wore this into battle sure was swaggy

dear god its hiddeous

Capitalism

Knight in shining armour gone even more wrong.

ghost contemplates the safety of spiky motorcycle helmet

„Stop! He feels bullied!“

'this is my newest take for jesus's crucifixion crown ...... what do you mean they already put him up'

That’s probably a really expensive magic helmet idk. IDK-- closest

Omg I love the adventure zone!

minesweeper (windows xp)

"Okay whatever you do don't touch the shiny spiky ball" "It's so shiny I wanna touch it"

Taking down the trash way too late

IT'S NOT A PHASE MOM

Darth Vader got stuck in the freezer.... again. Leia isn’t happy

Star Wars 2030

“And here is the very latest in motorcycle helmet trends” “Look, I only came to the mall for a pair of socks “

futuristic kkk

long-suffering jewelry store attendant really wants to retire

Put it down put it down put it down

“Hmm no you should see a doctor about that”

A weird ass crown is presented

The creation of sars-cov-2: an experimental Eurotrance nightclub art piece gone horribly wrong

How it feels to want something that u cant have

AND WE WILL CALL IT—SPIKE MAN actually do you think that’s too obvious?? Because of the—yeah, because of the spikes?? See, that’s what I’m worried about. I want it to be SCARY

I know it's risky but... lube me up

?

use the force luke.

that is a weird fleshlight

When you get an ugly gift and need to find a way to get rid of it, so your family member/friend offers to smash it

Touch the orb

originally taken from: the Opera Vlaanderen’s 2019 staging of Fromental Halévy’s La Juive, with Nicole Chevalier (left, with bottle) as Princess Eudoxie, Enea Scala (center, under table) as Prince Léopold, and Roy Cornelius Smith (right) as Éléazar

Responses:

When no one comes to your birthday party :(

fantastic, day 487 of mischief and they have yet to find my masterful hiding spot

i really wonder who he thinks he's playing footsie with

Marriage crisis. Reason sits under the table-- closest but not in the way you think (after all, the man under the table IS a tenor).

the last supper afterparty after jesus left

When you order the last supper on wish

espionage at the Politischer Rosenmontag

Probably the wrong opera but is that Leporello under the table

Now THIS is a Good Friday night

this was every birthday party i went to between the ages of 5 and 11

that awkward moment when you drop your fork under the table but when you re-emerge everyone else has left except one drunk lady and the guy trying to deal with her

After the last supper

Tfw you arrive to the dinner party too early and have to hide until a more fashionable hour

When the cishets aren’t home

waiter hides from customers

Nobody: My dog every time I’m eating:

what's left of the homies Jesus had dinner with

university chem lab experiment gone terribly wrong

I’ve been under the table FOR 30 MINUTES

Set your friends up by tossing them off under the table, they’ll think it’s each other n fall in luv

Someone hids under a table

"You're about to see an surreptitious-under-the-table-dick-sucking master at work"

5 yr old me trying to eat the desert under the table without my parents finding out be like:

They never invite me to their parties!

Just another girl’s night in

Oops! Didn’t notice you the table.

dionysus - bts (2019, colorized)

just a normal episode of eric andre (eric is the one under the table)

Just a normal day with the boys

Thievery

originally taken from: the Théâtre de Capitole du Toulouse’s 2017 staging of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Le prophète, featuring Kate Aldrich (left, surrounded by women in white) as Fidès and John Osborn (center, looking like a Jesus doppelganger) as Jean de Leyde

Responses:

Hold up, is that Eggman above Jesus?

holy disco

Looks like Tannhäuser. Our lord and saviour Richard Wagner. Now I need to be saved from that.

catholicism

me defending pineapple on pizza (THANK YOU)

jesus but hes about to be abducted by the alien ufo above him

Emmmmmmm Heaven? Idk

Lord of the rings?

ewww christianity gross

"behold, I am Important"

"Seriously?? It's not ACTUALLY pyjama day? Fuck you guys!"

Jesus at the Disco

Jesus Finds The Molerat People Who Live Under Bethlehem

disco is heaven

Want to join my new religion?

the kkk

church christmas pageant where everyone's sober but it's based on the director's fever dream

Am I the only one who sees the giant demon? Just me? Okay...

“Oh god I think I’m starting my period”

A party is held with a priest in the middle

"Let's get this secret Vatican sex party rolling!"

The new avengers endgame set is looking great!!

You know, guys, I try not to be a bother but...I can’t help but feel like I missed a dress code memo for this wedding??? It’s cocktail, right??”

Jesus visits Hogwarts

I must really stink if no one will even come close to me

the extra ass funeral i DESERVE

star wars life day

A cult at it’s best-- closest

Shrek 5, Jesus is still there I guess

originally taken from: the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden’s 2013 staging of Giuseppe Verdi’s Les vêpres siciliennes, featuring Bryan Hymel (left, standing) as Henri, Lianna Haroutounian (center, kneeling in the black gown) as Duchess Hélène, and Erwin Schrott (kneeling to her right) as Jean Procida

Responses:

When the director’s like “great rehearsal guys, just a few notes before I let you go” but it’s already 9:13 and your mom’s waiting in the parking lot

loyalist of subjects

bow before your queen

They forgot to take down the stage boxes after the Vienna opera ball but the show must go on.

somebody forgot to book chairs for this funeral

Me sharing God’s (Hayley koyoko) word on the discord server

mass execution bc the oboe solo sucked ass-- closest

That’s too many black suits I can’t see shit

I can’t even tell what’s going on here

8th grade school assembly about how it's uncool to shit on the walls at school

let's all get fancy so we can go to the opera and sit on the stage (idk this one's hard lol)

"Yes i am a time traveller, now don't freak out"

Tfw you forget to pay your lighting bills

White guys make decisions that will benefit them and screw someone that’s not a white guy over-- OUCH but that is too real (although not really in context here)

dead man gives speech at his own funeral

brotus and the boys ??? last meeting before the stabbing

high society social function ends in mass murder-- right opera, wrong scene

Someone walks into the talent show stage with a dog

Black-dressed bitches worship a man.

Worst school assembly of all time

POV:You're the window in the classroom and someone said "its snowing"

When the conductor shows up fashionably late to the orchestra concert

That's what you get for choosing the cheapest ticket option, get back in the mud where you belong

?

theyre just trying to jump into a grave at a funeral leabe them alone this is normal

oh my god he really whipped his dick out in front of everyone, this is just like in 1776 guys, except some women are actually in the room this time,

A funeral, stop wearing so much black

I want to slap their bald heads like rice

originally taken from: the Teatro Real Madrid’s 2018 staging of Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, featuring Roberto Tagliavini (right) as Raimondo

Responses:

Crowd “haha!! Looks like someone missed the all-black memo!! Now it’s laugh-in-your-face time! / Guy on the floor (whispering to guy against wall): go, save yourself! I’ll hold them off...”

if i leave now i wont be a witness and can tell the police i had no idea

it was the best of times, it was the worst of times

Guy in the back pretends to help but is to far away to even know what’s going on.

priest walks in on beginning of an orgy, contemplated joining but is too scared-

when someone brings up capitalism but you’re just trying to play minecraft

lol lets trample this guy while the judge isnt looking

Again. Too many black costumes

Loved this Dostoevsky novel

i would know if opera directors were more creative with clothing choices ngl

me on parties lol

"imma just sneak out of here while everyone else is distracted"

"Where did he get this flooring!? Amazing!"

Everyone act normal!

The tell tale heart but they got REALLY drunk

man tposes to ward off vampires after being caught undercover

boys ???? night

the priest really shouldn't have visited the insane asylum-- closest

He’s FINE everyone’s been hit by a car before

Something happens in a room.

Perks of being a wallflower

There's always that one person in the fight whos trying not to get involved when they really wanna

Oh good, they’re all posing for a Rembrandt painting, I can just sneeeeaaak out the back here...

The gamer livestreaming Resident Evil + everyone watching the stream ? waiting for him to open the door just knowing it will trigger a chase scene

Quick!

the guy t posing in the back is regretting his every decision.-- also accurate

the us senate jumps ted cruz, some other wack ass gop senator is trying to sneak away

...I spoke too soon, however this is a James Bond mission

Queers help fellow queer do math but it's a struggle

[bitchcraftmagic]

It’s so interesting to me that it is only now that Joe Rogan is under the spotlight of mass criticism when he has been laundering white identity politics for several years now. Alex Jones, a purveyor extraordinaire of white grievance narratives and repackaged antisemitic conspiracy theories, is a regular guest on the Joe Rogan Dumb Shit Power Hour. Stephan “I went to Poland and became a White Supremacist” Moleneaux has been on the show a handful of times, as well. These people are unequivocally bigots of the highest caliber. They make their living on hateful bullshit and Rogan has them on and let’s them seem nominally reasonable because he has the intellect of a baked potato. And because his brain is the rotted corpse of an armadillo he has no means to push back meaningfully on the disgusting shit they say. Not that he seems that interested in pushing back to begin with.

This has been a pattern with this beefy boy for years on end. The fact that Jordan Peterson, a bigoted dumbass who knows big words and thinks people are lobsters, has come on to spew the most nonsensical drivel countless times should have been disqualifying. That man has been so traumatized by the vague Cold War concept of communism that it like severely effects his mental health. This is a thing he readily admits to and the fact that anyone takes him remotely seriously any longer is beyond my apparently limited imagination. He almost died from only eating meat. He speaks and behaves like he has never really spoken to any human being for longer than four minutes. It is astounding that people think he is a thought leader. Everything he says is so shallow that he makes kiddie pools look like the Marianas Trench.

And maybe people don’t really understand this but the fact that Joe Rogan is friends and colleagues with ALEX JONES should have made any attempt at discourse impossible. Anytime anyone talks about Joe Rogan with respect I urge you to remind them that he is friends with a man who harassed the parents of dead children to make money. This is not an exaggeration. This has been documented in court. That association should have been a final nail in Rogan’s coffin. And what is worse is that when Jones goes on that dumb as fuck podcast he just sits there and believes whatever bullshit Alex tells him. Alex “the frogs are gay” Jones is someone that Rogan takes seriously. And he has for decades. Are you fucking kidding me?

What this shows me, and continues to show me, is that so many people are fine with bigotry. Perhaps they aren’t going to go around spouting this shit but they find it entertaining. They can stomach enough to just sit for three hours and listen to a greasy turd talk about how everyone is just too uptight about all the bigots he platforms. And the thing about this is even if Rogan is deplatformed (which I highly doubt he will be) the desire for people just like him won’t go away. Our culture is dissolving into out and out white supremacist fascism. This is just the entertainment branch of it. This bootlicking fuck head has the ears of a millions despite the fact that he has never said anything remotely funny. And everyone he talks to just jerks him off because he is a cash cow dumbass who falls to flattery like a house of cards. Even if you claim that he is not racist (which is laughable considering the amount of times he has said the n word for fucking shits and giggles) It’s still guilt by association, for me. You lay down with dogs you get fucking flees and that motherfucker is itchy as hell.

[the-hopeless-haze]

My Emo Author’s Ending Note :)

I've been writing this goddamn story since May 2020.

I was bored during quarantine and I was watching Glee and Kurt Hummel came on stage during the winter showcase for NYADA and he sang "Being Alive". Immediately I was enraptured by the song. I loved the lyrics, the way it was set up with all these specific instances of a relationship, the parallels when the song's narrator changes his mind and comes around to wanting a relationship, wanting a marriage. I was obsessed with this song. I went and looked up the original Broadway versions - and was reintroduced to Raul Esparza.

I knew him from the shitshow that is Hannibal (yes I hate Hannibal lmao come talk to me about it sometime) and I did use to watch SVU back in the day. And then it clicked - I was like, okay, I am going to write this fic with these lyrics as the chapter titles because at the time it was so interesting to me.

Here's some problematic backstory if you're interested lmao that I’ll leave under the cut lol

So I used to be a libertarian and like I was into all the questionable right-wing stuff, like Dave Rubin, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro... gross. And like they would always say, "Oh women shouldn't waste their 20s, they need to get married" and like that's what I wanted too because that's what I was being force-fed. And Company came out in the 1970s. Marriage was a lot different back then. So it kind of reaffirmed my narrative, that I needed to settle down and get married (mind you I am turning 21 in like three days lmao). But it also came with this character, Bobby, who is so emotionally vulnerable and riddled with anxiety, and we don't know why. So we insert ourselves onto him, or at least I did. I have awful social anxiety, and I don't have many friends never mind lovers lmao. I was in a long-term relationship with a guy and he was an absolute dick but I tried so hard to make it work with him and I would've married him because I was so desperate not to waste my twenties like I was told. But... I gained a lot of new anxieties from that relationship and related to Bobby even more.

So writing this was cathartic. I got to work out my thoughts and worries in a way that wasn't exactly connected to me. And I worked out a lot of stuff throughout this. I came to terms with being hella bisexual and that is why everyone is canonically fruity in this story lol. I came to terms with the fact that I was manipulated into doing sexual things with my ex that I was not comfortable with and that is why I dealt with the reader's anxieties when it came to sex in depth. I deal with mortality a little too because that fucking scares me lmao.

But I came to terms with the fact that it's not a woman's sole duty to get married. And I'd argue that's not even entirely the point of Company either. The point is to live, you have to allow yourself to be vulnerable and not discount the good just because it comes with some bad. And that's why the reader and Barba do not get married within the realms of this story. It's up to you to decide what happens to them but I did give them a happy ending because I'm a sap lmao. But due to the pandemic and just doing some critical thinking I am now a huge leftist... but that's a side story.

I also proved something to myself - that I can actually fucking finish something. I've written like a million fanfics and never finished them lmao but this one is the only one I did! (Except for the Hunger Games one I wrote when I was 11 that has since been deleted lol). So even though I cannot tell you how many times I wanted to hang it up I am so happy I powered through. I kind of never want to watch SVU again though lmao

But anyway... thank YOU SO MUCH to everyone who commented and reblogged and liked and read this story. That just means the fucking world to me. You have no idea. I love to write and idk I was like, fuck it, I'm going to put this out here and let people comment... and you know that's a kind of vulnerability in itself. But the response has been overwhelmingly positive and I want to thank all of you so much for that. This was not easy for me lmao especially not when all I wanted to do was throw in the towel... But I am so fucking happy I did it.

Thank you all of you so much :) Special thanks to @isvvc-pvscvl and @thatesqcrush for being here from the start and all the support :)

And thank you to all of the people on here who messaged me privately about the story - I won’t name you for privacy reasons but it means the world that my words had any impact on anyone!