#just look up any article about the short story i sexually identify as an attack helicopter

[klug]

I saw something random and it got me thinking about how honestly I don't think people should be required to reveal personal information, esp. information about their mental illnesses, just to be allowed to write about something

[impossiblelibrary]

Today's rant brought to you by: Queer Eye Japan, can we all just try to be as kind as they try to be?

After watching the Queer Eye Japan super short season, I wanted to google to see the overall reaction to the show, make sure that my western eyes were correct in seeing the care that was given to the culture. Were cultural taboos, other than being outwardly gay, crossed? So I find this article in the top results and other than the perspective, why tho? Tokyoesque.com had an article with a higher reading level, with surface level appreciation but at least better written.

I can't get over this hate article though. Unfounded, dumb, wrong and incorrect. Do not go forward unless you like that blistering kind of anger from me.

But the reasons just get weaker as the article extends: "Hurts the country it set out to save?" Looking for white savior much? They did not go to save Japan, they gave some free shit to like 4-5 people, think smaller.

Their culture guide wasn't gay enough.

You want to suggest any lgbt insta models or celebrities, use your platform to raises some up?

"There is a growing sexless culture in Japan for married and unmarried people, and it is perilous watching Queer Eye present this without any context behind what is driving this behavior."

Sexiness is what the fab 5 embrace, unfortunately and it was probably discussed behind the scenes of how much talking about sex was allowed or polite and the conversation of not having sex is closer to the tip of the tongue rather than the feeling of sexiness. The West is not the ones blasting that information. It is across multiple Japanese printed newspapers and online stories by now and the "context" is still being discussed and debated amongst Japanese. So I don't think any outsiders should be weighing in or "explaining" this phenomenon. We can repeat what we have been told but guessing at the reasons is not our place. The reasons illustrated by the author of the article seem lacking, a take but not the only one, but who am I to speak on that being in a sexual relationship with someone who pulls from that culture?

Kiko begins to lecture Yoko-san on how she “threw away her womanhood” (referring to a Japanese idiom, onna wo suteru) by going makeup-free and wearing drab, shapeless clothes.

The mistranslation by the subtitles fixed by this author was necessary information. But Kiko didn't lecture her on it, it was brought up by Yoko before any of them arrived, that was her theme, that was what she had decided to focus on. Meanwhile, if you watched Jonathan, he understood there was no time to spend on makeup and skincare so provided her a one instrument, 3 points of color on the skin to feel prettier. That and the entire episode being the 5 treating her like a woman on a date, not trying to hook her up, which is what they did in American eps.

"In teaching a Japanese woman, who already struggles to find time for herself, how to make an English recipe, Antoni is making great TV and nothing more."

So Antoni shouldn't have taught her apple pie because it's too exotic for a Japanese woman. (Can you smell the sexism?)

He didn't make an apple pie, altho Yoko did mention her mother made that for her when she was a kid. He made an apple tartine after going to a Japanese bakery who makes that all the time. Then highlighted the apples came from Fuji in true Japanese media fashion. Honey, American television doesn't usually highlight where the ingredients come from. A Japanese producer told him to do that. So all worries handled within the same ep. She got Japanese ingredients, had the recipe shown to her and then made it for her friends in her own house. Did the author actually watch this show or nah?

"beaten over the head with his western self-help logic. “You have to live for yourself,” he says."

The style of build up the 5 went for was confrontational but in a "I'm fighting for you" way. It's hard to describe, but the best I can say is, a person has multiple voices in their head, from parents, siblings, society, and maybe themselves. By being loud and obnoxious, American staples right there, they are adding one more voice. You deserve this, you are amazing, you are worth it. I know this is against most Japanese cultural modesty, but maybe it shouldn't be.

Sarcasm lies ahead:

Apparently: mispronunciation is microaggressions, not just someone who had a sucky school system. Yea okay, They're laughing at the language not at how stumbling these monolinguals are with visiting another country. Mmhm. Japanese don't say I love you and don't touch and that should stay that way instead of maybe, once in awhile, feeling like they can hug. Yeah, let's just ignore Yoko's break down that she had never hugged her lifelong friend after hugging strangers multiple times. Maid cafes are never sexualized in Japan ever, just don't go down that one street in Akihabara where the men are led off by the hand sheepishly blushing. Gag me. And Japanese men love to cry in front of their wives and would never break down once the wife leaves. I have never seen a Japanese movie showcase that move. Grr.

"I identify as many cultures."

So you're a Japanese man when it's convenient for you to get an article published? Are you nationally Japanese or just ethnically or culturally?

Homeland is an inherently racist word?

"After the Bush administration created the Department of Homeland Security after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a Republican consultant and speechwriter Peggy Noonan urged, “the name Homeland Security grates on a lot of people, understandably. Homeland isn’t really an American word, it’s not something we used to say or say now.”

Yes, let's use a Washington Post article rather than a etymology professor. Yes, the google search results increased after 2001 Homeland Security was used but the word has been around since the 1660s and I've read multiple turn of the century lit on white people returning to their homeland, i.e. the town off the coast they were born in.

"But" is not disagreeing. I think the repeated offender for the author is the not acknowledging the makeover-ees feelings. But, that is how LGBT have decided to deal with the inner voices that invade from society. They are just that, not our own, they are the influence of society, and we can choose, we have to choose, to be influenced by someone, anyone else.

Karamo can't speak about being black when an Asian is speaking about being Asian, even though the Asian gay man was feeling alone. It's called relating bitches, and I'm done with people saying that is redirecting the conversation, it's extending the conversation. That's how we talk, the spotlight is shared, especially when someone's about to cry and doesn't want to be seen as crying, time to turn the spotlight.

The gay monk wasn't good enough, you should have invited the gay politician.

Yeah, causes I'm sure a politician has all the time in the world for a quick stint and cry. They picked a Japanese monk who travels to NY because they had a guest who travels to the West too. Did you want him to stop traveling back and forth? Did you want a pure, ethnic and cultural Japanese gay man who has no ties to the west to talk to this Western educated young man? Seriously?

This is just not how it works in Japan.

Being in a multi-cultural marriage between two rebels, discussions on facets of culture are plenty in my household. Culture should be respected enough to be considered but not held on a pedestal like we should never adjust or throw some things out. LGBT being quiet and private for instance. "Being seen" was Jonathan's advice, and a good one especially for a Japanese gay man that was called feminine since he was a kid. Some gay men can hide, but as Jonathan said, he couldn't hide what he was, he couldn't hide this. So fuck it. Don't hide. It's actually more dangerous for a feminine man to come off as anxious rather than gay and proud. It makes you more of a target if they think you won't fight back. Proud means, Imma throw hands too, bitch.

This is also from the civil rights playbook going back to Black America: never hold a protest or a fight without the cameras, without being seen. LGBT have found the more seen they are, in media, in the streets, the better off we are. When LGBT Americans were being "private" about our lifestyles, we died, a la 1980s. They won't care if you start dying off if they never saw you to begin with.

And hence why I think the author's real anger is from these 5 being seen dancing flamboyantly in Shibuya, in Harajuku, afforded the privilege of doing this safely because of their tourist status, cameras and very low violence rate in Tokyo, loud and obnoxiously. Honestly, they wouldn't have been invited or nominated if they didn't want that brash American-ness coming into their home, just for a taste, at least.

Here's my real anger, my own jealousy: Japan's queer community currently does not have marriage or adoption rights. US does, so we have progressed further. But we are also not that many years from being tied to cow fences with barbed wire, beaten with baseball bats and left for dead overnight. If things are so bad over there, maybe take a few pages from the civil right playbook we took so much time to perfect and produced by the Black Americans who fought first. But so far, I only hear loss of jobs and marriages, which we still have here too. Stop trying to divide us, we are one community, LGBT around the world and we are here to try to help. Take it or leave it, it's not like we're going to go organize your own Pride parade for you.

Rant over? I guess. Is this important enough to be put in the google results along with his. Hell no, anyone with half a mind can see he's reaching more than half the time. And any argument about: this wasn't covered! There are a shit ton of conversations that are not covered in the 45 min they have. They are not a civil rights show, it's a makeover show, doing their best in that direction anyway. Know what it is.

Next blog post, what research I would guess was happening behind the scenes for each of the 5? I'm pretty sure I saw Jonathan doing Japanese style makeup there...

[deathlygristly]

I don’t want to add to the reblog chain because the thoughts I have right now are more about my personal reactions and emotions, but I wanted to type out my thoughts about this article: https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/22543858/isabel-fall-attack-helicopter about an author who was harassed over a short story to the point of checking into a hospital to deal with her suicidal ideation, and the story itself: https://archive.is/oXDEt, which is titled I Sexually Identify As An Attack Helicopter.

To me, it’s a story. I think it’s a very imaginative use of the meme, taking a troll joke and making it serious and using it to tell a story about gender and the military and war. I can’t imagine getting angry about it and wanting to harass someone about it. 

I don’t get the gender stuff in the story but by this point I know that I will never get gender stuff, especially not the upper middle class gender stuff that I think is the type mostly discussed on the internet and in this story.

I just....I don’t understand at all how you can read that story and then decide to get all enraged about it and harass the author and be awful about it.

I guess a fair few people didn’t even bother to read it? Like they just heard the title, pattern matched and assumed it was by a MMO general chat 14 year old troll, and they lost any sense of decency?

Also though it does help, because I also ended up in the hospital after internet harassment. For a hemorrhaging ulcer, not for mental health issues, although I believe the stress greatly contributed to the ulcer. I’ve tested negative for h.pylori twice now, and I only started taking the NSAID for the chest pain I already had.

Maybe the people involved in the Bad Times never bothered actually reading anything I wrote. Maybe if they did, they looked at it in the paranoid way mentioned in the article. Maybe it was some social phenomenon driven by an unholy combination of internet structure and human social behavior and it never had anything to do with me as a person in the first place.

Also, even though I haven’t written For Real in a while now due to the tinnitus and the spousal person’s kdrama obsession, there are still some writing bits in my brain that were pointing out how some of the sentences in the story could have been smoother. ;) Gave me hope that maybe I still can and will write For Real again.

Overall though...why do people do this? The article explains that it’s just how Twitter works, but what happened to me mostly happened on LiveJournal. And we know it happens on here too. And we also know that not everyone engages in this behavior. It’s not something hardwired into every human. Is it just hardwired into some humans, or is there something we can do to try to prevent it even if we don’t have the power to change the entire structure of the internet? Like, I don’t know, a way to build compassion and empathy and resistance to getting caught up in online mobs? Or at the very least, making it a social norm to not comment on things that you haven’t even read?

[scotfem]

Ooooh my god. Read the whole thing it's mind boggling and written by a TRA that doesn't actually know what oppression is

Last month, Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon posted a heartfelt video statement online. 

She said that she would make a stance to address transphobia in her party, outlining that it ‘is wrong and we must treat it with the zero tolerance we treat racism or homophobia.’

I – like many other Scottish National Party members who left in January – watched in tears.

Yet, I fear that Sturgeon’s words have come too late to undo the SNP’s slide into becoming one of the most concerning hubs of transphobia in Scotland.

When I, a non-binary person, joined the SNP In February 2019, the party felt like a beacon of hope. Scotland had a great LGBTQ+ equalities rating, and Nicola herself, as a life-long feminist and LGBTQ+ ally, was a role model I held in deep respect.

But at just three months in, I felt first-hand the party’s disregard for the safety and wellbeing of trans people.

After I appeared in a short social media video for the SNP’s official student wing, I became the focus of a disproportionately large hate campaign launched by anti-trans activists online. They pored over screenshots of my body shared over Mumsnet, mocking my features, which they found unfeminine.

As I watched the party fail to act as the same activists who attacked me sent thank you cards to SNP politicians like Joanna Cherry for her opposition to trans rights, I never took it upon myself to report what had happened. I was aware of other complaints that had received no response.

That was until I came to a crisis point in 2020 when I was subjected to coordinated, planned abuse by anti-trans activists at a branch meeting I had been invited to.

The leaked branch meeting minutes were seen by The Herald describing, ‘At one point photocopies of men taken from the internet were passed with the comments that they had all been convicted of predatory and paedophilic behaviour against women and girls while self-identifying as women’. 

In shock at their actions, I did not look at them all but one picture stood out to me, of a well-known UK trans public figure. 

This trans woman had experienced abuse online for her appearance not fitting the patriarchal ideal of what ‘woman’ looks like. Yet they compared her to convicted rapists and paedophiles, just for being who she is.

I couldn’t help but compare it to what happened to me over the SNP Student video; the sheer disgust at our bodies – objects to be ridiculed. 

As the night went on that room devolved into a den of transphobia. The minutes detail that anti-trans activists ‘shouted comments of men getting access to women/girls in toilets and changing rooms and raping them and the infiltration of LGBT information in primary schools encouraging children to identify as gay or trans.’

I was too scared to say anything although the branch executive apologised for these activists’ actions and ushered me to safety; it took me three months to summon up the courage to talk publicly about it.

And my fear was justified. Six months after I formally complained, nothing was done. I felt hurt and betrayed when I did not receive the support I should have been able to expect.

I emailed the new National Secretary Stewart Stevenson MSP, setting my intention to leave unless an update on my complaint was provided within two weeks.

He said nothing. And so, I left.

The sad part is many other instances go unreported due to the survivors being too scared to come forward out of fear of harassment. I was not the first trans person to come forward about being abused in the SNP.

Emma Cuthbertson, the former convenor for the party’s official LGBTQ+ wing, said she sent ‘at least 21 complaints’ outlining instances of transphobic abuse she received from other party members to SNP HQ, the national secretary and even Sturgeon herself. She said no one responded and subsequently left to join the Scottish Greens.

The rumbles of bigotry and party inaction came to a crescendo on Tuesday January 26, the day before Holocaust Memorial Day, as prominent SNP MP Joanna Cherry appeared to defend an anti-trans activist whose Twitter account has been suspended for violating its ‘hateful conduct’ policy. 

Cherry tweeted claiming that ‘Twitter moderation policies are a violation of #FreeSpeech & your hateful conduct policy does not protect women…As a Member of Parliament I’m calling you out on your sexism & your #HumanRights violations’, which was to me insinuating that sexism led to the account being banned rather than acknowledging the discriminatory remarks aimed at trans and Jewish people.

Last week, the SNP had a reshuffle and dropped Cherry from the front bench – Anne McLaughlin MP has been appointed instead as the party’s spokeswoman on justice and immigration.

Recently, Justice Minister Humza Yousaf submitted highly controversial proposals to the Hate Crime Bill, which seems to enshrine in law the demand of anti-trans activists to be exempt from hate crime regulations when criticising trans people’s identities.

This accumulation of stories shared over social media, to significant outrage, meant it was understandable that a sliver of recognition from Sturgeon in her video was enough to make mytears start.

Watching her was like having two years of fear and silence finally be put into words. I cried out of pain, mourning and exhaustion because I feel this has come too late to heal the harm done to trans people both inside and outwith the party.

At this time, I don’t think the SNP support trans people on our road to an equal and inclusive independent Scotland at all. Trans healthcare was already at crisis levels prior to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Now, waiting times are at such severe levels that some trans people wait up tothree years just for their first appointment at a Gender Identity Clinic.  

Trans women are experiencing an epidemic of Intimate Partner Violence, including domestic and sexual abuse from their partners.

I’ve watched as close friends’ lives have been ruined by these problems, but they seem of little interest to a party in which the mere mention of trans rights acts as a lightning rod for amplifying transphobia, and distracts from the mission of independence. Trans people are tired of having to ‘wheesht for Indy’ (‘wheest’ meaning hush).

It’s a horrible situation. Young people joined the SNP out of hope for a new Scotland and now many are regretting that decision.

Sturgeon has promised change and I believe her to be an ally but until change happens, I cannot see the SNP as a safe space for already marginalised trans people.

The onus is on all of our allies to pressure the SNP leadership to launch an independent, external review of its transphobic culture, with a focus on many ignored instances of discrimination and abuse, before a generation of its activists are lost.

‘We hope our efforts will reaffirm the status of the SNP as great supporters of the LGBT+ movement. The door remains open for Teddy, other trans people and trans allies, should they wish to re-join the party at any time.’

Joanna Cherry QC MP said: ‘I am not aware of anyone in the SNP who wants to undermine the rights of Trans people. As a lesbian, a feminist and a veteran of the struggles for equality I believe that everyone deserves equal protection under the law and I am very proud of the fact that in Scotland we have very good rights-based protections for Trans people. 

‘There is currently a debate about changing the Gender Recognition Act in Scotland. Some people have advocated for a policy of self-identification of gender. In response Women have raised legitimate concerns about the impact on their sex-based rights enshrined under the Equalities Act. It is concerning that in this area it is difficult to express a viewpoint without being labelled a transphobe. The Scottish Government’s proposed amendment to the draft Hate Crime bill was designed to ensure that people who wish to discuss women’s sex-based rights would be protected from charges of transphobic hate crime.  Without such protections Scotland will end up in breach of Article 10 ECHR which protects the right of free speech.‘

-End of article-

You read that right folx, this idiot is actually saying that women being able to congregate and speak about issues that affect us is hate speech and wants it to be enshrined in law. The trans movement couldn't be any more anti-woman if they tried

[migleefulmoments]

Let’s unpack some cc nonsense

Anonymous asked:

Not that anyone can at this point but if YOU were representing D, how would you get him out of the mess? The damage that has been done to him is horrendous but the man has talent. Surely D believed there was “light at the end of the tunnel” or he never would have agreed to this??!’ Curious? If there is a plan, would do you think it would entail?

cassie1022 answered:  Nonnie, I woke up to reading about this giant shit storm his team has created getting worse (shitstorm? really? it was a GAY website talking about all the straight actors who have played gay characters and gay actors who played straight and gay characters. The website post was not judgmental or cruel- in fact this is what they said

Films are an important voice for a lot of LGBT people as they offer vital representation in society. Actors do an important job of starring as our favourite characters in films. However, very few LGBT roles are filled by openly LGBT actors. Actors who are open about their sexuality are struggling to carve a successful career path for themselves – a fact that is not helped by their heterosexual counterparts filling up roles that some might argue should be reserved for them.PinkNews has compiled all a list of all the Hollywood stars who have gone “gay for pay” on the big screen. We’ve also explored the gay actors who have made a name for themselves playing it straight.

Then they listed along with each actor-most of them A-listers-the movie they were in. That’s it. Hardly career killing.)  They completely crossed the last line they had left with this latest nonsense. Make no mistake, this is a deliberate and vicious attack on D’s character, (is it though? he has said he is straight for 10 years) and it’s being perpetuated by people that are supposed to be operating on his behalf and helping him shine (He just won 4 awards and has his own show in the works which allows him to write, write music, sing, act and produce so I don’t know how you can argue they are not helping him shine) So, the question is, why are they coating him in mud instead? (No the question is why do ccers NOT understand that these stories are written by writers-in this case Joseph McCormic (X)- who create content for the specific website. It is the same as Vogue.com, Just Jared, The Advocate, Bon Apetite, Tasty, Buzfeed, and all the other speciality websites that create content for their readers. Writers pitch stories and then do the research or interviews and write the content. If they had to wait for teams to destroy their clients out of revenge, they would never have enough content to publish regularly and if Ricky sent this info to destroy Darren then Meryl Streep and Benedit Cumberbatch’s teams did so as well) THAT strongly suggests to me that they know their time is drawing to a close and they want to break and damage not just his career, but him, as much as they can. (This is a completely illogical idea that Abby started several years ago. Today @ajw720, @Cassie1022 and @Notes-From-Nowhere mentioned it.  Obviously there is a coordinated attempt to gaslight their readers with this trope. Did Abby sending out “cc talking points” this morning like the gop  always does?). The age old, if I can’t have you, I’m going to destroy you so no one else wants you, prophecy. (”Prophey: noun a prediction of what will happen in the future”. Not the right word here, Cassie. “I’m going to destroy so no one wants you” is abuse, plain and simple. If Ricky was actively and methodically destroying Darren, it would be grounds for Darren to break their contract and pursue legal options against Ricky. Let’s talk about Ricky’s contract- RICKY signed it, Darren didn’t because Darren HIRED Ricky. As a manager, Ricky is legally required to work to further Darren’s best interests.  He is not allowed to use his POA to sign anything that Darren wouldn’t sign himself. That is the law. Also you have been claiming this for the last 4 years-either Ricky sucks at destroying Darren, he is doing the world’s slowest destruction or it’s all bullshit). 

As for attempting to fix this mess? Well, I have to believe that there is some type of plan in place (again you have said this for 4 years). Clearly, he needs to clean house on his team and start over. (Here is where this gets interesting because Cassie lays out a plan for Darren to STOP being Darren and turn himself into Blaine Anderson once and for all) He needs to seek guidance from members of the LGBTQ community that have successfully come out and have the right people working for them (He isn’t gay). The replacements need to be thoroughly and meticulously researched and carefully selected. D needs to shed the dude bro douche image (that IS who Darren is) and get back to being the quirky, loveable goofball (Blaine) that makes you (ME) fall in love with him (because it is HIS job to be the fictitious character you fantasize about?). I suspect he knew exactly what they were planning and that’s why he hasn’t sought more career opportunities on his own.(He just planned a wedding, produced a StarKid reunion, is writing scrips, writing music, producing, acting and singing in Royalties and producing Elsie. He’s very busy). Let’s be honest, D himself is the one that secured his most successful career opportunities.(This isn’t something you know anything about. If Darren finds Ricky’s work lacking then he needs to fire him.) The things his team has gotten him are few and far between and generally only agreed to so their bank accounts grow and they get swag (Again a trope that Abby made up and you all just mindless globbed on to but that you would have NO idea who did what)  

The good news is that people, that are not fandom fanatics, won’t hold a grudge (Actually the ccers are the only ones who hold grudges. The rest of us understand that the healthy adult reaction would be to just find another celeb to like. Getting angry, raging and holding grudges when a celeb doesn’t do what you want them to do is what immature and mentally unwell people do) . Sure, he may take a hit with those outside the fandom, but memories are usually short and people are generally forgiving. He may take a bigger hit within fandom, but I believe he’s charming and sincere enough to rebound (and yet you claim he lies to us now every time he speaks so being sincere isn’t high on your list of criteria for being a fan) . Any fans that walk and don’t come back won’t be missed. I also believe he has a strong support system within the LGBTQ community.(Why? Why would the LGBTQ community strongly support him when he has outright lied about his sexuality so many times over the last decade?  He didn’t just avoid questions or give evasive answers, he spoke at length about his being straight, he even brought it up on his own quite a few times. He refused to be honest about who he is in 2019. That’s fucked up. As pissed as you -a gaggle of straight women- are about the Pink comment, imagine how the gay community will feel when they find out that he lied for 10 years about his sexuality and married a women to keep his secret while he was with Chris and he did so simply to keep his career afloat. The LGTBQ community is writing about him in their  “pay to gay” article, imagine the articles that would come out-“a decade in the closet while married to his husband cuz he wanted  to be an A-lister ” or  “Gay but married his Beard to stay relevant in Hollywood: 2019 edition”. According to cc theory, he isn’t closeted because of concerns about his safety or his family disowning him but because he wanted to be an A-lister....he stays in the closet in exchange for not being blacklisted in Hollywood, that is what you guys tell us. But he could come out and still perform- he could act, write, and produce StarKid, he could pursue music, he could do Broadway and be out and proud. He could likely do Royalties.  In fact, once Royalties is up and going, the “He’s closeted” trope is going to have a hard time standing because there will be no reason for him to be closeted).   So many people that identify as queer LGBTQ genuinely love him (Really? How does a straight women with no connection to the LGBTQ community know that? if you are speaking about Ricky Martin, Justin Trantor,  Elivs Duran, and Chris Colfer, you aren’t speaking about “many people”) and that speaks volumes and will be one of the key components of rinsing the mud left on him by team stupid off and helping him regain his brilliant light. If they believed the nonsense his team is spreading about him, they wouldn’t be friends with him (l don’t think any of his friends real CDAN or PinkNews) . The LGBTQ community is a loving, supportive group, but they won’t tolerate people that use them (exactly why they would not support a closeted Darren). If they thought that was the case with D, they would make it known.

All of this makes me so sad for him. He doesn’t deserves the character assassination that’s happening, especially as it’s at the hands of people he’s paying.

ajw720 @cassie1022 well stated. Completely agree.(Of course you agree, these are your tropes -you wrote them all)

notes-from-nowhere. I believe the plan is to discredit him as much as possible. This will make him less believable once he will be able to say his truth.

People is scared, what D may say once free is making them nervous (if that was true then Darren would have all of the POWER and could blackmail them. They certainly shouldn’t antagonize him even further, that isn't how you keep someone quiet. God, this trope is so stupid) and what we are seeing right now is an attempt to do an earlly damage control. Basically someone is trying to take him away his voice. If they successfully make him look like a liar (what have they done that makes him look like a liar? You guys, on the other hand, say he lies every time he talks about himself), an opportunist and a selfish dick, no one will ever take what he says seriously.(That isn’t how it works. Everyone in Hollywood is an opportunist and a dick- nobody in LA would bat and eye)  It’s maybe their lowest and lousy move since the beginning but as I’ve said earlier, none of them is better than this (huh?). This is how they play this game, the difference from before is that now that the end is near, D forced them to show their moves because he is no longer bending (and yet they have been playing this game for10 years now, they can only play it if Darren lets them...why is he letting them?) .

ajw720. @notes-from-nowhere that’s one of the reasons the sham mockery had to happen (more illogical logic). Because many that know the truth think d is choosing this. And that’s how it will appear in the surface when he is able to tell the truth. They want him to take the blame completely. (HUH? Did you have wine before you wrote this? It makes NO sense at all “Many who know the truth believe d is choosing this”???? YES BECAUSE HE DID CHOOSE MIA)

I won’t let that happen. Their sins are well documented.(Oh Abby, please let us know how you “won't let this happen” and please share the “documented sins”. We all know you believe they are sins but I would love to see how you have documented them.  I’ve read your master posts of evidence and they are all the rants of a mentally unfit person. You have NO power in this so claiming you “won't let this happen is utter nonsense. You sound like Trump)

cc-still-going-strong  Don’t forget he still has C and C’s friends. They are a great ally if D ever wants to win back the LBGT’s hearts. And LBGT community will understand the difficulty he has at the present.(This cracks me up- Darren has never been seen in the same vicinity of any of Chris’s friends in the 9 years we have been following them. He never mentioned or Tweeted them- even back we he wasn’t so cautious on sm.  This is pure fantasy- complete made up nonsense. I’ve already argued why the LGBTQ wouldn’t be thrilled to welcome Darren into their community with open arms) 

There is also a lot of his fans love him for who he is only, so that they will absolutely understand when his dark stage is over. 

The only harm he will ever gets would come from Mi/arren stans, but mostly they are love M because of D, not the opposite. 

There will be light waiting for him if he decides to be free from this BS. After all, he still has us and C (Thank god he has you, I love that Chris comes second in that comment).

ajw720. @cc-still-going-strong I think that the fact that C is still solidly by his side, speaks volumes for D’s character and makes an incredibly strong statement that I think many of the LGBT+ community in hollywood see.  (and what do you see Abby that indicates “Chris is still solidly by his side”? I'm super curious because over her in sane-world, we don’t even see a the most basic of indications of a friendship anymore). 

cc-still-going-strong Absolutely. I believe people who did corporate with him and/or know about C and him, will totally understand and support him.

And I strongly believe that C is still has D’s back. When the vid “Gay for pay” outed, C immediately update his Instagram and Twitter, as a distraction - with a video about a caterpillar in its ugly shape, but one day it will turn into a beautiful monarch. He only said #Savethemonarchs as a way to show his support for HIM. (Proving that the tinhatter are not sane. I cannot with this comment. It’s so ridiculous.... I just can’t. Literally WHO was so distracted by a caterpillar video that they forgot Darren was listed in a “gay for pay”? I also love how she totally wrote an entire story behind the post because that is what ccers do- see a caterpillar tagged #Savethemonarchs? It’s not about the plight of global warning and Monarch butterfly survival NOPE is really about HIM and the caterpiller will turn into a beautiful butterfly just like Darren, gag me) 

ajw720. Could not agree more (of course she agrees). That video was so intentional and such an interesting choice to not show the butterfly. Just the caterpillar.(blah blah blah blergh) That’s d and his current state. And d is going to emerge as a stunning monarch.

leka-1998 I’ve always liked that song but (Leka believing life is just a big episode of Glee)

“Don’t let them get you down

You’re the best thing I’ve seen”

is probably my favorite part.

cc-still-going-strong Not only the video but also the song choice.

Still going strong, guys.

[clairen45]

Red Re-Read: The Company of Wolves and the ST

This meta is long overdue. When I started my blog in January, I had a list of prospective articles I wanted to write about Kylo and Rey, or some themes that I was seeing suggested in the ST. On top of the list was Little Red Riding Hood, and I never even imagined going there without at the very least a honorable mention to Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber (1979) and the extended movie companion to 3 of these tales, Neil Jordan’s 1984 The Company of Wolves. Special request by @missnomerblr pushed me to finally complete the task. Also tagging our dear Reylo she-wolf extraordinaire, @ravenmaiden. The aesthetic and special effects left quite an impression on my mind as a child when the movie was released. Of course I was only allowed to watch it years later, and I didn’t get all the symbolism as a young girl, of course... but the idea that men with Frida Khalo eyebrows could turn into wolves, and that the wolf could get as seduced as the girl, were forever ingrained in my mind. How is it relevant to Star Wars, will you tell me? Ok, I will imagine that you didn’t catch any reference before, or read any meta on the sexual subtext of the movies,  but how could you miss the obvious red-themed campaign for the release of TLJ in theaters, with all the characters’ clothing dipped in red, and that little piece, very much unabashed about its reference:

Daisy Ridley even joked at the time about her poster, calling it “Little Rey’d Riding Hood”. That’s a good one, Daisy.

Officially, so many tales have been used by the Star Wars team to describe the ST. JJ compared Rey to Cinderella in his audio commentary to TFA. Sure, it’s a rags to riches story for Cinde-Rey-lla who is an orphan, undervalued and under-appreciated, and who maintains through her many hardships and trials a positive outlook on life and people, and a sunny character. Like your classic Disney princess who can talk to birds and mice, Rey understands every language. And if it’s not with a glass slipper that her prince identify her as his future bride, it is a blue lightsaber that does the trick. A saber, which like the slipper in Disney’s version, gets broken in the process right before the epilogue (part 3). Second reference: the characters were apparently coded as Goldilocks and the Bears during the shooting for TLJ. Again, that’s fair, because Rey, like Goldilocks, takes an adventurous stroll into the woods and ends up borrowing, like a cuckoo, things that don’t belong to her: a saber, a MF etc... She also trespasses onto Luke’s island, and then onto the Supremacy. And, like Goldilocks, in the positive versions, after a narrow brush with danger, she escapes barely unscathed with possibly a valuable life lesson. There is also Snow White, and the glass pod/ coffin that Rey uses to meet with her prince. I will add another element later, but I’ll hush for now. There is also the implicit Sleeping Beauty in the title The Force Awakens and the idea further developed in TLJ that Rey’s powers have been dormant ... until a prince awakened it... And then, there is Little Red Riding Hood.

This tale belongs to the cycle of educational tales about menstruation and loss of virginity. They are pretty easy to spot (intended pun): they are the ones with the color red encoded somewhere, with numbers that evoke the passing of time (12 fairies, 7 days, etc...), and also stories that require the heroine to lose a bit of blood: from the finger pricking of Sleeping Beauty or Snow White’s mom to the potential gore of Bluebeard and Little Red Riding Hood. And yes, usually menstruation and seduction go hand in hand pretty nicely. Because, traditionally, a woman who bleeds has just become fair game: she is desirable because able to bear children. So cycle of blood it is: menses, hymen, labor. What is fairly subtle, symbolic, and innocuous in cautionary tales aimed at children is brought to full light in Carter’s take on the classic tales aimed at adults. Her heroines, though, are given more obvious agency. More attention is given to the fact that it is also a time of budding sexuality for the heroines as well, a time when desire shifts from narcissim to the desire of the other. In tales, this otherness gets the extreme treatment: the object of desire is a monster, an animal, that normally becomes civilized by the end, so that desire fits conventional standards and doesn’t disrupt society. So the monster turns back into a prince when he can be salvaged (The Beast, the Frog), and he is killed when really too far gone (Bluebeard). I will also argue that, most of the time, the transformed one is actually the princess: though she doesn’t change physically, she has learned to accept her desires and stops seeing male desire and sexualty as monstruous. She has accepted the otherness, so she stops seeing him as a monster. She has changed psychologically. That being said, Carter was not the first one to bring a magnifying glass onto the implied sexuality in Little Red Riding Hood. It is implied for children, but has been very much understood as it was by adults... Think of Tex Avery’s wolf and Red for instance. What chance would have Wolfie against the very savvy and alluring vampish Red Hot Riding Hood? So the story of seduction has been going both ways for quite a long time, with Red being seduced or seducing the wolf... Then you have different outcomes, and frankly, writers and directors have done them all: girls gets devoured by wolf, girl gets devoured and rescued, girl barely escapes, girl outsmarts wolf,  girl kills wolf, wolf falls in love with girl, girl becomes a wolf, girl tames wolf... you name it.

ELEMENTS FROM LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD

It was quite a bold choice in TLJ to have Rey in full Little Red Riding Hood Cosplay when so far the elements had been merely subtext in TFA. Red, so far, had been mostly coded as Kylo’s color. But as we get to find out more about him, the color seeps and bleeds, especially in TLJ, the litteral “core” (aka heart) of the ST, the middle chapter which is very much about Kylo’s exposed wounds (both figuratively and symbolically), culminating with Crait, the planet that seems to be bleeding every time you  but skim its surface. Remember also that “raw” was the keyword in the trailer, and defines Kylo: “raw untamed power”. Raw means what it means. Exposed flesh, scorched, flogged. I thought I had read somewhere that the throne room scene had been coded with Little Red Riding Hood and Big Bad Wolf during shooting, but I have never been able to find the link through my research... Please, if you happen to know or remember that, just let me know. But back to the hood...

There has already been many metas on the importance of Kylo and Rey meeting in the woods. They could have met on Jakku, they were that close... But they didn’t. There’s the woods, but there’s also straying from the path. Red, like Goldilocks, is cautioned against that. Nothing bad will happen to little girls who stay on the straight and narrow. Possibly nothing at all wil ever happen to little girls who remain on the path... In most stories, though, straying a bit will be the good start for some journey... And indeed, Rey, given a clear path, “the first steps” on the famous Path of the Jedi, through her Force visions, refuses it. Rather than following the path, she runs away... straight into the woods... Where she meets her big bad Wolf. As in the original story, he starts out being more cunning than Red, and is able to get her where he wants her to be. Abduction in TFA. Long way to Granny’s house while he takes the short cut. Plotwise, there are also some common elements. Red carries a basket full of goodies that she is supposed to take to her sick grandmother. Her mother commissioned her to the task. It’s all female realm. The grandmother lives alone, far away, in a secluded place. The grandmother represents knowledge, and also fate for the little girl: one day she will be a mother, and then a grandmother. The wolf wants to get there and get it all: the girl, the goodies, and the grandma. By getting away with the grandmother, he also symbolically tampers with the girl’s future: aka, being seduced/bedded (and not married), she will never be a wise, old, respected lady one day. As for Rey, this is not too far off. Her basket of goodies is short round BB8 which holds information. Information that is of importance to Leia. And which can lead to an old, wise... Granny Luke? living alone in a far away, secluded place... And who in a way represents a potential future for Rey, being the Last Jedi. Kylo also wants to get there. So just as in the tale, there is a potential race towards Luke’s place. And by getting the girl, Kylo is also tampering with her future: dark Side or Light Side Rey?

ANGELA CARTER’S SHORT STORIES

3 tales deal more specifically with wolves in Carter’s The Bloody Chamber : “The Werewolf”, “The Company of Wolves”, and “Wolf Alice”. I am just going to undeline a few elements that can resonate with what we have seen in the ST so far.

“The Werewolf”: the little girl gets attacked on her way to see her grandmother. She defends herself and cuts off the forepaw of the wolf. The paw turns out into a human hand. When she finally gets to her grandmother she finds her really sick and feverish, and understands that the wolf was actually her grandmother. She kills her and takes her place in the house. For that one, I want to underline the idea that monsters can hide under familiar faces, or that something that was deemed monstrous can reveal a human side. Depending on what side you are looking at it. That was the point of the ST in the cross flashbacks that tell us about Luke and Kylo. The monster gets humanized, and we get to see something unattractive and upsetting about someone who had all our trust. I am not saying that Luke is a monster, but that he potentially could have done something monstrous, which it turns out he did, because this fleeting moment turned Ben into a monster. And on the other hand, Rey gets to see Ben the man under Kylo the monster. Special bonus to the Skywalker special in the Werewolf story: the cut off hand. And in the end, Rey is indeed the one in Luke’s stead.

“The Company of Wolves”:  different folk tales and folklore about wolves and werewolves...  I have underlined that one for you: “Before he can become a wolf, the lycanthrope strips stark naked. If you spy a naked man among the pines, you must run as if the Devil were after you”. It reminded me of half naked Kylo. And then the story of the girl.This description of the girl:

She stands and moves within the invisible pentacle of her own virginity. She is an unbroken egg; she is a sealed vessel; she has inside her a magic space the entrance of which is shut tight with a plug of membrane; she is a closed system; she does not know how to shiver. She has a knife and she is afraid of nothing.

Some of these images of virginity (and virginity consumated and broken) we have seen played out on the screen: from the veil covering the MF on Jakku, the eggs on Ahch-To, the curtains on the Supremacy, to the cave on Crait... In Carter’s story, the girl is not a little girl, she is described as a pubescent, or verge of pubescence, girl, barely formed. She meets a young man in the woods who holds a reamarkable object, “a compass”. It’s nature versus culture. He bets her a kiss that he can get to Grandma before she does. The girl will take her time, she wants to lose that one. In the meantime, the man does away with the grandmother, but not before stripping naked and showing his genitals (”His genitals, huge.Ah! huge!”). When the girl walks in, she is no fool. She understands fast enough. She starts by showing compassion to the lot of wolves howling in the cold night. Then she starts shedding her clothes she “took off her scarlet shawl, the colour of poppies, the colour of sacrifices, the colour of her menses, and since her fear did her no good, she ceased to be afraid”. As the man talks about eating her, she starts laughing: “she knew she was nobody’s meat”, and she joins him in bed. The last line sees her sleeping sound and sweet “in granny’s bed, between the paws of the tender wolf”. Which reminds me of Isaiah “the wolf shall dwell with the lamb” and the coming back of a Golden Age.

“Wolf Alice”. That one is about two awakenings. On the one hand we have a young girl who was suckled by wolves and is found by nuns. Desperate to fully civilize her, they deliver us to the house of The Duke, who is some kind of a monster. You think he is a vampire at first, since he has no reflection in the mirror , then some kind of monster feasting on corpses. But he turns out to be a werewold at the end of the story. So the two creatures are actually very much alike. There were a lot of elements there that reminded me of a particularly twisted AU Reylo, to be honest. To begin with, their circumstances: she is a nobody, without any family, barely a first name, and he is a Duke, with a castle and countless trinkets from the past. For instance, Alice’s description:

Like, the wild beasts, she lives without a future. She inhabits only the present tense, a fugue of the continuous, a world of sensual immediacy as without hope as it is without despair.

It could fit Rey on Jakku, marking down each day. She does not have any plans beyond today. She is caught in a stasis.The Duke is constantly described by his hunger: “huge, inconsolable, rapacious eyes. His eyes see only appetite. These eyes open to devour the world in which he sees, nowhere, a reflection of himself”. That also reminded me of Kylo’s need to cover his face and his body in TFA, as if he wanted to disappear. They never interact with each other. The castle is referred to as “the den where she and the Duke inhabited their separate solitudes”. Alice changes, though, as she discovers the passing of time through her menses, and her reflection in a mirror. The mirror scenes can also evoke Rey’s experience on Ahch-To... At first Alice is very happy about finding a girl in the mirror because she thinks she has made a friend, that she has a companion to share experiences with... After a while, she ends up understanding that this companion is “no more than a particularly ingenious variety of the shadow she cast on sunlit grass”. With this knowledge, she puts on a wedding dress that she found in the castle and starts roaming outside. Her wanderings take her to the graveyard where the Duke is having a feast, and where he is hunted by an angry mob who manages to wound him. That’s when Alice (in full bride attire) and him interact, and that seeing him in pain, she nurses him back to life.

Poor, wounded thing... locked half and half between such strange states, an aborted transformation, an incomplete mystery, now he lies writhing on his black bed in the room like a Mycenaean tomb, howls like a wolf with his foot in a trap or a woman in labour, and bleeds.

The whole beginning could have been written for Kylo. And the symbolism at the end is clear rebirth. As she gently licks his face. Where there was nothing in the mirror, gradually appears the face of the Duke under her ministrations:

the prey caught in its own fishing net, then in firmer yet still shadowed outline until at least as vivid as real life itself, as brought into being by her soft, moist, gentle tongue, finally, the face of the Duke.

It sure reads like some smutty AU fanfic... And not far from Rey’s own experiences and interactions with Kylo. Two solitudes that meet. The girl so hopeful to find what she wanted to see in a mirror and finally crying when she understands it was all a lie, a shadow, and not what she wanted. And who turns to another solitary person right afterward, who may be the only person in the world to understand what she goes through. A creature that is caught between two states. A monster tracked down and wounded, whose human face she is alone able to reveal.... Ummm...

THE COMPANY OF WOLVES: CINEMATIC PARALLELS

Though Neil Jordan’s adaptation of Carter’s tales is contemporary to other fairy 80′s classics such as Labyrinth, Legend, The Neverending Story  or Dark Crystal, that one was never aimed at children. In an article from Film Ireland, this movie is best described as

more influenced by filmmakers like Jean Cocteau (Beauty and the Beast) and 1970’s Parisian pornographic art movies that embedded fairy tales with a salacious twist. The result is a film drenched in sensuality, richer than chocolate cake, and sporting enough themes and allegory to keep film students occupied indefinitely.

Neil Jordan worked with Carter herself to write the script for this movie. And, interestingly, most of the crew for the movie came from the Star Wars movies... The story goes like this: in a house in the country, a young girl is sleeping in her bedroom, dreaming, and visibly upset. She has an elder sister who doesn’t like her, and parents who are at a loss about her behaviour. In her dreams, the girl imagines she is a peasant girl from an XVIIIth century village, plagued by wolf attacks. Her elder sister gets conveniently killed at the beginning of the story. The girl spends most of her time with her grandmother (Angela Lansbury), some kind of a witch/fairy godmother, who knits her a wonderful red coat, and who warns her about men and wolves. Most of the stories do come from Carter’s tales but are fleshed out. The girl, who doesn’t have a name in the original story, becomes Rosaleen. She also has a suitor in a village boy... But then one day she meets a strange man in the forest and then...

There are indeed many interesting parallels to draw between Jordan’s movie and what we have seen so far in the ST, as far as Rey’s journey is concerned. The Company of Wolves is supposed to be a journey after all, an experience, what Film Ireland superbly calls “ a timeless and psychedelic daydream/nightmare, undulating and shifting”, that is supposed to reflect a young girl’s fantasies and fears as she is on the cusp of womanhood. This is about transformation, and, as the girl is portrayed sleeping most of the movie until the end, about an awakening. Which is not too far off from what Rey is experiencing, albeit in a galaxy far far away, and in a totally different genre. But, it would not be smart to overlook the implications of the title for the first installment: The Force Awakens. We know, from Snoke and Kylo’s conversation in TFA, and from Rey’s conversation with Luke in TLJ, that it is not so much about the Force Awakening (did it ever sleep?); but about someone awakening within/to the Force. And who else but Rey has been awakened? “Something inside of me has always been there... But now it’s awake.  And I'm afraid. I don't know what it is or what to do with it. And I need help. “ Which could honestly be uttered by any teenage girl (granted, boys too) as she experiences puberty... The novelizations insist on Rey’s dreams and nightmares, something we unfortunately never got onscreen...

There are more parallels to draw between Rosaleen and Rey. Rey, like Rosaleen, is the girl with the rose. The wilted flower in her AT-AT was a subliminal call to the Beast’s magic rose in Disney. White roses, red roses, are not just emblems of love, they also represent female sexuality, and female blood.

They both are fighters. Rosaleen carries a knife with her into the forest. And when her grandmother tells her a story that ends with a husband beating his wife, Rosaleen’s reaction evokes Rey: “I'd never let a man strike me!”. Her meeting with the wolf/man is also interesting to compare with Rey and Kylo. In Carter’s story, the man is described as a hunter, but in the movie he is turned into a rich man, a marquis. There is a class divide that did not exist in the short story. When she finally quizzes him about what he really is, whether he is a man or a wolf, his answer is that he doesn’t belong in one or another, that he belongs to both. Something that is further echoed by the Priest who finds the wolf girl and wonders whether she is “God’s Work” or the Devil’s, and finally decides it is better to show compassion to a suffering creature. Like Rey, Rosaleen ponders about the nature of her adversary, and decides first on hurting him: she shoots him after stealing his own gun (like someone we know who got somebody’s saber and struck thet somebody down). But then, when she sees him in pain and crying, she offers her compassion and realizes they are not so different. Her mother had warned her that there was also a beast in women’s hearts, so the ending shows Rosaleen turned into a wolf, apparently from her own free will. She chose to become the man’s companion. Much like our characters in TLJ who realize they are more connected than they thought, and Rey seeing Kylo differently.

I would like to offer further parallels in themes or scenes between the two movies:

Before meeting the wolf man, the girl has a suitor: a boy she met in her village. She is not romantically interested... and sees him more as a friend.

Meeting in a snow forest, both armed

Blood on the snow.... This classical Snow White reference is also a symbol for loss of virginity or first period... In both movies, the guys are the ones “bleeding” the snow... Can’t get more obvious than that...

The “duel” involves a “red moon”... Before the girl gets inside Granny’s house, the moon turns red, and looks like an eye. Starkiller base has this reddish eye, and it explodes (turns red) after their fight...

Both women wound the wolf... Rosaleen shoots at the wolf and wounds him in the shoulder. Rey cuts Kylo’s face and part of his chest.

High waisted pants...

Do you like subtle phallic symbols? (Remember that in Carter’s short story, he was showing his huge genitals... Well, that’s the best they could do... LOL)

And more of that...

From hunter/prey dynamic:

To real intimacy by the firelight, in “Granny’s House”... Luke is the “Granny” of the story...

The compass... It is the object that the hunter shows the girl as a lure. Compass is a song in Rey’s spotify playlist, and we have seen a compass in Luke’s hut.

The mirror, the eggs, and the nest.... The need to breed. Proof that it is all linked and that Ahch-To was indeed sex-ed class.

A lot of points can be made between Luke and the grandmother. If, unlike Luke, the grandmother is more than willing to teach the girl, they both have magic skills. She turns out to be a (good) witch. The girl loves her grandmother and believes all her stories to be the truth, but her mother warns her at one point about the grandmother’s biased view of the world. Luke’s views also turn out to be partial, and the truth slightly twisted. During one of her strolls, the grandmother encounters a snake...

Remember Luke on Dagobah?

When the wolf faces the grandmother, he shows up with blood on his mouth, implying that he has “enjoyed” Rosaleen. The grandmother asks what he did with her. The wolf: “Nothing she didn’t want”. We find these two ideas first in the smut hut when Luke is shocked to discover that Rey has allowed herself to get this close to Kylo, and then when Kylo tells Luke that he will destroy Rey...  Also, if the wolf kills the grandmother, no blood is shed. When the wolf attacks the grandmother, she breaks as if she were a doll. She is thus a simulacrum: she was not a real person, she was the image of a person. Just like Kylo unable to kill Luke because he is just an image projected from across the galaxy. I think this is a very intriguing point. The point here is to shatter illusions, dreams, and fantasies. The girl in The Company of Wolves is sleeping next to a horror book called “The Shattered Dream”.

Other possible parallel? The pack!

The Snow White references and subversion. From this:

To this:

I was also interested in the little scene when the grandmother explains how the Devil meets a young man in the wolf and gives him the potion that turns him into a wolf. This reminded me of how Snoke ensnared and turned Kylo... Heck, for that matter, Snoke is even like a very grotesque Terence Stamp!

Oh, and the Hamlet scene...

And yes, I can definitely see some parallelisms in the potential ending as well with Rey running away with Kylo... Look at this poster for the French DVD, which fuses the face of Rosaleen with the wolf and compare it with the TFA poster where Rey and Kylo merge their weapons (prelude to sex, right?) and complete each other, as well as the concept art in Art of The Last Jedi that merged their faces for Ahch-To:

The point is not to say that the writers thought of this movie or this set of story to create the ST. Maybe they did, but that doesn’t really matter, anyways. The many similarities, in my view, are mainly due to the fact that both stories tap into similar themes. The coming of age of a girl, the fears and fantasies stemming from the desire for the other, the ambivalence between disgust and attraction about sexuality, the fear of losing oneself and one’s identity (the path, the compass, the metamorphosis). Again, this is a tale as old as time. Which is why it has so much appeal and resonates into our psyche. Maybe this will never be the main event for many people who will just enjoy the cool battles and special effects. Maybe it is this extra depth that irks the discontented fanboys, because, though they don’t fully see it, they still understand that something else is at play there... But this is why this movie will endure the test of time as a story. Themewise, it has universal SEX appeal.

[hopeless-scar]

Bullying

   “Bullying” is a subject that most of us would first think of when mentioning school and especially high school. You have four years to prepare yourself for university, college or in general, life. Instead of thinking that those years should only be about focusing on passing and having good grades to get to the college that you want or whatever you might decide after taking or not taking that gap year touring Europe, many things might happen that will hold you down and won’t let you see nor live the good things.

     I thought all that “mean girls” vibes were only in basic american movies. All movies can be real if the people want to experience having an interesting life by making others miserable with theirs. I’m not going to depress the ones that didn’t get bullied but I’m discussing an important issue that should be discussed. High school can be a great place, like I said if the people didn’t want attention and just made it peaceful for others, I have met true friends in my junior year of high school and we stayed in the same school for one year and then we all went to our separate ways but we still talk to each other almost everyday for the last 3 years. Before I met these amazing human beings I was a very weak unstable person who was crying for help, desperate and lonely, I was trying to talk to everyone and be friends with every kid that I pass by, I used to laugh at literally anything just to not make the other person feel unheard or not interesting enough to “fit in”. 

“FIT IN” is a term made by a group of people with social problems, seemed like they couldn’t communicate with everyone else in the art or chess club. So instead of getting out of their comfort zone, they decided to make everyone uncomfortable with their talents and individualities and also made them hallucinate that they should act like that group with lack of social interactions so they can “fit in”. 

    I’ve never “fitted in”, I’ve never felt like I was like the rest of the kids in kindergarten or in any educational level, I was interested in different TV shows like “Cow and Chicken” and “That’s So Raven”, adding that “Nat Geo Wild” was an everyday must watch before heading to sleep ( AKA 8 pm). I knew I was different but it was fine. Everything was fine back then but later you grow up and some of us experience life sooner than others. People would say that “life will throw bricks at you” does it though? people you meet down the lane called life are the ones who either choose to be kind and nice or nut-heads who suffer from an identity crisis. I’ve been through this phase called bullying twice, the first time started in 4th grade till 8th grade ( basically it stopped after moving to another school ). I’m not specifying that bullying is being harassed by someone in school, it can happen anywhere. I started to gain weight after moving to my dad’s place. I’ve been called fat and “don’t sit on it, you will break it “ saying that to a 10-12 year old girl/boy would break her/him. I’ve felt safe because I was with the people that should protect me but that doesn’t mean you can’t be sexually assaulted by someone who shouldn’t be hurting you in any kind of way.  All the mothers and fathers please be careful of who your kids are spending time with no matter if it’s a relative or not. 

Amal Bel Hasa, Chief of the Compliance and Resolution Commission at the Knowledge and Human Development Authority in Dubai, said ”Bullying can have serious long-term effects on the children involved. Schools and parents have a responsibility to prevent it from happening and to ensure its quick resolution. By issuing a set policy, parents and schools will have a greater understanding of how to identify and resolve the problem.” Earlier this year an article was published in The Sun about the suicide of a 15 year old girl back in December 2015. Cassidy Trevan went through bullying which led her to take her own life. She got attacked on social media and got slapped across the face once or twice, then got gang raped at only 13 years of age. Cassidy was taken from her mother and left lonely. Some of her words were “If you are lucky enough to have children of your own, remember what you did to my precious only baby, and imagine how you’d feel if someone did that to your baby.”

   The first day of February, 2017 is when people had the “courage” to attack me and insult me online in the very common social web “Twitter”. It was unexpected considering that I’ve never been attacked in any of my high school years. That time was different. I had true friends that made me discover who I really am and how strong I am. Don’t underestimate the teens who aren’t 100% there for you because they can be the people who would give birth to the rumours that would make everyone turn against you. A “friend “ can make you look like someone who’s thirsty for attention. The “nice” kid can make you look like a psychopath who’s desperate for their “friendship”. All that unnecessary things that happened didn’t make me feel like jumping off a cliff.     

     Just after that incident happened, a newly popular series aired called “13 Reasons Why”. The new Netflix show delivered a very important message in a pack of realistic scenes that are not too far from happening and none of us are distant from having the chances of experiencing them. I felt the need to cut my hair short after being attacked in social media, and I guess it was a shock to the people that Hannah did that too. This made those people realise what type of people they represent in the stories or in this case, in this series. If you didn’t get bullied then you know someone who has. Don’t let them enjoy winning, you are strong to shut them down. We all can stick together to stop this from happening. Hannah or anyone who has committed suicide or decided to end their life wasn’t weak but they couldn’t find the love to stay. Let’s spread love. 

[heatherannehogan]

the lesbophobia thing

Lesbophobia is real. It's the prejudice, bigotry, and oppression that exists at the intersection of homophobia and misogyny. Let me say it again: Lesbophobia is real. Hate for lesbians is real.

However, it is essential to acknowledge and understand that the term lesbophobia has been co-opted by a loud and growing contingent of LGBTQ women in communities that share troubling ties and ideology with factions that exist inside the alt-right movement — worse, the dangerous dogma that's attaching itself to word the lesbophobia has found a new home at AfterEllen.

I first encountered the word lesbophobia in response to the post I wrote called Queer Women Take Over The 2016 Emmys. Her Story got a revolutionary nod for Outstanding Short Form. Kate McKinnon took home a trophy for Saturday Night Live. Sarah Paulson won for The People vs. O.J. Simpson. And Jill Soloway scored another victory for Transparent. On social media there was a small outcry that I hadn't chosen the headline "Lesbians Take Over the 2016 Emmys," despite the fact that Kate McKinnon was the only winner who explicitly identifies as a lesbian. (In fact, Sarah Paulson is on record saying, "I refuse to give any kind of label just to satisfy what people need.") The reasons the handful of dissenters gave for my decision to call the Emmys queer was that I am a lesbophobe, an espouser and executor of lesbophobia.

To be very honest with you, I shrugged it off. The most unwinnable battle we have at Autostraddle is labeling LGBTQ people in a way that satisfies everyone. It's such a constant struggle, we laid out an explanation about labels in our official comment policy. Recently on a Pop Culture Fix, I wrote about the new queer characters coming to The Good Wife spin-off. One of them will be a lesbian, according to the show's writers; the other's sexuality has not been labeled. So, I said, "The Good Wife spin-off will prominently feature two lesbian, bisexual, gay, homosexual, or otherwise queer-identified women." Just to cover all my bases because it was almost Christmas and I was tired and I didn't want to have to argue about labels. And yet, the cries of lesbophobia came in again. I got a couple of emails, a dozen or so tweets. Essentially: "Lesbian is not a dirty word! Saying queer is lesbophobic!"

So, on December 26, I tweeted something I think is a true, fair, and accurate analogy:

Yelling "lesbophobia!" when someone says "queer" is like yelling "war on Christmas!" when someone says "happy holidays." Come on, y'all.

A couple of days later, AfterEllen's official Twitter tweeted at me and said: "@theheatherhogan oh, agreed. It's like yelling "biphobia!" and "transphobia!" when someone says lesbian."

To which beloved Autostraddle cartoonist Dickens replied:

"AfterEllen is three weeks shy of transforming their website into an online support group for victims of wyt lesbian genocide. This is honestly the most ridiculously entitled white lesbian coated petrified bullshit I have seen in a long time. And if you don't think white supremacy has reached out its dirty little fingers and touched a few groups of marginalized white folks, well. Keep an eye on their feed here and there. Keep an eye on their former writers. They aren't just trying to Make Lesbianism Great Again… They are asserting their strength. They are erasing the visibility of the defectors. They are sliding their salty little asses into spaces and feeds where they must know they are clearly not wanted or cared for. I was never a fan of AE but this new image they're building for themselves is a little too Nazi-adjacent for my galaxy Blaaaack aaaass."

Dickens was, of course, correct. And her point was proven once again the very next day when an article blasted out to the 125,000 followers of AfterEllen's official, verified Twitter account cried: “Lesbian Spaces Are Still Needed, No Matter What the Queer Movement Says". It suggests that trans women and bisexual women's desire to be included in queer women's spaces is to blame for the decline of lesbian-specific spaces, which lesbians need to stay safe from trans and bisexual women.

That kind of rallying cry feels very much like the "Save Our White Neighborhoods" rallying cry of the alt-right, so I went on a deeper dive to try to find the origins of what I called "the lesbophobia movement" on Twitter. And what I found was more horrifying than I ever imagined.

A few weeks ago AfterEllen — which everyone presumed dead after the company that owns it effectively fired everyone, including longtime editor in chief Trish Bendix — announced it had acquired a new editor named Memoree Joelle. In October, Joelle, tweeted a Change.org petition that she'd signed called Take the L Out of LGBT. The petition is a direct response to a previously failed petition that called for GLAAD, the Human Rights Campaign, HuffPo Voices, The Advocate, etc. to Drop The T from LGBT. The most popular supporter of the petition is a guy you might know called Milo Yiannopoulos. He signed it, tweeted about it, and dedicated 3,000 words to it in a post on Breitbart. Thanks to Milo's urging, Matthew Hopkins, one of the main perpetrators of Gamergate, wrote a post called "Why #GamerGate Should Help the ‘Drop the T’ Campaign" on his personal blog. Hopkins called it "one of the most politically important campaigns of our generation."

In addition to signing and tweeting about the petition, Joelle commented her approval. When former AfterEllen writer Elaine Atwell brought Joelle's support of the petition to light, Joelle's comments disappeared from the petition, and so did Elaine's byline from the hundreds of articles she wrote over the last five years at AfterEllen.

The comments on the Change.org petition mention lesbophobia multiple times and equate it with trans activism, as do the subreddits that discussed Joelle's contribution to the petition. "Part of lesbophobia is hating us for our same-sex attraction, but another very big part of it is hating us for our rejection of men," one user wrote on /r/GenderCritical/. (Trans women are almost always referred to as men on this particular subreddit.) Another Redditor on /r/actuallesbians decried the "male entitlement and lesbophobia" of protesting the petition. "The moment we talk about your rape culture or your male violence we're 'transphobic' or 'biphobic.'" (The men in this comment are actually trans women and "rape culture" refers to the constantly espoused idea in TERF communities that trans women are male predators.) The lesbophobia tag on the blog GenderTrender is a deeply disturbing trip down an anti-trans rabbit hole. The lesbophobia tag on the website 4th Wave Now is horrifying; it equates allowing trans kids/teens to come out and live openly as their true gender with child abuse, ideas that are — again — shared with Breitbart and Milo Yiannopoulos. Reddit and Tumblr are absolutely flush with lesbians using the word "lesbophobia" to back up the ideas presented in these "Drop the T"/"The L Is Leaving" petitions.

These spaces that use the word "lesbophobia" to attack trans and bi women or people who use the word queer share more than than an ideology with Breitbart. You'll find them saying things like "trans women want to colonize the lesbian community." You'll find them using the phrase "SJW" (meaning Social Justice Warrior), a pejorative term coined by the Men's Rights Activist movement. And you'll find a lot of talk about how the correct "biology" is the thing that allows people access to the protections of the majority. And lots and lots and lots and lots of just truly sickening propaganda leveled at trans and bi women. It's very much about creating an in-group and scapegoating an out-group through tried and true tactics that have been — I'm sorry — utilized by Fox News and the alt-right for years.

I wrote about these things on Twitter, and you can read Dickens further unpacking them here and here. (You should read that last thread before you jump in here and call her "my black friend.")

Look, we didn't just wake up one day with an openly racist, openly sexist, openly xenophobic, openly ableist, openly anti-semitic president in the White House, appointing the leader of the most dangerous white supremacist website in history to his top advisor position. We watched blatant and unabashed white supremacist language and ideas slowly take over the movement from the inside. We watched the most powerful scapegoat the most vulnerable. We watched Fox News make heroes out of the white men who murdered unarmed black children and terrify people with their whole War on Christmas bullshit and equate all Muslims with terrorists. A Nazi didn't walk into the West Wing and have a seat; the slow creep of white supremacy laid the path for him.

Vox did a fascinating interview with former conservative talk show host Charlie Sykes earlier this year. He quit over Trump. But the whole interview is him agonizing about how, to him, the GOP had always been about fiscal conservatism and states rights and he believed in that ideological purity so deeply that he fooled himself into believing that's what the GOP was about to everybody, despite the fact that he saw the white supremacy and fascism slowly gaining power and momentum until it took over.

To realize, first of all, that you’re part of a movement that was not the movement you thought it was, that you’re aligned with people that you didn’t really understand you’re aligned with, and to realize that everything that you thought about the conservative intellectual infrastructure was really piecrust thin. You thought you had this big principled movement and then suddenly along comes Donald Trump and you realize that it was just was just the pastry on top. So I think disorienting is a great term. Disillusioning is not too strong either.

To me, what we're talking about with lesbophobia is a similar thing. Is lesbophobia a term some lesbians have rallied around to protest the prejudice and bigotry that exist at the intersection of homophobia and misogyny? Yes, of course. Absolutely. HOWEVER. I had to go searching for people using the word lesbophobia like that because my entire experience with the way the word kept popping up in my timeline and in my comments and in the comments sections of other websites was to decry the use of the word queer and to espouse anti-trans and anti-bi ideology. And that includes every single person who landed in my mentions on Twitter when I started talking about this. I did not click on a single profile without finding anti-trans, anti-bi language; or ask a single person if they believe trans women are women and have them say yes.

If you are a woman who is using the word lesbophobia to NOT do those things, and you're more angry at me for pointing out that it's happening than you are at anti-trans/anti-bi people who have hijacked its meaning, I ... I truly don't understand. What's happening at AfterEllen is terrifying me. Maybe the website is technically dead, but it still has clout and power and it's using it to push some really dangerous ideas about lesbian exclusivity, and those ideas are shared by a very loud group of people who use the word "lesbophobia" on their blogs, social media, Reddit, etc. to vilify the people (like me) who stand against them.

I don't want to cause anyone pain. I don't want to make anyone feel unsafe or unloved or unaccepted. I DO NOT BELIEVE LESBIANS ARE NAZIS. I AM A LESBIAN. If you truly think that's what I was saying when I unpacked these ideas on Twitter, I'm sorry. It was not my intention.

I do think, however, that it's imperative for you to open your eyes to how the word lesbophobia is being used to persecute and oppress trans and bi women in very vocal and influential spaces that have direct ties in ideology and language with the alt-right.

[vanceoliver]

Can Bacterial Vaginosis Cause Night Sweats Cheap And Easy Cool Tips

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There are several over the other microorganisms multiply and outnumbers the good ones, and BV happens when your vagina's pH levels stay normal and healthy bacteria.Among the typical symptoms of BV start showing up.But that's not what you put into finding a cure, but just to name a few.I am no gynecologist, I only know what the causes are linked to the overgrowth of bacteria, then how can it affects the vagina back to you by your physician can property diagnose BV from toilet seats, bedding, or swimming pools, however it is always an excellent bacterial vaginosis occurred.It is always a symptom of vaginal ailments naturally.

Try switching to an overgrowth of bad bacteria in our bodies are incredibly complicated, requiring a level teaspoon of the times, the most popular effective home remedy for bacterial vaginosis.Bacterial vaginosis occurs due to the physician do not eliminate the root cause, which is taken by mouth in the vagina being washed away.You may incorporate more pieces of garlic and crush it.In order to identify these organisms is naturally present within the vagina into acetic acid.The disease is either white or yellow that is caused by an overgrowth of bad bacteria.

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The sooner you will find treatment options intended for Bacterial Vaginosis during pregnancy.This is the normal vagina pH balance inside the body becomes generally out of control again and again especially when people start to feel itchy, swelling, while having sex.Now although you must immediately consult a few basic tips that can upset the natural environment of the doctors and other medical professionals the infection is the number of online research on this article.Maintaining a healthy diet, as this can often be confused with a case of BV, the normal functioning of the causes and symptoms whatsoever. You will probably be that many sufferers find that claims to be self-cleaning, an at home could lead to a recurrence of this condition are present.

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Bacterial Vaginosis In The Mouth

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[arplis]

Arplis - News: When Your Rape Doesnt Count

Something about the knock at the front door made Mary-Scott Hunter think a neighbor was in trouble. She had just arrived home from her job at a corporate training company, and she was mulling over an earlier fight with her girlfriend, but the sound jolted her out of it: five loud, fast raps. She could see two men looming through the window, dressed in oddly formal clothing. When she cracked the door, they identified themselves: a Minneapolis police officer and an FBI agent.

Oh shit, Hunter thought. What have I done wrong? She wasnt sure if she should open the door. She didnt trust cops all that much. She let them in but remained standing, uncertain, as they settled into her living room.

The men asked Hunter if she had been raped in 1987. Yes, she said.

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They told her they had identified the stranger whod broken into her house when she was 21 years old and attacked her in the hallway outside her bedroom. The suspects name was Darrell Rea. After 31 years, he was in custody.

First came the shock. Then reliefand, finally, happiness.

Seriously? she asked.

Sergeant Chris Karakostas, a homicide investigator at the Minneapolis Police Department, assured her it was true. He asked her if she wanted to sit down, so she did, and she listened.

From the perspective of police, Hunter had done everything right back in 1987. Shed immediately called the cops, allowed a nurse to collect a rape kit, and recounted the attack in painful detail during multiple police interviews. But the rape had taken place four years before the state forensics lab began testing DNA, and other leads went nowhere. For decades, Hunter lived with the uncertainty of whether her rapist was still out there.

Yet while Hunters case went dormant, Rea came under suspicion for a slew of other crimes. Police came to believe that the former apartment building caretaker could be linked to a number of sexual assault, physical assault, murder, and missing person cases, according to a criminal complaint. But he was never convicted of serious charges.

Theres a lot of women out there that really dont have some justice for what happened to them, says Sergeant Chris Karakostas.

Then, in 2013, the state crime lab matched DNA from Rea, by then in his late 50s, to the 1983 murder of a 17-year-old, Lorri Mesedahl, who appeared to have been raped before she was beaten to death near railroad tracks in north Minneapolis. But because the crime was so old, many witnesses were dead, and prosecutors wanted more than the DNA match from the victims body to charge Rea. So investigators ramped up their testing of the citys old rape kits. Thats when a hit came back for Hunters 1987 attack.

By the time the investigators told Hunter about Rea in March 2018, she had given up hope the case would ever be solved. I stopped fantasizing about this guy getting caught a long, long time ago, she tells me.

Today, Hunters experiencethe knock at the door, the detective bearing unexpected newsis becoming less of an extraordinary occurrence. After decades of shelving untested rape kits and otherwise mishandling many reports of sexual assault, police departments are now making progress on long-unsolved rape investigationsdue to unprecedented political will, new investigative techniques, and increased funding for DNA analysis.

In Michigan, for instance, an effort to test about 10,000 rape kits since 2009 led to the identification of at least 833 suspects who could be linked to multiple sex crimes. A state-funded effort to test old rape kits and hire new investigators and prosecutors in Cleveland has produced about 370 convictions since 2013. And a $38 million program created by the Manhattan district attorneys office paid for the testing of 55,000 rape kits across the country from 2015 to 2018nearly eliminating the pileup of untested kits in seven states. More than 20 states have recently passed laws requiring rape kit testing, audits of untested evidence, or systems for survivors to keep track of their kits, according to the Joyful Heart Foundation, an organization that advocates for sexual assault survivors. Meanwhile, police departments are rapidly adopting new approaches to solve sexual assaults, including genetic genealogya technique that identifies offenders by comparing crime scene DNA to consumer genetic profiles stored in public, online databases.

Even when these cold cases are solved, the legal system still prevents some survivors from getting justice. As Karakostas explained to Hunter as he sat on her couch, the window for prosecutors to press charges against Rea for her rape had long passed. At the time the attack occurred in 1987, Minnesotas statute of limitations for criminal sexual offenses involving adult victims was just three years.

Statutes of limitations are meant to protect defendants from false charges based on faded memory or degraded evidence. But they can also be a way for rapiststo remain free in a criminal justice system that convicts assailants of a felony in just 5 out of every 1,000 rapes, according to estimates from the antisexual violence organization RAINN. Over the past couple of decades, often following cultural upheavals like the Catholic child abuse scandal and the #MeToo movement, activists have fought to abolish or lengthen statutes of limitations, with mixed success.

Currently, at least seven states have no statute of limitations for any felony sexual offense. Dozens, including Minnesota, have lengthened the time given to prosecutors to bring charges, or added exemptions for cases with DNA evidence. Still, these reforms dont help survivors like Hunter, whose case expired before thenew lawstook effect.

The statute of limitations basically says, after X amount of years, the crime and its impact dont matter anymore.

But, as in most states, there is no statute of limitations for murder in Minnesota. So after Hennepin County prosecutors charged Rea with killing Lorri Mesedahl, they hoped Hunter would play a role in putting him away. Similarities between the attacks might bolster the prosecutors case. Before he left Hunters living room that evening in March, Karakostas asked if she would help.

Hunter instantly agreed. Taking part in the murder trial could be a way to recover some of the feeling of control wrested from her three decades prior. Shed never really forgiven herself for giving up that control, even though there was nothing to forgive; even though she knew, intellectually, that the rape was not her fault. The idea of being able to prosecuteor be involved in a prosecutionwas part of that want to be able to do something positive, to enact a result, Hunter, whos now 54, tellsme.

She pauses for a moment. Dude should pay, she adds.

The investigation that led officers to Hunters front door was long and circuitous. Minneapolis police had been looking into Darrell Rea for more than 40 years, slowly uncovering a series of women and girls they believe suffered at his hands: a terrified child, a troubled teenager, a marginalized sex worker. Each case proceeded in fits and starts, hindered by problems common to sexual violence investigationswitnesses dropping out, police bias against certain types of victims, and expiring statutes of limitations. (Through his lawyer, Rea broadly denied the criminal accusations against him and declined to answer specific questions or comment further on the allegations detailed in this article.)

In 1990, the Minneapolis Police Department got the call that would eventually prove crucial in bringing Rea to justice. Seventeen-year-old Victoria Owczynskyor Vicky O, as police investigators have long called herwas reported missing after disappearing on August 26, 1990. In a photograph circulated in a missing person bulletin, she smiles broadly, wearing a baggy sweatshirt and big earrings; permed, dark hair frames her face in a cloud.

According to retired Minneapolis Police Sergeant Tim Opdyke, who later picked up the investigation, the first sergeant assigned to Owczynskys case believed maybe she disappeared voluntarily on her own, he says. You know, 17 years old. She just ran away. But it was hard to square that with the fact that Owczynsky had left behind her money and cigarettesan unlikely choice for a teenager planning to skip town.

Naomie Rondo, 45, says her stepfather Darrell Rea abused her when she was a child.

At the time she disappeared, shed been staying with a friend, Naomie Rondo, in northeast Minneapolis. Rondo was one of Reas two stepdaughters. A neighbor told a police officer he had seen Owczynsky sitting in Reas pickup truck on the day she vanished.

By this point, Rea was not a stranger to police. In 1977, he had been accused of raping a woman after picking her up along Minneapolis Lake Street. Police found the woman covered in blood, crawling back toward the road; she later told them she had escaped by fighting off her attacker, who had a large knife, with a glass Coke bottle she found on the car floor. Rea was identified and tried for first-degree criminal sexual conduct and aggravated assault. But after he argued that the intercourse was consensual, a jury acquitted him of those charges and convicted him only for simple assault, landing him in jail for a short time.

About 11 years later, police got a report that Rea was abusing his stepdaughters. Rondo,now 45,says Rea would fondle her while washing her or tickling her, or put a hand down her pants while she was sleeping. At least once, he locked her out of the room and assaulted her older sister, Monique Stevens, while Rondo pounded on the door, crying. Stevens, now 48, has a vivid memory of looking at her second grade teacher and wondering if she should tell her how Rea pressed his body onto hers. I better not, she thought. She didnt tell anyone for years while Rea was entering her room at night, progressing from fondling her to raping her, punching, choking, and hitting her head against the bed frame. She would drink coffee at night to stay awake. Stevens says she believed that if she let the abuse happen, Rea wouldnt hurt her mother or siblings; that if she was quiet, her family could stay together. Only when Rondo reported the abuse to her school in the late 1980s did police get involved.

But after investigators questioned the girls, the family stopped cooperating with law enforcement, according to Karakostas. While prosecutors can press child sex abuse charges without the consent of a parent or guardian, they must believe they can meet the legal burden of proof to move forward. Once the family pulled out, neither of the two Hennepin County prosecutors who reviewed the case would bring charges.

Stevens says she used to babysit Owczynsky, who was a few years younger and often stayed at their house. She says Owczynsky was the only person who directly witnessed Rea raping her. Police working the Vicky O missing person case searched Reas home and car in 1990. When officers interviewed Rea, he denied that Owczynsky had gotten in the truck with him, Karakostas says. They never found enough evidence to arrest him for the girls disappearance.

But over the years, the Vicky O case would bring Rea under the police departments scrutiny time and time again. More than a year after her disappearance, Sergeant Opdyke and his partner, Sergeant Phil Hogquist, picked up the Owczynsky file from a box of unsolved cases. They, too, became fixated on Rea, who was by then in his late 30s, living and working as a caretaker in a shabby northeast Minneapolis apartment building. When they brought him in for questioning, Opdyke remembers thinking Rea was unnaturally calm under stress, and that he was using the interview to get information from the investigators. By the time the interview was over, I was flat-out accusing him of the murder of Vicky O, and he never reacted, Opdyke says. Never once got upset. He was there to find out what we knew.

Karakostas, a homicide investigator at the Minneapolis Police Department, spent years gathering evidence in Reas case.

While Opdyke was convinced that Rea was guilty, prosecutors werent. Opdyke says he was told that without a body, or more concrete evidence, they could not press charges.

But there was, possibly, another way to get to Rea. Given the 1977 assault case and the report regarding his stepdaughters, it seemed likely that they were dealing with a repeat offender. To that end, Opdyke and Hogquist learned from a fellow investigator of yet another caseRea might be involved in. In 1988, a 23-year-old homeless sex worker named Barbara, who asked that we use only her first name, had been attacked under circumstances similar to the details alleged in Reas 1977 trial, including the location. Barbaras case had gone cold, but it had one crucial difference from the other incidents: There was DNA evidence.

Barbara was walking to a White Castle near Lake Street one early morning in June 1988 when a man flashed money at her from a silver station wagon. They drove to a parking lot near some railroad tracks and had sex, and then, she tells me, he wouldnt stop. Barbara fought backscrapping and scrapping, just kicking and fighting and punching and kicking, she says. One of her hits must have drawn his blood; it dripped onto her shirt. Then the man jammed a tool resembling an ice pick into the hollow at the top of her neck.

The blow, somehow, didnt kill her. Barbara, her face pressed against the floor of the passenger seat, played dead as the man drove north into a quiet, leafy neighborhood. I just didnt know how bad I was feeling, but my mind was still working, she says. When she felt the car turn a corner, she leaped to open the door and rolled out of the station wagon. Struggling to grab her, the man crashed the car into a tree. He fled the scene as lights began turning on in the surrounding houses.

Karakostas reviews evidence in the Rea case.

Police later tested the bloodstain left on Barbaras shirt for protein and blood typeDNA testing was not yet availableand ruled out the first person they arrested for the attack, according to the Hennepin County Attorneys Office. Then they let the case fade away. It sat on somebodys desk, or got passed around, says Hogquist, who recalls feeling frustrated that there was a broad tendency to neglect sexual assault cases in the department. It was even worse for sex workers, anotherinvestigator tells me. Society was like that back then, says Barbara, who is now 54 and works as a nurse. She doesnt think attitudes have changed. Put yourself in harms way? Thats what you get.

But by 1993, five years after the attack on Barbara and three years after the disappearance of Owczynsky, the state crime lab had started testing DNA evidence. Working with Opdyke and Hogquist, the Minneapolis police lieutenant who had investigated Barbaras rape years earlier drafted a search warrant for Reas DNA. They obtained a sample and compared it to the bloodstain from Barbaras shirt. It matched.

Yet when the investigators brought the case to prosecutors, they were rebuffed: The three-year statute of limitations for both rape and attempted murder was already up. While a 1991 law extended the prosecution window to seven years for most criminal sexual offenses, it only applied to new cases, or cases in which the statute of limitations had not already run out. Barbaras case had expired less than seven weeks before that law was enacted.

Not until a couple of years ago did anyone tell Barbara about Rea. At first, she says, she was gladbut then I thought, There aint nothing I can do about it. Its just one more way in which she feels like the legal system failed her. As violent as a crime like that, they should never have a statute of limitations. Its ridiculous.

For Opdyke, Hogquist, and the other investigators, the dead end in Barbaras case deflated their hopes of catching Rea. Thats where all our investigation ended, says Hogquist. We got shot down. The Owczynsky investigation, too, went quiet.

When Opdyke retired in 2006, he made a copy of the Vicky O files to take with him to Florida. That was a case we carried with us when we left, he says. Thinking about Rea still gives him goosebumps.

It was like the one who got away. I always thought we had the right person, but wemeaning [Hogquist] and I, and the police department at the timewere never able to do anything about it.

Barbara Raped and stabbed in 1988 On escaping the station wagon where she was raped: The whole car just got fuming, sweaty, windows forming sweat and fog, and he wouldnt stop, and it was going on and on and onI was just hoping somebody would hear, somebody would see, and instead, I felt like I had to give upBut I felt a stab in my back and my neck. I found out later it was an ice pick. So I played dead. That was not easy to do. And I dont know if he saw somebody coming or whatIm just still trying to figure that out[but] he put a piece of carpet over me to hide meI felt the car start up, and he started moving. I just didnt know how bad I was feeling, but my mind was still working, and I could peek out through this hole of this carpet and see the lock and the door handleSure enough I felt the turn with the car. So thats when I did itjumped, got one hand on the lock, one hand on the handle and did them both at the same timeI got out, I just slid my body out and clumsily started running upThank God he did leave, because he wouldve got me again. Listen to Barbara tell her story: https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Barbara.mp3

It would be almost 20 years before the Minneapolis Police Department would make significant progress in their investigations of Rea. Again itd be because of Victoria Owczynsky, the 17-year-old who had been friends with his younger stepdaughter.

Owczynsky, or her body, still had not been found, but in late 2007, Sergeant Gerry Wehr came across her missing person file. He was on light duty at the time, recovering from hip surgery, with an assignment to look for cold cases that showed promise. Wehr says he liked reading files from the crammed archives stashed in the clock tower of Minneapolis City Hall, retracing the steps of old investigations. Its dusty, dirty, its kind of dark, and there are just boxes everywhere, Wehr says. Of course, nothings in order.

His interest had been piqued after policegot a call that a relative of Owczynskys was using her information to get welfare benefits. So box by box up in the clock tower, Wehr continued working the case for years, learning about the teenagers disappearance, and about Rea, and, eventually, Barbara. With the help of the FBI, he started developing a criminal profile of Rea, uncovering several other attacks, mostly on sex workers, that seemed to fit his modus operandi. Over and over, those cases had been dropped, or not charged in time. Sometimes there was simply not enough evidence. But other times the reason was bad police work, Wehr admits; in particular, cases that involved victims who did sex work languished.

The haphazardly stored, jumbled archives made progress slow. It took nearly five years of investigating before Wehr pulled a crumpled piece of paper out of a box: the search warrant for Reas DNA from Barbaras case. Wehr had long been hoping for DNA evidence to help his search and he knew that Reas DNA sample, as well as the blood from Barbaras shirt, could still be in evidence. I just knew there would be something that would come up if we entered it in the system.

Both samples were still in storage. In 2013, the state crime lab reanalyzed the sample from Barbaras shirt and Reas DNA, confirming the match using more advanced testing. Then the lab uploaded its new DNA profile from the bloodstain into a database for crime scene evidence. Thats when the system returned another, unexpected hit: semen recovered from the autopsy of Lorri Mesedahl, the 17-year-oldkilled 30 years earlier. Wehr tells me he was surprised there was only one match for Rea in the database.

Mesedahls murder was not one of the cases Wehr had pegged to Rea. One Friday night in early spring 1983, after returning home from a party, Mesedahl had snuck out to go see her boyfriend. When she arrived at her boyfriends grandparents house close to 3 a.m., his grandmother refused to let her in. The next morning, Mesedahls body was found, facedown, surrounded by a pool of blood, next to railroad tracks. Semen was found in her vagina and rectum, as well as on the legs and seat of her pants. Not until 2008 would the samples be tested and uploaded to the system.

In 1983, Lorri Mesedahls body was found near these railroad tracks in north Minneapolis; the 17 year old appeared to have been raped and then beaten to death.

The Mesedahl hit blew the entire Rea investigation wide open: There was DNA and the statute of limitations on murder never expires. Finally, police had discovered evidence with a real chance of convincing prosecutors to bring charges.

Wehr was on the cusp of retirement. Before he left, he handed off the case to Karakostas, who once patrolled Lake Street as a young beat cop and had since become the departments cold-case homicide specialist. When you arrest [Rea], you got to make sure hes getting charged, Wehr remembers telling Karakostas. Because people have been doing this to him for 20 years. He gets called in on a rape, he gives them a story, and they threaten him and yell at him theyre going to charge him, hes going to prison. But nobody ever does. He walks away.

In part to see if they could bolster their case by finding more attacks linked to Rea, investigators ramped up their testing of old, neglected rape kits. In 2014, they found another victim: Mary-Scott Hunter, a young legal assistant who was raped in 1987.

By March 2015, Karakostas believed he finally had enough evidence and arrested Rea. But even then, it wasnt enough. Karakostas says prosecutors got cold feet and declined to charge him. Chuck Laszewski, the Hennepin County Attorneys Office spokesperson, says the county attorneys office felt it needed more evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Rea had murdered Mesedahl. Key witnesses had died, including the medical examiner who inspected her body. As Wehr had predicted, Rea denied everything and was released.

It would take another two and a half years and follow-up testing on Mesedahls clothes before prosecutors decided they were confident enough to pursue the case, Karakostas says. In September 2017, Rea was taken into custody again, and charged with second-degree murder.

Monique Stevens Sexually abused starting in the late 1970s On growing up in Reas house: He would watch me take a shower. I didnt even want to take showers. I got teased at school because I smelled sometimes. I mean, we were poor, so I got teased for my clothes even though we had uniforms, cause I have holes in my shoes. So I was traumatized at school, too. I was ashamed of my body, of myself, who I was. I didnt want people to look at me. I just wanted to stay covered all the time. Listen to Monique describe growing up: https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/stevens_growingup.mp3

On trying to defend herself against Rea: I slept with a knife under my pillow. He would run upstairs. I would jump up on my bed, and scream and scream and scream, and my mom would come up and get him out of the room. And then there were nights she wasnt there, so hed rape me. And when she was there, Id do the same thing all over again. Scream and scream and scream, and shed come running up there. I would not sleep. I would drink coffee sometimes, Naomie would too, so we could stay awake. Listen to Monique describe defending herself:

https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/stevens_defend.mp3

Mary-Scott Hunter was always a light sleeper, even on the nights she had been drinking. In 1987, she was 21 years old, working at a law firm and sharing a split-level duplex with three friends from Carleton College. We were all incredibly close, says Nina Levine, who lived upstairs. They bonded over the Grateful Dead and played softball together. (Hunters story first came to our attention through Mother Jones Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery, who became friends with Hunter in the years following the attack.)

Hunters housemates were somewhat worried about her; she was somewhat worried about herself. She had recently dropped out of school and was struggling. Maybe not eating enough, Hunter says. Drinking too much. She was trying to change those parts of her life. One Thursday night in March, she relapsed, going out to a bar, bingeing and purging, then falling asleep in her bedroom on the bottom floor of the duplex.

Around 4:30 in the morning, a noise woke her up. Then she heard it again, louder. She rolled out of bed and left her room to check on her friends. Thats when she saw theman at the top of the staircase. He wore a dark sweatshirt, the hood pulled tight around his face. In his right hand, he held a screwdriver.

Dont freak out, he said, according to her police report from that night. I just want to fuck you. If you freak out, Im going to stab you.

He forced her to the lower-level landing. Then he raped her for more than 30 minutes.

I was convinced, at one point, that somebody in the house would hear it, and the cops were going to come, Hunter says. But they didnt. As the man grew frustrated, she thought, Im going to die. She was stunned when he finished and left without killing her.

She immediately woke up Levine, who helped her call the police. When officers arrived, it just got surreal, Hunter tells me. It was a relief that they were there, but they were very nonchalant about the whole thing. Levine remembers watching an officer question Hunter and sensing he didnt believe her, as if she had invited the man to her house after going out drinking that night. She was shaking a lot, Levine remembers. She would start to talk, then get a little silent, then go back.

Mary-Scott Hunter (right) was living with Nina Levine in the mid-1980s when Rea broke into their home and raped Hunter.

Hunter recalls the lingering surprise that she hadnt been murdered. She remembers cracking jokes in the back of the police cruiser with Levine and another friend who accompanied her to the hospital. During her rape kit exam, a nurse wrote that Hunter was quiet, cooperative.

Only later, as she waited in the hospital lobby for a ride back to the house, did Hunter allow any darker emotions to hit her. She leaned forward in her chair and stared at the floor. I cant believe this happened, she recalls saying out loud. Levine put a hand on her back.

Im not typically somebody who kind of breaks down, so it wasnt that, Hunter recalls. I think it was the first time that I started to just be a little bit more in my body. And that was the startshe pauses, searchingof not wanting to be in my body.

A few days later, when Hunter sat down with a Minneapolis police sergeant for an interview, he asked her what she was wearing when she was raped, according to a transcript of their conversation. She answered his questions simply and completely. She wanted to help. When the sergeant identified a suspect and put together a lineup, she was frustrated with herself when she couldnt identify him. (Forensic testing eventually ruled that suspect out.) After the lineup, Hunter remembers, the investigation seemed to fizzle.

At the same time, she and her housemates were struggling to cope with what had happened. In the following weeks, Hunter slept on a mattress in their living room. She read and re-read feminist literature, and signed up for self-defense classes. The landlord fixed the window locks, installed an alarm system, and offered the housemates free therapy sessions with her husband, a psychologist.

As months passed, then years, Hunters struggles with mental health got worse, and, eventually, better. She got sober; she came out. I got to know myself, she says.

With time, she thought less and less about the attack and the still-open investigation. But she continued to question whether she had done enough to stop the rape. Those doubts still nag her: Why the hell didnt Ido more to fight? she asks. Is that some deficiency in me, that I clam up when Im in flight or fight? Why did I do the things I personally did? Did I not think I was worth fighting?

She knows its not her fault she was raped, knows its never any survivors fault. But knowing is a different thing than feeling it.

Only after Karakostas knocked on her door last year, after prosecutors finally decided to charge Rea, did Hunter come to a kind of peace with her doubts. Rea had killed before, she knows now. On the night hed attacked her, the same could have happened to her. Maybe I actually did have the right instincts, she says. If she had fought back, she might not have survived. Its let me off the hook a little.

Mary-Scott Hunter Raped in 1987 On night terrors in the years after her rape: Ill just get stuck in a loop of auditory hallucinations, of being sure that I hear somebody inside the house, and theyre coming up the stairsI had even tried tricks, like I would imagineI have cats, and I know that if theres any sound in the house, the cats just run away. So for a while I was like, look at the cats. If the cats are not running away, and you think you see the cats sleeping, its not happening. But then my brain would catch up to me and make the cats jumpOnce I finally would break the loop, and Id wake up, and now I was actually awake Id see the cats are sound asleep, or had just run off, because usually what breaks this cycle is, I wake myself up screaming. Listen to Mary-Scott tell her story: https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/hunter.mp3

On a sunny morning in late June, Hunter pulled on a black T-shirt emblazoned with the words nasty woman and biked to the Hennepin County Government Center in the heart of downtown Minneapolis to see Rea receive his sentence for the murder of Lorri Mesedahl. By the time Hunter arrived at a meeting with a victim advocate on the 22nd floor, Barbara was already there, seated at a small round table.

It had been almost two months since the women had learned that Darrell Rea had been convicted of second-degree murder with intent, after waiving his right to a jury trial. Explaining her ruling, Hennepin County Judge Tamara Garcia wrote that the DNA evidence in this case is compelling and that a guilty verdict was the only possible conclusion. While Reas public defender had tried to propose other potential perpetrators, none of the alternate theories added up.

Garcia had considered evidence not just from the killing of Mesedahl, but also from the 1988 attack on Barbara, which the judge determined was similar enough to Mesedahls case that it could corroborate the facts of the murder. But Hunters rape, Garcia decided, couldnt factor in to her verdict. While some elements of Hunters case were similar to Mesedahlsboth were young women, attacked with a weapon just a few miles apartthe assault had taken place in her house, not Reas car, and did not leave her with serious visible injuries. The allegations of sexual abuse against Monique Stevens and Naomie Rondo also were not considered. None of those crimes, Garcia ruled, shared enough details in common with the murder to be included in her deliberation.

Hunter had been crushed by that decision. Shed been holding out hope that the trial would give her a chance to finally do something, to act after years of stasis. She says she wouldnt have been afraid to take the stand. I would love nothing more than to be able to stand in front of [him], she says, to be like, Yep. Guess what. Im here. Giving you a little bit of payback.

The closest she could get would be to see Rea sentenced to prison. She wanted to be there, to put a face to the figure who had persisted in her nightmares for 32 years, but whose features had grown fuzzy in her memory. And she was curious about the other survivors. But what do you say to a stranger brought into your life through trauma that is somehow both shared and separate? In the meeting room high above the city, Barbara and Hunter greeted each other politely. Then they fell into a nervous silence.

Barbaras mind was racing. That morning, shed woken up early to dress for court, taming her long, curly brown hair and applying makeup, which she did rarely. Then she smoked a cigarette beside a heart-shaped pond shed built herself in her backyard, her space for peace and reflection. She knew she would be disappointed by the sentencing, but she wanted to see the criminal proceedings through to the end.

I just hope this turns out okay, she told Hunter in her quiet rasp.

Yup, Hunter answered.

A cardigan-clad victim advocate arrived to prepare them for the hearing. Rea, the advocate said, would not be taking responsibility for his crimes. He would not show remorse. He had family members supporting him in the courtroom. And neither Hunter nor Barbara would be allowed to deliver a victim impact statement in person. They could only submit a written copy to the judge.

I was ready to just die, you know. I was letting go because I was exhausted. But I think the good Lord wanted me to survive. To press charges for Lorri Mesedahl, says Barbara.

Barbara could no longer keep from breaking down. She had spent hours practicing her statement in front of a mirror, imagining telling the judge how she was still scared, and angry that her case was never prosecuted: I have come to the conclusion I will never see justice. Welling up, she told the advocate about surviving other abuse and violence, before Rea, and how it had changed her, affecting all her relationships.

As Barbara spoke, Hunter sat very still except for her hands, which she was kneading. Suddenly she jerked in her seat. Goddamn these men, she said, turning toward the window.

Barbara caught her breath. Then, seeming to notice something, she turned to Hunter, whose short graying hair was tucked behind her ears. Were you brunette too?

Yeah, Hunter said.

A screwdriver?

Yeah.

Mine was a dull-ass ice pick. Barbara used a tissue to dab at the heavy mascara lining her eyelids. Do I got makeup all over my face?

You look great, Hunter said. Fierce. They rode the elevator down to the 13th-floor courtroom together.

Stevens and Rondo were there. Stevens, dressed in black, fought hard to stay composed; beside her, Rondos slight, tense frame betrayed her anger. They gripped each others hands as they waited first for the judge to appear, and then for their stepfather to be escorted to the defendants table. By the time Rea entered the roomnow 64, heavyset and pale, with a thick white goatee and mustachetears were streaming down Stevens cheeks. It wasnt that she was afraid of him; she had seen him once as an adult, at her grandmothers funeral a few years ago. Its that there were so many waysPTSD, struggles with intimacythat her childhood experiences still remain with her. I was held captive by him, and there was nothing I could do, she tells me. I would like to see him have to stay in there until he dies. Because Ive been in prison for almost my whole life.

The only statement permitted in the courtroom was from Lorri Mesedahls half brother. Darrell won the game, Del Young said, tearing up as he stood in front of the judge. To ever allow this man to walk these streets again puts the public at such an extreme danger.

A few minutes later, Garcia sentenced Rea to 10 years and one month in prison, the maximum permitted under Minnesotas sentencing guidelines at the time of the 1983 murder. With supervised release and the time he had already served while awaiting a verdict, Rea would likely get out in just under five years. If the statutes of limitations on Hunters and Barbaras rapes had not expired, and Rea was also found guilty for those crimes, his recommended sentence could have been more than 20 years, calculates Mike Brandt, a Minnesota criminal defense attorney who is not involved in the case.

Barbara admits it scares her that Rea will be out of prison so soon. But she also believes her role in convicting him is the reason why she survived his attack all those years ago; on the night he tried to kill her, she tells me, I was ready to just die, you know. I was letting go because I was exhausted. But I think the good Lord wanted me to survive. To press charges for Lorri Mesedahl. Mesedahl is buried a few blocks from Barbaras home. She visits the gravesite often.

The Rea case, says one veteran investigator, is a wake-up call to make a better system.

In the current system, the only person were protecting is Darrell Rea, Sergeant Chris Karakostas tells me. The way the case unfolded is the result of bad policy, bad police work, bad county attorneys, the failures of the system to take care of people like him, Sergeant Gerry Wehr says. Its a wake-up call to make a better system. There is some hope things will change, and that this generation of sexual violence survivors will be the last to face the obstacles presented by narrow statutes of limitations. Minnesota long ago eliminated the ticking clock for any sexual assault where there is DNA evidence, but its prosecution window for other sexual assaults of adults now expires after nine years. In the past two legislative sessions, state lawmakers have rejected proposals, including one from former state Rep. Ilhan Omar (now a member of Congress), to completely abolish the statute of limitations on all sexual assault cases.

Hunter is still living with that impact. Some nights, she hallucinates the sound of someone coming up the stairs in her house. The night terror loops until she wakes up screaming. Closure, she says, is kind of a tricky word. Part of her is glad that Rea refused to accept responsibility in court. If he had apologized, she says, theres a burden on me. To process forgiveness.Barbara, Hunter, and Stevens told me they wish the law treated rape the same as murder, leaving cases open for as long as it takes for police to solve the crime. Having statutes of limitations for these sexually violent crimes is belittling and demeaning, Nina Levine, Hunters friend and former housemate, wrote to me recently. The law basically says, after X amount of years, the crime and its impact dont matter anymore.

Karakostas still isnt done with the case. He believes Hunters rape indicates there could be more crimes to uncover. I think any investigator who worked, even touched, this case, or knows anything about it, would agree that the probability that there are other victims out there, either living or dead, is probably pretty good, he says. After Rea was convicted of murder, he was legally obligated to hand over a new DNA sample. And unlike the bloodstain from Barbaras shirt, this one has been uploaded to the FBIs national database. From now on, it will be automatically compared to unknown DNA from crime scenes across the country and to results from the roughly 1,700 rape kits that Minneapolis Police have neglected to test since the 1990s. One day, Karakostas speculates, there could be another prosecution. In that future case, a judge could rule that the experiences of Hunter and Stevens count as corroborating evidence. Maybe they could still get their day in court. Theres a lot of women out there that really dont have some justice for what happened to them, Karakostas says.

Theres also still the big unanswered question: What happened to Vicky O? Over the years, rumors of where she may be have circulated through the police department. According to multiple investigators, the apartment building where Rea lived when Owczynsky disappeared in 1990 had an underground level, and at least one witness told the cops that he used to spend time down there. Its become the stuff of legend among certain Minneapolis cops that Owczynskys body might be buried underneath the building. One problem: The city condemned the building and tore it down in 1992. In its place stands the headquarters of the Minneapolis Police Departments 2nd Precinct.

Its a chilling prospectthat the body theyve spent decades looking for could be literally underneath the polices feet. Theoretically, Karakostas muses, youd have to take [the building] down. That seems unlikely, but like the investigators before him, hes still driven by the search for Vicky O, and Rea is still his number-one suspect. No matter what it took, he says, nothing would please me more than to find Vicky.

Darrell Reas stepdaughters, Monique Stevens (left) and Naomi Rondo (center), with their friend Victoria Owczynsky, who disappeared in 1990.

A previous version of this story was published online in June. The story, included in the November/December 2018 print edition, has been updated to reflected the sentencing of Darrell Rea.

Arplis - News source https://arplis.com/blogs/news/when-your-rape-doesnt-count

[nancygduarteus]

Historians’ Favorite Anecdote About Victorian-Era Orgasms Is Probably a Myth

It’s among the most delectably scandalous stories in the history of medicine: At the height of the Victorian era, doctors regularly treated their female patients by stimulating them to orgasm. This mass treatment—a cure for the now-defunct medical condition of “hysteria”— was made possible by a new technology: the vibrator. Vibrators allowed physicians to massage women’s clitorises quickly and efficiently, without exhausting their hand and wrist.

It’s an intoxicating insight, implying that vibrators succeeded not because they advanced female pleasure, but because they saved labor for male physicians. And in the last few years, it has careened around popular culture. It’s given rise to a Tony-nominated play, a romcom starring Maggie Gyllenhaal, and even a line of branded vibrators. Samantha Bee did a skit about it in March. A seemingly endless march of quirky news stories have instructed readers in its surprising-but-true quality, including in Vice, Mother Jones, and Psychology Today.

In short, the tale has become a commonplace how people think about Victorian sex. And according to a contentious new paper, it may also be almost totally false.

There is absolutely no evidence that Victorian doctors used vibrators to stimulate orgasm in women as a medical technique, asserts the paper, written by two historians at Georgia Tech. “Manual massage of female genitals,” they write, “was never a routine medical treatment for hysteria.”

“There’s no evidence for it,” says Hallie Lieberman, an author of both the new paper and Buzz, a popular history of sex toys. “It’s inaccurate.”

It’s not hard to see how the idea spread. The entire hypothesis of Victorian vibrators originates from the work of one scholar: Rachel Maines, a historian and visiting scientist at Cornell. Her 1999 book, The Technology of Orgasm—described at the time as a “secret history of female sexual arousal”—argued that clitoral massage was used as a medical technique for centuries, from the time of Hippocrates to the modern day.

But that’s just not true, according to Lieberman and Eric Schatzberg, the chair of the School of History and Sociology at Georgia Tech. There is scant evidence that orgasms were widely understood as a cure for female hysteria, and there’s even less evidence that Victorians used vibrators to induce orgasm as a medical technique, they say. “Maines fails to cite a single source that openly describes use of the vibrator to massage the clitoral area,” their paper says. “None of her English-language sources even mentions production of ‘paroxysms’ by massage or anything else that could remotely suggest an orgasm.”

Instead, they argue, Maines conceals this lack of support by relying on a “wink and nod” approach to primary sourcing and by “padding her argument with a mass of tangential citations.”

In an interview, Maines said that she has heard variations of the paper’s criticism before—and that her argument in The Technology of Orgasm was really only a “hypothesis,” anyway. “I never claimed to have evidence that this was really the case,” she said. “What I said was that this was an interesting hypothesis, and as [Lieberman] points out—correctly, I think—people fell all over it. It was ripe to be turned into mythology somehow. I didn’t intend it that way, but boy, people sure took it, ran with it.”

Maines added that she was a little surprised it took so long for other scholars to question her argument, given how admittedly “slender” the evidence she gave in The Technology of Orgasm was. “I thought people were going to attack it right away. But it’s taken 20 years for people to even—people didn’t want to question it. They liked it so much they didn’t want to attack it.”

Even though Maines now calls her argument a “hypothesis,” her writing in The Technology of Orgasm does not take the same provisional tone. “In the Western medical tradition, genital massage to orgasm by a physician or a midwife was a standard treatment for hysteria,” she wrote in that book’s first pages. “When the vibrator emerged as an electromechanical medical instrument at the end of the 19th century, it evolved from previous massage technologies in response to demand from physicians for more rapid and efficient physical therapies, particularly for hysteria.”

“I intended it as a hypothesis. Perhaps the way I expressed it didn’t communicate that,” Maines said when asked about the book’s declarative tone. “Interpretations of historical data are open to interpretation.”

“In the book, she doesn’t refer to it as a hypothesis at all. She makes the claim that this is a fact, and it happened,” says Schatzberg. “To me, it suggests that Maines was aware of the weakness of her claim, and later, after it was taken up so widely, tried to backtrack.”

Certainly Lieberman did not imagine Technology of Orgasm to be hypothetical when she first encountered it. Her new paper with Schatzberg originated from a classroom aside in 2010, when Lieberman was working on a dissertation about the history of sex toys. Her adviser mentioned that he sometimes found it useful to understand other scholars’ work by checking their citations. “I started doing that on this book, and I found that nothing added up,” said Lieberman.

She brought the book to Schatzberg, who was a professor at Wisconsin at the time, for a second opinion. They began going through the book citation-by-citation—and found what they believe to be significant errors. In one passage, Maines alludes to a technique described in 1660 by the British surgeon Nathaniel Highmore. The original quote, translated from Latin, describes a movement that “is not unlike that game of boys in which they try to rub their stomachs with one hand and pat their heads with the other.” Maines says this is a reference to the difficulty of producing orgasm through “vulvular massage.”

Not so fast, say Lieberman and Schatzberg. “The quote about the boys game occurs in a discussion of complex motions of the fingers, especially when playing stringed instruments,” they write. “Nowhere does this discussion even hint at massage of the vulva.” (When asked, Maines continued to insist Highmore was referring to genital massage.)

In another passage, Maines quotes a 19th-century physician describing how a vibrator can speed up the massage process. A doctor without a vibrator “consumes a painstaking hour to accomplish much less profound results than are easily effected by the [the vibrator] in a short five or ten minutes,” reads the quote.

But this does not describe genital massage, Lieberman says. “Vibrators were patent medicine,” she told me, and they were used as a labor-saving device for many different types of less titillating massage. This physician was actually advocating for vibrator massage of “the intestines, kidneys, lungs and skin,” she says.

Even once Lieberman and Schatzberg had made these discoveries, publishing them was not a given. At first, Lieberman hoped to publish an article that combined her own research into the history of sex toys that with a refutation of Maines’ thesis. But she found that anonymous peer reviewers resisted her framing of The Technology of Orgasm. Eventually, Lieberman removed all her critique of Maines from her article, and it was accepted for publication.

Lieberman, working with Schatzberg, turned that criticism of Maines into a full journal article—and they again struggled to find a journal that would publish it. According to emails reviewed by The Atlantic, editors now felt their criticism should focus on more than one book and that it should be more generous to Maines’ political context. One editor said that they should treat Maines’ claims not as erroneous facts, but as outdated historical interpretation. “You are letting ‘facts’ slide over into what might fairly be called interpretation,” that reviewer wrote. “Don’t we, as example, continually revisit what the ‘facts’ of the industrial revolution were and how it happened?”

The article was published in The Journal of Positive Sexuality in August.

“Some people have said, ‘Oh, you’re attacking [Maines].’ But my life would have been so much easier if her work had been accurate,” Lieberman said. “I did not want to critique her, I do not want to attack her, I have no problem with her. I just want to build on someone else’s work, and when that work is incorrect, it creates problems for scholars in the field of history of sexuality.”

“It’s a real problem if you’re a grad student writing a dissertation, and in what seems to be the widely accepted work in your field, you can’t find any justification for,” said Schatzberg.

Other historians have previously identified problems with Maines’ work. Fern Riddell, a popular historian who studies Victorian sex, attacked the idea that “Victorians invented the vibrator” in a 2014 Guardian article. (Riddell did not respond to an email sent through her publisher.)

And Helen King, a classics professor at the Open University in the U.K., wrote a lengthy scholarly rebuttal of Maines’ use of Greek and Latin sources in 2011. Maines “deliberately skewed” translations of the ancient texts she cited, like interpreting a medical text “in which the lower back is massaged as ‘masturbation,’” King said in an email. “She played just as fast and loose with the secondary material; for example she cited a general article on Roman baths to support her hypothesis that piped water in the baths was used for masturbation, even though that article says nothing about water pressure or women, let alone masturbation!”

Reading the new paper, King said she had one thought: “What comes as a surprise is that Maines’ book is even more flawed than I’d thought. ... I do wonder if anyone at all looked at it for the press.”

That press was the Johns Hopkins University Press, which published The Technology of Orgasm 19 years ago. “As most senior scholars know, university presses peer-review their books by relying on other senior scholars to comment on the quality of the work,” said Greg Britton, its editorial director. “Before it was accepted for publication two decades ago, this book would have been selected by the editor, undergone a rigorous round of single-blind peer review, and then approved by a faculty editorial board.”

He added: “Presses do not, however, fact-check their books as Lieberman and Schatzberg acknowledge. More to the point, Professor Maines has always maintained that her assertions were hypothesis open to further exploration.”

Maines nodded to King’s work as a precedent for the Lieberman and Schatzberg paper. She maintains that she never set out to pass off the notion of vibrators as a Victorian treatment for hysteria as historical fact; rather, she simply wanted to present the possibility as a way to get people thinking and talking about “orgasmic mutuality,” or female orgasms in addition to the traditionally more familiar male orgasm. And given its outsize impact in popular culture, especially through works like Ruhl’s play, “I think I succeeded in that,” she says.

This kind of symbolic victory is exactly what Schatzberg worries about. “In this post-fact era, the one bastion where facts should still be loved, and honored, and respected, and relentlessly pursued is academia,” Schatzberg said.

In the last few years, the social sciences have been rocked by a “reproducibility crisis,” in which once-bedrock findings in psychology, nutrition science, and other disciplines have failed to replicate when tested. Lieberman and Schatzberg believe the same “publish-or-perish” incentives which drove that crisis also explain the vibrator story: Its success, they write, “serves as a cautionary tale for how easily falsehoods can become embedded in the humanities.”

“People are not rewarded for checking previous work,” Schatzberg said. “They’re rewarded for coming up with a sexy new research finding. That’s true in the sciences, but it’s also true in the humanities.”

Lieberman said the entire episode seemed to illustrate the academy’s tendency to confirmation bias. “It was salacious. It was sexy. It sounded like a porn,” she said.“It fit into our belief that the Victorians weren’t as educated or knowledgable as we are about sex—and this idea that we progressively get more enlightened about sex, and that history follows this narrative from progression to progression. It fits so well into this. It fits into ideas that people had that women’s sexuality wasn’t understood.”

“One of the big takeaways for me is that the peer-reviewed process is flawed. Peer review is no substitute for fact-checking,” she added. “We need to fix this, and we need to start checking other people’s work especially in history.”

To King, the takeaway was clear: “People wanted to hear this story,” she said. “Vibrator stories sell.”

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/09/victorian-vibrators-orgasms-doctors/569446/?utm_source=feed

[distantwitness]

Repost: #KillAllMen Is Feminist Liberation Through Satire

This blog is purely about my research into visual depictions of human suffering, but because I am being personally attacked on a medium I use professionally I feel it is appropriate to share here. 

Please distribute as you see fit and nolite te bastardes carborundorum. 

Originally posted at Laywers, Guns and Money.

Trolls aren't just after me, they're after your rhetorical tools in speech against oppression

Days after my twelve-hour suspension from Twitter ended, the trolls have returned under the same absurdly bad faith humanitarianism. 

The first lockout was annoying but it ended before I knew it. An evening spent on a romantic date with my very male husband made the time pass easier. 

This time I'm locked out for seven days, and when I'm a writer who depends on Twitter for contacts and research this is no minor inconvenience. My husband and I can't eat out at nice French restaurants for seven straight days, Groupons have some pretty strict limits.

On March 19th I lampooned a Federalist article, penned for the purposes of the gun control debate, proclaiming that all men are born violent. Well if that's so, then the only logical response for women, the disproportionate victims of men's violence, have no choice but to #killallmen. 

To interpret this joke of mine, which is quite clearly a joke, as an endorsement or threat of violence is stupid. Even more stupid is that the joke was banned even as it floated above an article with quotes like, "A man’s nature cannot be repressed...Men were made for the intentional use of force and power." Whatever your thoughts on Punch RockGroin's parenting advice, the response of "#killallmen" cannot be seen as a serious and to do so is either profoundly stupid or profoundly dishonest. In order for "#killallmen" to be a credible threat, it has to have some basis in reality. Spoiler alert: It does not.

An Unreal Hashtag

I'm not going to sit here and tell you that #killallmen, at least in my use, is just a joke. It is satire, and as I am currently teaching satire in world literature to British secondary students, let me tell you satire is deadly serious. To be a satirist is to identify oppression and to take power back by upending the dominant narrative. I can't claim to be the inventor of #KillAllMen, but allow me to explain the way I use it. Feminists and their male allies are constantly calling out abusive behaviours of men to stop, whether it be street harassment, unequal pay, dictating reproductive rights, etc. The response of anti-feminists is frequently to say that we are trying to end masculinity, that we are weakening men (see the Federalist article cited above), that all our desired policies will be the death of men. 

Turn of the century anti-suffragette postcard and their imagined women's violence against men. Plus ca change...

A Men's Right's Activist created meme featuring feminist video games critic Anita Sarkeesian.

It is ridiculous. So what does a satirist do when faced with an oppressive ideology that is in fact quite ridiculous? We mirror it. We say, "Yes, Kill All Men!" Because it is an absolutely ludicrous conclusion to draw and the louder you say it the stupider it sounds. We are echoing stupidity not to imitate it, but to mock it and strip it bare. 

I don't particularly care if anyone thinks I'm good at satire, all that is subjective. What I do care about are readers interpreting the function of my satire correctly. You don't have to laugh but you also don't have to phone up Interpol. Just imagine I'm a white male stand up with a beer belly on Comedy Central and change the channel when I'm not funny.

The "Threat" Against Men 

What makes "#KillAllMen" a non-serious threat where "#KillAllJews" or "#KillAllGays" are much more dangerous? The simple answer is reality. We know that there are armed groups out there with the intent, opportunity, and historical record of killing Jews and gay people. Nothing similar exists when it comes to male identity. Is there an organized armed group out there with the stated mission of eradicating all XY genes?

No.

There are however armed groups, like the military in Myanmar and the government in Chechnya, who wish to wipe men from specific ethnicities or even sexual orientation off the face of this Earth. But these threats are typically carried out by other men, and there is plenty of evidence to show the perpetrators are happy to carry on killing and assaulting the women associated with the victimized men. Women from the same group as those engaging in the violence may even show support, but they do not do as individual actors autonomous from the men running the murder show. Are men more likely to be targeted for assault simply because of their gender identity as men?

No.

Men whose physical appearance marks them as members of an out-group are absolutely uniquely targeted for violence. Black men, Latino men, Jewish men, Muslim men, gay men, men who dress in traditionally female clothing, all of them have been victims of one hate crime or another. The FBI doesn't keep statistics on the gender of the attackers in hate crimes, but individual reports of women engaging in violent physical confrontation solo against men are rare if not unheard of. Nowhere is there any evidence that men are under attack by women simply for their identity as men. 

Are men more likely to be victims of domestic violence or sexualized violence? No-ish.

Men, as well as young boys, are absolutely victims of domestic violence. No serious advocate would try and tell you otherwise. Men in both heterosexual and homosexual relationships can experience physical abuse at the hands of a partner. Male children are also vulnerable to abuse from mothers and not just fathers. However, there's a difficulty in assessing whether they are more likely because of the stigma around reporting. Women are simply more likely to report intimate physical abuse. 

It is my own personal opinion that men and boys have a much harder time coming to grips with physical and sexual abuse and might very well need more support in the short term. Women are absolutely guilty of abusing men with prejudice against race, religion, sexual orientation, or even disability. But there is no epidemic of women's violence against simply for being men. That is the paranoid fantasy of the Men's Rights Activist.

Comedian Donald Glover explaining the difference between telling "crazy ex-girlfriend" and "crazy-exboyfriend" stories to friends.

Even if we gathered all the data showing how men can be victims of violence with different motivating factors, women are always disproportionately more vulnerable and are therefore are in greater need of protection.  

Satire Is A Power Move

The Alien was female, but Ripley certainly had to mow down a lot of men standing in her way that tried to use the Queen as a bio-weapon.

If Jonathan Swift's initially anonymous pamphlet A Modest Proposal were shared on Twitter today without the historical distance, I have no doubt one of his many enemies would be arguing Swift is actually calling for us all to #EatIrishBabies. The hashtags #RoastAllBabies #YumYumYum must clearly violate Twitter's policy against hateful conduct. No one living today could argue in good conscience that Swift was actually advocating for frying up the chubby little cheeks of infants born into poverty in order to control the population of urban, and predominantly Irish, poor. So why would he argue that poor women could get themselves off the street by skinning their toddlers to make into gloves for fine and elegant ladies? Because the people Swift is ridiculing, the upper classes so concerned with these poor and lazy souls in the street, have had their humanity so far removed as to believe it. Only an idiot or a dishonest philanthropist could be so credulous of A Modest Proposal at face value.

This Isn't About Me

I watch friends and colleagues like Reza Aslan, Jillian C. York, Hend Amry, and Talib Kweli (just to name a few) get trolled all the time. I shout back at the trolls or offer public support to them when I can just so they know they're not alone. 

I am white, I am straight, I am married, and I can take nice photos because my chosen appearance is traditionally feminine.I have a lot of privilege which has protected me thus far from the sorts of abuse many of my out-group and female friends have received online. I have a body of published work out there that demonstrates my serious commitment to human rights and my ability to write compassionately about victims. I'm not terribly worried about any professional losses, simply the threat of chronic inconveniences. I'm not angry for my own sake. 

I'll get back on Twitter sooner or later and I'll be fine. We need to think about what tactics the trolls are learning to silence so many others with views similar to mine. Buzzfeed reporter, and white female, Katie Notopoulos was locked out for ten days after trolls reported her for joking "kill all white people". Granted I think my satire is a bit more sophisticated than Kate's, our tweets have the same function and we shouldn't be banning satirical speech based on a subjective judgement of its value. 

Women, of all types, are at the most risk of abuse online. Amnesty International has researched this subject pretty thoroughly and finds that women are disgusted by Twitter's response to harassment. Twitter knows it has a problem but seems unable or unwilling to fix it. Last year at The Root, Monique Judge looked at how race and gender correlated with harassment on Twitter. The list of studies and articles on the subject go on and on.   

Meninists will probably always exist, but there's no reason Twitter should take our attempts to laugh at them so seriously.  

Extra Fun: My Prezi for Year 10 and older students on Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal". Created for my job as a Tavistock Tutor. 

[cyrilt7220356-blog]

Leading 5 Worship Innovator Assets

Once I have actually resided in Norway for a month, I assume I have a tolerable http://chatbot-4u.info tip of exactly what differentiates a Norwegian off a United States. I really did find that fairly impressive, yet there's a ton of taboo as well as fetish-y sexual activity things, as well as I'm unsure specifically that I will totally advise this to. All the stories are exceptionally dim, in a way that offers the concept as opposed to just for shock worth; I also discovered a solid sympathy, though, for the powerless as well as any individual that experiences dropped, consisting of compassionate imitations from the transgender neighborhood. I think self-conscious concerning it, but I also believe that folks will certainly discover me also casual if I talk in my all-natural voice. Others say that secret information must certainly not be actually published in social media due to the fact that this might threaten life as well as can be misinterpreted. Conductors look lovely as well as friendly as well as our team assume that our experts have actually discovered the right person, that is actually when they begin their secretive attacks that our company really feel wounded however still are actually not up to identify the root cause of problemAwareness of the tactics that manipulative close friends make use of is vital as this assists to pinpoint them and the next essential step is to deal with all of them in such a way that you are guarded coming from their poisoning. Drink a glass of detoxified or filteringed system water to rehydrate your body. In this particular certain weight loss system, you are actually typically capable to take in maximum FIVE HUNDRED to 1,500 fats day-to-day. Health specialists state that you should not consider a juice purify as a long-lasting weight loss service, and I didn't. But just as any type of craftsperson hangs around polishing his skill-sets to earn the best piece of designed, thus need to an author strive to show a short article that is going to be a delight to review as well as not pity him for its careless grammar as well as punctuation. Individuals healthy are actually normally capable to allow a fast, however those in sick wellness ought to find health care recommendations to begin with. When you appreciate people around you, they really feel great in your company. For those that possess a little more opportunity, this is actually possible to take a personal watercraft excursion with the narrower canals from Bangkok, on behalf of Thon Buri, where you could observe closely the life of folks that live right by river. An individual letter contains laid-back written communication along with friends, family members and also etc I drink my head every single time I hear folks debating to maintain your money in the marketplace. You will be blown away through this little nation in main Europe, which is actually an excellent loved ones vacation place to go. Slovenia is a top secret energetic outdoor destination. A study coming from the University of Liverpool has actually recommended buying canine owner learning and also amenities as a tactic to target physical inactivity and issues like weight problems in both folks and also their household pets. As people are adjusting their lives to make use of methods and products to aid safeguard the atmosphere and battle environment improvement, the attraction from green, green lifestyle products has produced on its own apparent, even about home pool.

A nutrition as well as well balanced wealthy diet full of vet encouraged quality pet dog food alongside these well-balanced treats will make sure an energetic and healthy and balanced life for your family pet.

[movietvtechgeeks]

Latest story from https://movietvtechgeeks.com/sundance-day-8-wounds-queer-perspective-plus-throughbred-sidney-hall/

Sundance Day 8 'Wound's' queer perspective plus 'Throughbred,' 'Sidney Hall'

The 2017 Sundance Film Festival is nearly over, and as we’re basking in the glow of fresh air and theater lighting, it’s exciting knowing that some amazing treasures found here will be resonating with today’s world. Some of our favorites picks of today are John Trengrove’s fascinating The Wound which really gives an eye-opening look at a South African secretive rite of passage for boys entering into manhood.

Thoroughbred is another very interesting one that many people can relate to about two friends trying to rekindle their connection. It reminded me of when you home five years or more after high school and run into some of those same people who never left your town. You realize how much you’ve changed in that time and trying to connect again is nearly impossible, especially for those that haven’t changed at all in that same timeframe.

‘THE WOUND’ PRESENTS A QUEER PERSPECTIVE ON A SOUTH AFRICAN RITUAL OF MANHOOD

For his enthralling debut feature, South African filmmaker John Trengove lifts the veil on the secretive rite of passage from boyhood to manhood in a remote area of South Africa. The Wound follows Xolani (Nakhane Touré), a forlorn factory worker, as he travels to an obscure mountain camp where teen boys go through the traditional Xhola initiation. Xolani has been assigned to mentor a friend’s son, Kwanda (Niza Jay Ncoyini), who notices the attraction between Xolani and another caregiver, Vija (Bongile Mantsai), who is not only secretive about his sexuality but also prone to bursts of explosive behavior.

Following the screening, Trengove, who is white and self-identifies as queer, said he made the movie because there’s a complete lack of queer imagery in the African film canon. “It came out of a sense of urgency,” he told the audience. “For myself as an outsider, it’s something I could speak about more freely than someone who is inside the culture. I’m speaking about same-sex desire. As a queer filmmaker I was able to introduce the subject into this very intricate world and practice.”

Describing the project as the result of profound collaborations, Trengove revealed that to achieve authenticity he spoke with a South African novelist who had been through the initiation himself, and the two men began to create the story together. The three principal actors in the film each in his own way made a formidable contribution to the film, not just in terms of what an actor does but in making the characters their own and contributing something quintessential and unique to their own experiences.

Trengove noted that the film’s subject matter is very controversial in South Africa, despite being the subject of various documentaries and news articles and even being mentioned by Nelson Mandela in his autobiography. “I think our film comes at a moment when there’s a growing conversation about a sensitive subject,” he stated. “The ritual has come under fire for reasons of relevance and safety. I think equally it’s still regarded as a meaningful process that boys go through that shows them their place in the world of men.”

The director praised the courage of his three lead actors for taking on the roles. “I was very fortunate to have the bravery of these three actors to collaborate on what you saw tonight,” he said. “They did it for their own very personal reasons, primarily out of a conviction that these are stories we need to begin to speak out.”

THOROUGHBRED: OLIVIA COOKE AND ANYA TAYLOR-JOY CONSPIRE TO MURDER

With his debut film, Thoroughbred, Cory Finley finessed his way through two major challenges that could confound another first-time filmmaker. The first, as he told the audience during a post-screening discussion on Thursday at the Yarrow Theatre, was a transition from theater to moviemaking. And the second was pulling off a nuanced tone that at once straddles comedy, drama, and thriller.

The film stars Sundance Film Festival veterans Olivia Cooke (Me and Earl and the Dying Girl) and Anya Taylor-Joy (The Witch) as Amanda and Lily, two old school friends who uneasily try to rekindle some kind of connection. Though Amanda is emotionally blocked, incapable of showing or perhaps even having feelings, chilly Lily slowly reveals herself to be in greater crisis, as she bristles against a stepfather whose strictness is driving her to entertain wicked thoughts.

Finley talked about how Thoroughbred started out as a play but became a film. “When it was a play it really was a kind of philosophical, moral discussion between these two characters on one couch. It started with asking questions about myself, and attacking some of my own fears and anxieties about my own mind and moral compass, through writing,” he said. “As I started getting towards the later drafts of the play, I realized that there was something about it that was very film noir. And even though it was contained in one household, I started becoming aware of all the things I could do cinematically.”

Producer Alex Saks talked about her first conversation with Finley, after coming across what was still a play. “Within five minutes I knew that even if he didn’t know it yet, he was going to direct the movie — and that he was a filmmaker,” she said. Finley described trying to make up for his inexperience by reading books, watching movies, and visiting film sets in the months before his first shoot. “I tried to cram in as much preparation as possible so that I could communicate effectively with the whole crew,” he said. “But I was certainly learning a lot on the job.”

And as for that fine-tuned tone, Finley said it was something they consciously refined from rehearsals through the shoot and then in editing. “We talked about [the tone] as being a narrow tightrope,” he said. “I was lucky to get a couple of days of rehearsal before we started, with the two leads, and we came to a clear understanding of the tone that we were all aiming for. And then in the editing process we had another chance to really look carefully at these scenes and play very specifically with timing and pauses and different takes. There’s a fun balance to be had in trying to provoke an audience to laugh and also to be slightly afraid. The two emotions, if you can balance them, go well together.”

Though he said he still plans on producing more theater, Finley’s first foray into filmmaking has him hooked. “I’ve fallen in love with the tools to which a director has access,” he said. “So I’m definitely looking forward to playing around in this world more.”

WINNIE: A DOC ABOUT WOMEN, POLITICS, AND MISOGYNY

With WINNIE, the new documentary about Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Pascale Lamche offers an illuminating portrait of the complex story of the woman, who is often cast in the shadow of legendary human rights activist Nelson Mandela, her husband of 38 years, even though she fought on the frontlines to end apartheid during the 27 years he was imprisoned.

While Winnie’s story has been capably told by other filmmakers and documentarians and through countless books and articles, Lamche manages to create a fresh, thorough, and likely definitive study by using revealing new interviews, as well as a veritable treasure trove of newly uncovered archival materials.

“I interviewed Nelson twice for previous films, and each time it was a great honor to meet him and speak to him and spend time with him, but I was always very intrigued by Winnie,” Lamche told the audience at the post-screening Q&A. The director noted that, while Winnie is mostly venerated in her home of Soweto, South Africa, Lamche learned that her subject was also widely demonized in many European capitals for her crusade against racism, and a smear campaign was launched against her. “That seemed like a space to explore,” the director offered.

Through a meeting and conversation with Mandela’s daughter Zindzi, who also speaks on camera in the doc, Lamche was eventually introduced to Winnie. She ended up interviewing her subject four times over a period of two years, including once just after the death of her former husband, when she was still dressed in her black mourning clothes.

“On each occasion, I tried to pull back another layer of the story,” Lamche shared. “Each time I met her I uncovered more in the story because I’d been digging away and making progress with the people who’d been her enemies. I never went to her with specifics and said I interviewed this guy who waged this warfare campaign against you. As our relationship progressed over time, it deepened. I hope that’s apparent in the film.” As her film skillfully explores the intersection of women, politics, and misogyny, it’s not a challenge for audiences to draw a strong parallel between Mandela’s story and the current political climate in the U.S.

PERSON TO PERSON: A SUBTLE, OPTIMISTIC COLLAGE OF EVERYDAY NEW YORKERS

“I made [this movie] with a lot of friends. And it’s about tenderness, it’s about friendship, it’s about wanting to have a friend, and what it’s like to be a friend, and what it’s like to lose a friend,” explained director Dustin Guy Defa as he introduced his latest project, Person to Person. Defa makes his return to the Festival after his 2014 short film of the same name.

The feature, shot in retro 16mm, follows various characters throughout one day in New York City, including a moody teenager putting up with her best friend’s antics, an endearingly simple man trying to buy a rare vinyl record (Bene Coopersmith, who also starred in the short film version of the story), a depressed guy attempting to reconcile with his girlfriend after hurting her, and an anxiety-ridden rookie reporter who feels completely out of place her first day on the job. But unlike other films that depict a large ensemble of characters with different story lines, this one doesn’t aim to connect them in any obvious way other than the fact that they’re in the same city.

Defa said that when he first thought of the idea for this project, “I got very excited … to make such a variety of people and to not necessarily connect them. So I got very excited [about how to] pull it off. I developed all the characters separately. … But once I started actually working on the outline and the writing, I was interconnecting it in other ways that aren’t visible. … Even though they all had such different things and different tones and things like that, I was still connecting them thematically in many ways. And so I needed the flow to really work even though all these people had such different things going on.”

When asked which characters he relates to the most, Defa revealed, “They’re all me in many ways. I’ve done stupid things in my life, I’ve treated people weirdly, and then friendship is very important to me [like it is with Bene]. And Wendy the teenager is definitely me as a teenager in many ways. … But I don’t have a favorite.”

The characters don’t necessarily go through anything captivatingly dramatic, but Defa’s purpose wasn’t to have audiences on the edge of their seats. He explained that, amid many abrasive, visceral depictions that often appear on the screen, he simply wanted to create “a nice place to go for an hour and a half” — to which the audience applauded in agreement.

  SIDNEY HALL: A PRECOCIOUS WRITING TALENT DRIFTS INTO OBSCURITY

Sidney Hall, which premiered on Wednesday night at the Eccles Theatre, spans 12 years in the life of the eponymous character, from the moment that the precocious high school kid becomes a celebrated author to his apex of fame and emotional nadir, and to his time disowning all that he’d become and drifting into obscurity. Remarkably, those 12 years mirror the 12 years it took writer-director Shawn Christensen and writer Jason Dolan to see the project to completion.

“Shawn was in a great band called stellastarr*, and when he was on tour I sent him the first couple of pages of the script, and we went from there. It was the summer of 2004,” Dolan said during the post-screening Q&A. “We wanted to tell a story about perspective — what it’s like to think about how you were at 18, 24, and 30. We chose those ages because those were the ages we were at when we were writing the script.”

The breadth of time covered presented challenges for both the crew and the performers, including Logan Lerman as Sidney and Elle Fanning as his neighbor and later wife, Melody. “The transitions between ages — sometimes we had only hours in which to do it,” Lerman recalled.

“We shot 10 days of [age] 18 first, then we shot the [age] 24 segment, and then we shot the 30, with the intention of having a weekend in between each era,” Christensen said. “But actually for Elle and for Logan I had to break the news to them that we were going to have to switch from 18 to 24 over the lunch break.”

Though it seems like such a quick shift in age would be challenging, Fanning explained, “You can’t really think about playing older or playing a certain age, because what does that really mean?” She continued, “I was more interested in where Melody was in her life.”

The script doesn’t take a straightforward chronological approach to those eras, and instead interweaves them throughout, such that it’s only at the end that you know how the characters resolved each of those dramatic moments. Dolan explained that he hoped audiences would connect to that structure because “your life is sometimes a mess in your own mind.” He said, “What we wanted was to give people a puzzle to put together, to reflect on this character and also themselves.”

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