#mustache funk

[retrowaving1]

Why do I appreciate Bob Dylan so much? Well, here are some random thoughts:

My brain literally melts in pleasure when I listen to song by Smerichka, a Ukrainian kind of rebellious (as their music was a complete opposite of what soviet union wanted people to listen to) ensemble from early 70s and realise there's the sound of the guitar which was popularized (if not invented) by Bob Dylan in 1965-66 on his Bring It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde albums.

Like Dude.

Dylan, an American performer and songwriter, created a mixture of American folk and Rock-'n'-roll music which was so iconic that it somehow even got to the Soviet Union despite Bob Dylan's music being prohibited there. Ukrainian Mustache Funk (yes, it's an actual name of this genre) was heavily influenced by the folk motives specific to the Western Ukraine and it's particularly amazing that you can hear the influence of American folk-rock in their music too. It's like a perfect fusion of everything I have always loved and it's only possible because this son of a gun ones invented it and held on to it despite the criticism.

Btw, I was reading BD's biography by Howard Sounes and tried to immerse into the story through re-listening to his albums appropriate to the periods of his life I was reading about, and at some point when I was listening to his debut album I heard his iconic performance of the House of The Rising Sun I started crying like a baby. Why? Well, I realised that, according to the book, even though this particular arrangement of the song was created by Dave Van Ronk, it was Bob Dylan who first recorded it in this sound. This song in this particular arrangement performed by Bob Dylan was so popular, that the Animals made their famous recording of the song being inspired by that specific recording by BD. The song became so famous that somehow it got to the USSR where someone once performed it, some guy from my hometown heard it and learned how to play it, my father heard that someone singing this song (having 0 idea what the original song was like,who first recorded it, who arranged it and so on), learned how to play it himself and many years after taught me how to play it on the piano. So, to cut a long story short, this is one of the first songs I have ever heard in my life and the first song I learned to play, and it is so damn nostalgic to me, and I love it so much, and I have so many warm family memories connected to this song and all this because this little smelly Jewish boy once decided to record it for his debut album in 1962 in Greenwich village so far away from my home. The song is so amazing and timeless that my father who was born 5 years after this song was released on Bob Dylan and legitimately fell in love with it and decided to pass this love to his children. Just how fucking amazing is that ffs

[halflingkima]

recent google searches: how to gently explain to booktokkers that i don't disregard their fravorite "smut" bc i'm a prude, but bc it's bad writing

[stachebracket]

'Stache-Off!! Round 1

[kindlyfunkn]

two matches back to back where i kinda sorta made friends with the killer. stared at them and did a little dance and they left me alone lol

the first match was a legion, he had a bad round and i tried to let him sacrifice me but he told me to go on. every time i encountered him we just looked at each other lol, like two or three times we met face to face and he left me alone it was pretty funny

second was plague, on the new alien map (forget the name lol) i knew she was coming up to the high point and i waited at the stairs for her. she paused when she saw me waiting and reared up to vomit but never did. i did a little dance, she copied me, then i went over the side and landed on the rail and she followed and i walked up and down it. eventually i ran off and thought she was going to resume chase like normal but she just went on lol. though after that interaction she continued playing like normal (ALSO made friends with a vittorio that round like idk if he felt the same but stg we were straight up blowing each other sucking penis bromosexual lovers etc)

got videos of the plague interaction, and one of the legions interactions + the end of the match (wish i couldve gotten the first few times we met); might post if i am able to transfer them to my phone in good quality (it's a complicated process and explanation as to why it is difficult to save my game clips to another device, one that i am not about to go into) or when i get a computer i can save them to a usb drive and do it from there

[ddejavvu]

Thick Thighs Save Lives - Bradley 'Rooster' Bradshaw x Reader x Jake 'Hangman' Seresin

Summary: Being the only aviator with meat on your bones is tough. It's even more tough when you're stuck showering with two of your teammates.

Contents/Warnings: smut (minors dni), double penetration, fingering (vaginal and anal, f receiving), oral (m receiving), dirty talk, shower sex, protected sex, spit kink, body insecurities, mid/plus!sized reader, self-deprecation, arguing, angst with a fluffy/smutty ending

WC: 5.5K / navi

feedback is greatly appreciated! comment, reblog, talk in the tags, send me a message, tell me what you think!

If there’s anything you don’t want to hear during a not-so-friendly game of beach football, it’s ‘shit!’. The exclamation comes from Coyote who’s branched off to your towels on the sand, fingers curled around his watch, “We’re late.”

“How late?” Phoenix is already adjusting her ponytail, as it’s frazzled from the action. She’s squinting in the sun and remedies it by knocking her sunglasses down off of her head and onto her nose. It’s smooth, and she knows it by the soft smirk that curls at her lips.

“We have twenty minutes to get on the road.” 

“Shit,” Rooster parrots, dropping the ball where he stands, which is how you know he’s panicked too, “We all need showers. Penny’s gonna kill us if we stink up the restaurant.”

“We can go in teams,” Fanboy decides, already sprinting over to his towel, “We don’t have time for individual ones.”

Before you can get a word in edgewise Coyote and Phoenix are rushing to join him, Bob hot on their trail. The showers are spacious, sure, but you wouldn’t exactly volunteer to share them with anyone. 

With a terrible sinking feeling in your stomach you realize that the only three left are you, Rooster, and Hangman. That means the only way you’ll get to Penny and Maverick’s engagement party is if you shower together.

They’re already at their towels, scrubbing sand out of their hair and strapping their watches back on. Hangman’s is a thick, black leather band, and you can see flecks of sand marring the sleek strap from where it laid on the towel. Rooster’s is thinner, brown in color and gold around the rim. His is clean, but he puts it on his sweaty, sandy wrist. It won’t be for long.

Both men are shirtless, too-tight jean shorts squeezing their waists. You make a point not to stare as you trek back to your towel, already picking up on their competitive banter before you’ve even stood beside them.

“-probably use all my shampoo,” Hangman scoffs, clenching his towel tight in his fist, “You always steal my shit, Bradshaw.”

“I think it’s only fair seeing as you steal my gel!” Rooster quips back, gesturing to Hangman’s stiff, shiny hair, untouched even after your game, “Isn’t it fucking weird, Y/L/N? How much he uses?”

Rooster looks back at you for confirmation, someone on his side. But you’re too disheartened to respond, dreading your impending doom. All you offer is a meager, “Yeah.”, that curls a frown under Rooster’s mustache.

“You hurt yourself or something?” Hangman raises an eyebrow, stunned by your lack of teasing, “I think we need to call the doctor, you didn’t just insult me.”

“I’m fine.” You grumble, towel held around your waist despite the presence of your rash guard, “Just tired from football.”

“Well get ready,” Rooster warns you, “Mav’s gonna have to tell us all about how he and Penny met, and I’m really hoping he withholds the details on the little rendezvous that got him in trouble with her dad, but I know he won’t.”

You shudder for a moment, if only to please him, to throw him off your scent. You’re tired, there’s not any other reason you’re in a funk. You’re tired.

You are tired. You’re tired of caring, of constantly thinking about it. You’re tired of wearing a rash guard to the beach instead of a swimsuit, because everyone else is smaller than you. You’re tired of watching people’s eyes, tracking them to make sure that if they ever dip below your chest there’s something in front of your stomach to block it from their view. You’re tired of adjusting your uniform to make it looser, you’re tired of leaning against the bar instead of sitting at it, you’re just tired.

You are tired. You’re tired of caring, of constantly thinking about it. You’re tired of wearing a rash guard to the beach instead of a swimsuit, because everyone else is smaller than you. You’re tired of watching people’s eyes, tracking them to make sure that if they ever dip below your chest there’s something in front of your stomach to block it from their view. You’re tired of adjusting your uniform to make it looser, you’re tired of leaning against the bar instead of sitting at it, you’re just tired.

“Hey,” Hangman’s voice breaks you out of your thoughts, admittedly less grating and irritating than it normally is “You sure you’re okay?”

You blink and they’re staring at you, brows furrowed and limbs frozen in place. You wish that the waves lapping gently at the sand would crash onto shore and swallow you whole, sweep you up in a tidal wave of salt water and seaweed so that you wouldn’t have to answer.

“I’m fine,” You grit, slipping your feet into your shoes and rushing to stand outside the showers, “C’mon, we’ll be late.”

--

You had hoped that they’d get too busy bickering with each other to ever find you. But here they come, not five minutes later, just as Phoenix steps out of the steamy bathroom. A towel is wrapped around her torso and Hangman exaggerates his ogling of her, only turning your stomach further.

“Perfect timing,” He drawls, and she rolls her eyes. 

Bob steps out next, taking one look at her face and stepping in front of her, “Your turn, Bagman. Try not to use all the gel.”

“See?” Rooster nudges you, his elbow against your arm as Bob and Phoenix walk away, “I told you! It’s absurd, he slathers it on like cement.”

“He’s gotta,” Coyote drawls, reaching over to knock on Jake’s head, “Otherwise his head’d sound as empty as it is.”

The two engage in a good-natured shoving match, but it’s one that nearly sends Coyote’s towel cascading to the ground, and you keep your eyes firmly on the tiny bottles of shampoo and conditioner that you’d brought. You read over the ingredients, as if sodium laureth sulfate and glycol distearate will keep your mind off of your humiliation.

“You said you’re fine,” Bradley murmurs from beside you, “But if it’s something you just don’t wanna say around Hangman, he’s not listening.”

Part of you is less embarrassed to be honest and exposed to Rooster than Hangman. But he’s still a man, an incredibly fit one at that, and you’re not sure you’d ever want to reveal it to either of them.

“I’m just nervous,” You tell him the only part of the truth you’re willing to admit. I’ve never... showered with a- a boy before. A man.”

You cringe at your misstep, but if Bradley’s amused by it, he doesn’t show it. Instead he hums, sympathetically so, “We’ll turn around, honey. Don’t worry about it, okay?”

“You’ll turn around,” You mutter, “I think it’ll just egg Jake on further.”

“What’s this I hear about eggin’ me on?” A familiar southern twang makes you tense as the man it’s coming from appears by your side, bumping his hip into yours, “You ready for our steam session, sweets?”

“Leave her alone, Hangman,” Rooster groans, feet slapping against the tiles as he goes to adjust the water. He shoves at Hangman’s back as he passes, and you stifle a giggle as the man nearly falls over.

“Hey, she’s the one that chose to shower with us,” Jake insists, and Bradley’s scoff is enough for you not to fight back, “And I would, too, if I were you, darlin’. Do you know how many ladies are lined up to see how hung Hangman is?”

You force a gag, “The only lady I see here is myself, and I’d rather smear wet sand in my eyes.”

“That’s what I’m gonna do to you if you don’t turn around and shut up,” Bradley speaks through the roar of the shower water, steam already rising from its fall, “Just drop your pants and wash your ass, so Y/L/N can shower to herself.”

“Well, well, well,” Jake smirks, towel cinched around his waist in only one hand as he stalks for the showers, “Looks like one of the ladies lined up is Bradshaw himself. Wanna see it, Rooster? Here it is.”

Jake drops his towel ceremoniously, and Bradley’s face morphs into a grimace as he turns away hastily.

“My fucking eyes,” He laments, and you pause in gathering your toilettries to laugh, while also trying very hard not to stare at Jake, “Oh my god, Y/N, you won’t have to worry about me seeing you. I’m going to pour shampoo into my eyes until I go blind.”

Jake realizes you’re taking a little too long getting ready, cocking a hip as he leans his head back to stare down his nose at you, “So what, you gonna ditch dinner, Y/L/N? Whatcha waitin’ for?”

“She’s waiting for you to stop being a perv and turn around,” Bradley comes to your rescue once again, and thankfully, Jake seems to realize it’s a real issue, pivoting until he’s facing the shower wall.

“I think she just wants a nice view of our asses,” Jake theorizes, standing with his clear on display, “Which is better, Y/N? Mine or Chicken’s?”

“Chicken,” Rooster grumbles under his breath, and if you were brave enough to actually declare a winner, you’d give it to him just for that. But, Hangman’s form is rather impressive, all tight curves and tan skin and-

And you shouldn’t be looking. You clear your throat awkwardly, peeling off your rash guard as Jake sponges his side down. There’s sand running thick down the drain and you hope it doesn’t back up, something you’d feel terrible for Penny to have to clean up.

“Uh,” Bradley stills in his place, “Shit, I think I left my shampoo over there. Y/N, could you…?”

“I got it,” You hum, reaching over for the blue bottle and tucking it in his carefully, blindly outstretched hand, “Thanks for, um- here.”

“Yep,” He nods, smearing a dot of the substance on his palm and lathering it through his hair.

“Oh no,” Jake mimics Bradley’s previous predicament, dropping the bottle in his hand so that it rests between his legs, “Y/N, could you-”

“Ass,” You drawl, reaching forwards to butt your palm against his back. He stumbles forward with a laugh, catching himself on the railing. He bends down to reach for it and you’re nervous he’ll peek at your body from between his legs, but he stays respectful, something you know he is at his core even if he pretends differently.

You find yourself relaxing against the tiled floor of the shower, feet firmly planted instead of poised to run. As much as you know neither of the men in front of you would make any rude comments about your body or your weight, there’s still the nauseating fear that they might think differently of you having seen you completely unobscured. So you’re thankful for the privacy, that lasts… well, until it doesn’t.

The snap of your conditioner cap catches the skin of your pointed finger in its jaws and a gasp clutches tight at your lungs.

“Son of a bitch!” You cry, waves of pain flowing through your finger and out towards the rest of them. On cue each man turns, eyes wide and fear-stricken, without thinking.

You know they didn’t do it on purpose. You know they instinctively thought you were hurt, and wanted to help. You know they didn’t mean to look at you. But the withering feeling in your guts knows no logic, only fear.

They’re looking, it hisses, They’re looking at everything. The way your stomach pudges into a roll at the base. The way your breasts sag. The way your thighs stretch, marks littering their stems, and present no gap.

“You’re bleeding.” Bradley observes, eyes trained faithfully on your finger, “I’ll get a bandaid.”

He rushes for the cabinets outside the shower, dripping water over the floor. Jake stands, staring, but you’re too humiliated to glance at his face and notice the soft pinky blush on his cheeks that’s spreading to his ears. 

“Here,” Bradley speaks from behind you, though he molds himself to your side when you’re still frozen in fear. He brushes a towel over your cut, the turquoise material staining red. He then undoes the waxy paper wrapping from the bandaid, sticking it tight to your skin.

“It’ll get wet,” He reminds you, “But it’ll stop soap from stinging it.”

You don’t even thank him. At your prolonged silence he glances up at Hangman, intent on giving him a concerned glance, but he sees the man’s eyes rove over your form and snaps.

“Dude,” Bradley utters gruffly, “Don’t be a perv. Come on, turn around.”

When Jake stays just as still as you, he reaches for him, shoving hard, “I said turn around!:

“Please, Jake,” You whimper, tears brimming in your eyes, “Turn around.”

“You’re crying.” Jake snaps out of his trance to frown up at you, and Bradley keeps pushing, an insistent thorn in his side, “Why are you crying?”

“Because you’re-!” You gush, lip wobbling, “You’re looking at me, and- and judging me, and-”

“Judging you,” He scoffs, eyes nearly bugging out of his head, “Best body I’ve ever seen. Case closed. Court dismissed.”

“Shut up,” You seethe, tears finally dripping down your cheeks, “Just shut up! You think this is fucking funny? You don’t think there’s a reason I didn’t want to shower with you?”

“You’re private, I get that.” He scoffs. “But if you think I’m judgin’ any part’a that, then you’re stupid, too.”

“Not the compliment you think it is,” Bradley mutters, hands still prying at Jake’s shoulder, “She told you to turn around, just do it.”

“No,” Jake doubles down, pushing Bradley away and stalking towards you, “I wanna know why you think so goddamn low of me. You really think I’d rope a woman into a shower and then pick apart what she looks like? You think that low of me?”

“It’s not about you,” You gush, hands at your sides in frustration, “It's about me! And my fucking body, okay? I’m not calling you a dick for judging me, I’m calling myself-”

“What?” Jake’s head tilts to the side, eyes glinting dangerously, “What are you calling yourself?”

“....Gross.” You finish lamely, the fire in your chest extinguishing with the poof of a sigh that escapes your lips.

He’s grabbing your hand without thinking about it, gentle but firm. You stare at him, anxiety-riddled.

“Listen here, girly. I’ve let you get away with sayin’ a lotta things about yourself. Dumbass I agree with, especially considering these circumstances. I’ve heard clumsy and stubborn, those I don’t have an issue with either. But don’t look me in my fuckin’ face and tell me you’re gross, ‘cause it’s an insult to me and my tastes.”

He squeezes your hand once before releasing it, and it feels more now like a heartfelt gesture than a threatening one. You’re breathing heavy, lungs cut short from the adrenaline of the moment, Even though Bradley isn’t pushing him anymore, standing on the sidelines waiting, watching, Hangman turns around without another word. He scrubs aggressively through his scalp and you’re almost surprised nothing bleeds, your mouth hung slightly open and your tongue leaden over your teeth.

“I’m not your type.” You finally manage to mutter, voice taut.

“Yes you are,” Jake scoffs, “How would you know?”

“I saw you eyeing up Phoenix earlier.” You roll your eyes, and if Bradley hadn’t turned around again you’d have flashed him an exasperated look.

“So? A man can like several shapes,” Jake boasts, voice losing venom, “Plus I ogle Phoenix just to piss her off.”

“It works.” Bradley cuts in, and you snort.

“Point is,” Jake drawls, and you’re sure if Bradley was in his line of sight he’d have been the victim of a very withering stare, “Don’t discredit yourself. You’ve got sexy ass thighs, woman.”

“Jesus, Jake,” Bradley sighs, “Can you just hurry up, already? I’m sure there’s nothing more Y/L/N wants than to get rid of you.”

“Oh, shut up, lapdog,” Jake deadpans, “You can’t tell me you don’t agree.”

Bradley’s silent for a moment, and your gut churns.

“Whether I do or don’t is irrelevant,” He chooses his words carefully, “Let’s just leave Y/N alone.”

“He totally does,” Jake snickers, “Hear that, Y/L/N? It’s his blush.”

“Like you weren’t blushing!” Bradley scoffs, “I looked up at you and thought you’d been temporarily replaced with a baboon’s ass.”

“Oh, that’s funny,” Jake drawls, “That’s what I think every time I see you, porn stache. Then I remember it’s just your natural charm.”

The crisis has been averted enough for you to let out a shaky laugh at their insults, and the sound catches both men’s attention.

“Listen, Y/L/N,” Jake starts, voice much kinder and softer now, “The point of this isn’t me telling Bradshaw he’s got the face of an ass. The point is to get it through your thick fuckin’ skull; you’re pretty damn sexy, y’hear?”

You snort at his callous nature, “No one’s ever told me anything like that before.”

“Yeah?’ He pauses,towel in hand that he nimbly swings over his shoulder, “Well, pardon me for lookin’, and even more for touchin’, but everyone else is fuckin’ insane.”

Before you can process his words he reaches down to palm at your thigh, a hefty squeeze that sends your flesh spilling against his palm. You stiffen, even though he stays politely away from your ass, encroaching only on territory he could also grab while you’re clothed. The feeling of his touch, no matter how chaste, elicits a noise from your throat that you wish you could pass off for a scream.

It’s not.

It’s a moan.

He stops where he’d begun pulling away, eyes sharpening slightly. You don’t dare look at Bradley, but if you did, you’d see his cock twitch.

“Did I hurt you?” Jake asks, voice low.

All you can do is shake your head, teeth digging into your lower lip helplessly.

“Did you like it?” He tries again, but this time he doesn’t accept body language as an answer/ Still hunched, he ignores your nodding and reaches up with his free hand to tug your bottom lip out from under your teeth.

“I asked you a question,” Jake croons, voice smooth and soft, “Did you like it?”

All you can whimper is a meager ‘Yes’.

Do you want me to do it again?”

“Yes.” Stronger, this time.

His hand plants itself firmly back over your thigh, thumb stretching towards the curve of your ass this time. It’s a little more suggestive, and a lot more alluring.

“Jesus,” Jake groans, kneading the soft flesh of your doughy thigh between his fingers, “Bradshaw, c’mere for a second.”

He hesitates, “Do you want me there, Y/N?”

“Yes,” You nod once more, legs stiffening and thigh tensing against Jake’s palm, “I- I do.”

“You take front,” Jake instructs, falling into place behind you with his hands now greedily prying at your ass, “And I’ll take back.”

The smile that Bradley offers you when he steps in front of you is nothing short of dreamy. It’s enough to make you blush, and he lets out a soft, breathy laugh at how forward Hangman is being while he stands giddily in front of you.

“If you say hi,” Jake drawls, hooking his chin over your shoulder and reaching around your front to grip at the seams of your inner thighs while glaring at Bradley suspiciously, “I’m going to slap you.”

“I wasn’t going to say hi,” Bradley scoffs, and you can tell by his blush that he totally was.

“Jesus, enough yammering,” Jake scoffs, turning his head to press his dewy lips into your neck, “We’re gonna be late for dinner.”

You worry, for a moment, that he’ll let go. That he’ll walk away, get dressed for the restaurant, and pretend nothing ever happened. But that’s not what he does, of course. Instead, you feel the hard press of his cock against your ass.

“I’ll be gentle,” Jake croons, feeling you tense as his hands smooth over the dip of your ass, “We’ll go slow, okay?”

“Real slow,” Bradley murmurs, and it catches your attention, reeling it back to him. You realize he’s standing much closer to you now than he had been before, lips nearly brushing yours.

The second your lips meet his in a kiss, Hangman smooths his hand between the globes of your ass. You squirm at the sensitive feeling, foreign as his fingertip brushes against your hole. But he doesn’t let up, and neither does Bradley.

Rooster’s tongue slides against your bottom lip, warm and wet. At the same time Hangman’s hands squeeze your ass, pulling apart each side and smoothing down the skin between. It sends a shiver up your spine that escapes in a puff of air between your lips, one that Bradley eagerly swallows.

Bradley’s hands grab your cheeks, thumbs brushing near your eyes and yanking you closer. You can feel Jake’s fingers carefully prodding and pressing at the tight ring of your asshole, a hitch in your breath causing you to bite down on Bradley’s lip.

“Fuck,” He hisses, coming away with a red lip and a guttural groan, “Jake, just- let up. Me first, she’s obviously sensitive.”

“She’s just tight,” Jake murmurs, lips pressing to the expanse of your shoulder, “Nothin’ I can’t fix.”

“You’ll have plenty of time to fix it,” Bradley grumbles, tearing a condom open with his teeth that he’d snagged from his wallet, “‘Cause I’m going in first, and you- shit!”

His fingers, slippery from the water and probably excess soap, drop the condom. The way that you’re arched into Hangman’s touch means that your thighs are squeezed together and bent slightly, and there’s no better way to catch a condom than between your thighs.

The foil wrapper sticks between your legs, making it easy for Bradley to pluck it out and toss the wrapper aside. Penny will find it tomorrow, because you’re sure as hell not gonna remember to get it.

“Well, whaddya know,” Jake drawls, grinning against the skin of your neck so hard you can feel it, “What they say is true. Thick thighs save lives.”

You face-plant into the water-dropped skin of Bradley’s neck, ignoring the way Hangman snickers.

“Actually, I think they just stopped a life from being conceived,” Bradley reasons, only a few sloppy strokes of his cock needed to easily slip the condom on, “But that probably saved my life, ‘cause if I got you pregnant in Penny’s bathroom, she’d slit my throat.”

The tip of Bradley’s hardened dick presses to your inner thigh, skin seldom touched and sensitive. You lean into it, but Hangman’s fingers follow, gently stroking over the rim of your ass. It’s starting to feel less foreign and more pleasurable, a twinge of something sweet licking at the underside of your belly like a rogue flame.

Bradley gently presses two fingers against your slit, ever-considerate in making sure you’re sufficiently prepped, but his eyes widen at how much slick he’s greeted with just past your folds.

“Holy shit,” He breathes, nose nudging yours as his lips brush with your own, “You’re wet.”

“Duh,” Hangman scoffs, and one of his hands abandons your ass to slip between your folds, collecting slick on their tips and dragging it back to your ass, “I’ve been touchin’ up on her for a while now.”

“Pardon me for thinking that’d work like an umbrella on a rainy day,” Bradley bitches, but you cut him off with a kiss before he can spout any other mildly insulting metaphors for how bad he thinks Hangman is in bed. You’ll vouch if you have to, he knows what he’s doing.

With each slow circle that his fingers trace around your rim, you bend back into him. Until you can feel his cock pressed stiff to your backside,just as Bradley presses his tip flush with your clit.

“Oh-,” You gasp, clit sending a shockwave of electric lust reverberating throughout your body, “Bradley, I- Inside, please, now!”

“I’m coming, sweetheart,” He croons, speaking in a velvety soft hum against your lips, “Don’t worry.”

He holds to his promise, sliding his dick down from where it’s pressed to your clit and easing it between your folds. You heave a blissful sigh at the feeling of being full, and it makes you rock backwards into Hangman’s fingers.

One breaches your hole, slipping inside with an agonizingly pleasurable burn. The stretch feels heavenly, especially because your cunt is already stretched to accommodate Bradley’s cock that slowly bottoms out inside of you.

“Good,” Jake praises, kissing beneath your ear, “I knew you could do it.”

Rooster lets out a groan at the feeling of your involuntary clench around him, eyes screwed shut. His forehead is braced against yours and you take the liberty of engaging him in another kiss, letting the pleasure of Jake’s fingers at your hole compel you to lick into Bradley’s mouth.

Being pleasured from both sides is too overwhelming. You feel yourself already rising to a climax, pressed on by both Bradley’s thick cock grating against your insides and Jake’s fingers.

You smooth your tongue over Bradley’s, gripping his shoulder when he increases his pace to be steadily fast. He’s not speeding through anything, but he’s not slow either, and it makes your insides burn.

The feeling of his cock ramming over and over and over against that spongy spot deep within you is too much, especially when Hangman slides a single, thick finger into your ass. You can’t help it, your orgasm hits you like a freight train (or perhaps a fighter jet), and you clench sporadically around Bradley’s thick, hard cock.

You whine relentlessly into his mouth, fingers clawing and prying at his damp skin as your knees go weak. You’re surprised you stay standing at all, but you funnel all of your orgasmic vigor into the kiss that Bradley eagerly licks out of you, and clutching his shoulders is enough.

Coming down from your high is jarring, especially when you realize that the steady pressure against your clit had been Bradley’s thumb the entire time. The pleasurable sensation is starting to sour with the unpleasant sting of overstimulation, and you tear his hand away eagerly, “Too much.”

“Sorry,” Bradley grunts into the kiss, the bristles of his mustache grating at your lip. 

Bradley pulls out of you, still hard and red-tipped. 

Jake takes one look down, his free hand sliding up your back while his other stays firm at your ass, “Those were pretty sounds. Look’t what they did to Bradshaw. See that, honey?”

You nod, breathless as you stare at Bradley’s impressive length.

“I think you should return the favor,” Jake muses, putting pressure against your back so that you bend in half, “Suck him off, darlin’.”

You land at eye-level with Bradley’s covered cock, and you can’t get the condom off fast enough. You drag your tongue along the underside of Bradley’s hard dick, taking the heated length into your hands and squeezing fondly at his balls. He swears low and gruff under his breath, watching your tongue snake against his slit.

Your lips curl around the head of Bradley’s cock, and the way that Jake adds a second finger to your ass makes you suck hard. You feel Bradley’s cock twitch on your tongue, and you scrape your teeth feather-light along him as you take more of him into your mouth.

He tries to keep himself still, tries not to face-fuck you, but he’s hopeless. His hips jolt forwards and you gag at the feeling of his dick hitting the back of your throat. It makes him groan, fists clenched at his side.

You bob and suckle along every inch of Bradley’s dick, licking up the vein that runs along the side and hollowing your cheeks while Jake fingers you open. When there are suddenly no fingers in your ass anymore at all, you whimper, taking Bradley’s cockhead into your fist while you try craning your neck to look back at Hangman.

“Keep going,” Jake directs you, nodding his head towards your fist, “He’s not done, and neither am I.”

You slip the hand that’s curled around Rooster’s dick and slide it up his length, rubbing gently at the base while you kitten lick the head. He pants and groans, bucking into your fist and subsequently your throat. The feeling of Jake’s dick pressed tight to your stretched hole makes you jolt forwards, and you face-fuck yourself on Bradley’s dick.

“Jesus,” He hisses, “You’re- you’re good at this, baby. C’mon, a- a little more, now.”

You let out a scream muffled by Bradley’s cock as Jake slides himself into your ass, dick grating delightfully tight against your rim. Once he bottoms out he sets a merciless pace, giving you no time to adjust before you’re being hammered into like he’s a feral animal.

“See that, Bradshaw?” Jake boasts, sending a hefty slap to your ass, “Told you she could do it. Perfect ass.”

“I see,” Bradley pants, hands tangled in your hair while you bob on his cock, “I- I’m gonna cum, honey.”

There’s barely any warning before the sight of Jake’s cock ramming into your ass gets to be too much for Bradley, but you don’t need it. You’re perfectly content to welcome his warm seed down your throat, letting it paint the inside of your mouth as you tongue him dry.

You don’t realize you’re using Bradley’s cock as a pacifier until he pushes at your forehead, hissing in oversensitivity, “Okay, okay! It’s too much,” He soothes you by sticking two of his slick-stained, thick fingers between your lips instead, “Here, honey. There y’go.”

Drool gathers at the seam of your lips and Bradley smears it away from your mouth, gathering it on his palm and licking it away. He groans at the taste, his own seed permeating your saliva, “Messy girl.”

Jake isn’t satisfied with his lack of action. Apparently, jackhammering into your ass isn’t quite enough for the guy, and he fists a hand in your hair to yank you upright with a grunt.

Bradley’s fingers slip from your lips with a pop and you cry out as Hangman manhandles you, pleasurable pain flooding your senses from the hair-pulling that start waves of a second orgasm swelling below your belly.

“Open,” Jake commands, keeping your neck bent backwards so that his face hovers over yours. You open your mouth without hesitation, and he spits inside.

Warm saliva, cooling quickly the more you stick your tongue out, pools by your throat. You eagerly swallow without being told,drool now seeping backwards down your face and towards your eyes. Jake licks it off with a broad, wet swipe of his tongue, and smears it against your lips.

The kiss is messy, upside-down and drooly, but it’s hot. Jake’s tongue licks against yours and his teeth nip at your bottom lip, a real spider-man style porno.

Your spine aches from being bent like a curly-q, but the ecstasy bleeding into your core is enough to push it to the back of your mind. You reach down to finger your clit, a whimper bleeding into Jake’s mouth at the action.

“Gonna cum, honey?” Jake drawls, “Sweet pussy’a yours gonna clench around nothin’?”

His southern drawl is stronger when he’s fucking, you note. It’s attractive.

“Not nothing,” Bradley volunteers, sticking his spit-soaked fingers up into your gaping cunt, “Cum, baby.”

You’re very good at following orders.

Your second orgasm hurts, in the best way. It tears you apart from the inside out, cunt clenching tight at Bradley’s fingers as he curls them inside of you. Jake bites hard at your lip as you ride out your second orgasm, and his dick twitches inside of you once, twice, three times before he’s letting himself go in tandem.

He fills you with warm cum, the substance gushing out of your gaped hole and oozing out around his own cock. 

“Jesus fuck,” He snaps, the words an unintelligible grunt against your lips, “So tight, and so sexy.”

Bradley’s free hand braces itself on your stomach, and the touch doesn’t make you recoil like it normally would. It’s lewd, but being splattered with their cum really makes you believe that they’re not going to judge your body.

Instead you lean into the touch, letting Bradley embrace you as you come down from your high a moaning pile of mush.

“Slow,” You warn Jake, who’s never heard the word a day in his life. He follows directions, though, easing his dick out of you and making sure it doesn’t burn.

“We need another shower,” Bradley pants after a moment of fucked-out silence. 

You nod, brain foggy, “Yeah. We- we can’t show up to the restaurant smelling like sex. They’ll know.”

--

As it turns out, you don’t need to smell like sex for everyone to know you’ve just had it. You show up forty-five minutes late, sweaty-faced and rosy-lipped, all slightly out of breath. Your dress is rumpled, and Bradley’s tie is haphazardly secured.

“Oh,” Phoenix grimaces, nose scrunching in disgust, “Gross, guys.”

“In my bathroom?” Penny looks aghast, “You better not have clogged the shower drain.”

“Easy,” Maverick throws a hand out over her own, “We’ve done it in there one too many times to judge.”

“Gross!” Payback rears away from the older pilot sitting next to him, “Everybody needs to stop getting laid, but if you do, don’t tell me about it!”

[pupsmailbox]

1970's ID PACK

NAMES︰ adanna. adonis. adrienne. alan. alberto. alice. ama. amara. andrew. angela. antonio. april. arlo. asha. aspen. audre. august. bella. betty. bianca. brody. bruce. calvin. cass. chester. chika. chris. claudia. craig. curtis. dahlila. dahlilah. daisy. dale. daniel. darryl. dean. del. dennis. desta. diana. dolores. don. donna. doris. dorothy. duane. dylan. eddie. edwin. enrique. eric. fez. flower. frank. franklin. freddie. gary. gene. glenn. gloria. guy. harvey. hooper. hyde. imani. jack. jackie. jacqueline. jamie. janet. janice. janis. javier. jay. jean. jerome. jerry. jo. joe. joel. johnny. joni. joreen. jorge. judith. julio. keith. kelly. kelso. kenneth. kirk. kurk. lawrence. lee. lelise. leon. leslie. liza. lois. lonnie. louis. louise. luce. marilyn. marjorie. mark. marla. marshall. martha. max. mona. neil. nia. omar. pat. patti. perry. quint. randy. raul. ray. ricky. rita.. robin. rodney. roland. ronnie. roy. russell. ruth. sergio. shirley. sid. sidney. simone. stan. stanley. steven. stevie. stuart. ted. terri. terry. thandi. thema. theodore. timothy. vincent. virginia. warren. wayne. wes. zuri.

PRONOUNS︰ atari/atari. boogie/boogie. bright/bright. cass/cassette. cassette/tape. color/color. dance/dance. disc/disco. disco/disco. flower/flower. flower/power. fresh/fresh. funk/funk. funk/funky. glam/glam. glam/glamorous. glam/rock. grease/grease. groove/groove. groove/groovy. groovy/groovy. hip/hip. hip/hippie. hip/hop. hippie/hippie. muse/music. mush/mushroom. music/music. must/mustache. oran/orange. peace/peace. pop/pop. punk/punk. rain/rainbow. rainbow/rainbow. sing/sing. spiral/spiral. stripe/stripes. sun/shine. tape/tape. tree/tree. wind/wind. ☎️. ☮. ☮️. ✌. ❀. 🌈. 🍄. 🎱. 🎵. 🎸. 💿. 📀. 📺. 📼. 🔮.

[xxnomadsxx]

RANDOM Trolls HEAD-CANNON!!!!!

1. What if trolls would communicate through Dance~ (LIKE BEE’S) sometimes the music at a party is too Loud to hear over, so they will just dance at one another to communicate (or out of boredom)

2. Pop trolls are the only ones able to use their hair the easiest, in the first movie we get a lot of hair action with the POP Trolls in the second movie it’s barely used the funk trolls don’t use it the classical trolls the techno trolls. NONE of them use their hair, the country trolls use a mustache but nothing else. Even the Rock trolls didn’t use it but when rock Branch used his mullet it took him a few seconds and concentration to get it to grab Poppy. WHAT am I building too? Good question I think the Pop trolls are the only ones who have a good enough control over their hair because they started gaining those hair abilities due to the bergans catching and eating the pop trolls and they started gaining a defense mechanism against predators (Bergans).

[davycoquette]

Acrostic Sentence Tag Game

Thank you for the tag, @sableglass! The word you gave me was

STRANGE

Soon you forget all about how you ran away because of her, because you didn’t want her to know you threw your life away. You can’t think why you did it, now, so it must be the devil is real. It must be he’s as real as the wild pining that dragged you out of the wilderness to tempt fate underneath bridges downtown. As real as the vanity of being wanted. As real as the mounting fear that you did it because you wanted something terrible to happen to you.

Teenage Shiloh contemplates returning home to his mother.

The last of the four horsemen does not come in.

From an old west classic saloon shoot-out scene. Four bounty hunters have ridden up to the saloon and three have filed through the door.

Right after you see it, you smell it, and it doesn’t smell anything like a man but that’s when you know it used to be one.

Child Shiloh finds a body in the crick.

Antebellum propriety is long wrung out of him, and even the treacly Charleston drawl has abraded shrewd and terse. It suits him. He’s wide-faced, with little dark eyes nobody trusts. His eyebrows are puckish and full, contrary to the sparse mustache that slants like a gable roof over his mouth. The white men call him amigo and the women call him Oliver, and the locals don’t speak to him at all.

Reintroduction to an old west story character who grew up on his parent's rice plantation in Charleston, South Carolina.

No one blamed her; this was not Donovan’s first time careening into the light.

From an old west piece called The River King. Refers to a woman's apathy as Don Rucker lays dying.

“Good. You look like you could stand to set a while. Go on — I got the laundry. You’re jes droppin’ it on the ground, anyhow.”

Arabel, daughter of the leader of an outlaw gang, suggests Ruck fuck off and let her get the chores done.

Every place is the same to you, isn’t it? You see this ancient land with forests older than the continent itself rooted to the ruins of mountains that used to pierce the sky. You see rushing whitewater and brightly colored birds and rolling fields of wildflowers, and you smell honeysuckles and pluck blackberries off the bush in the summer. Schoolhouses and clotheslines and governments – but what do you care? You never cared about home or community. Hell, the same town you were born in, the place where you grew up – it was one of these places. And now? Empty, smoldering. They say it’ll be a hundred years before the fire under the earth burns out, before that place looks like anything but a scene transplanted out of hell.

This one's from an RP character profile. Fella is a lackey for a coal mining company that's ravaging an Appalachian town.

Taglist:

@albatris

@capnmachete

@harmonic-melodii

@illarian-rambling

@michellekarnold

@nathaniel-zellos

@saturnine-saturneight

Sorry if y'all already got tagged in this one!

Also, OPEN TAG!

Your word is: FUNK

[grendel-menz]

hi hi do u have more info abt ada? she’s so cool

Omg yeah!!

She’s one of my older OCs and belongs in The Sticks story. She’s Kamila’s younger sister by 3 years, and a big people person.

I wanted to put a spin on the ‘innocent/bright eyed/kinder than most’ little sister character type by having Ada be this person who’s too giving and kind due to a lack of self respect and preservation. She’s a doormat and is often treated as a pseudo-therapist or mother to others despite being one of the younger characters; taking on burden after burden with a smile only to stress in private.

Ada’s an optimist who has doubts about staying that way, and lives for others. Rashaad (her husband) and Trevor (her found family) are really the only ones who know her deeply enough and are around her often enough to really get the pressures she suffers from, internal and external. Her sister, Kamila, is too wrapped up in her own self loathing to see how large her sister’s is. Kamila is also just a lot less outwardly emotional than Ada and gets rattled when it comes to comfort or comforting. Kamila thinks she ruined Ada by being a bad sister and Ada thinks Kamila hung the sun and stars.

Also sorry it’s sadder gdgdgdgd. She’s pretty goofy outside of her funks, and has a sense of humor that’s very Facebook mom. She owns a lot of minions coffee mugs and mustache patterned clothes. Ada buys Rashaad a lot of frankly tasteless and corny shirts and dutifully he wears them all.

She’s definitely a character that’s tough to write, not because I don’t know her throughly bc honestly she’s one of the most fleshed I out characters I have, but because I’m an older sister and I stew. I love her sm.

[timptoe]

And I Know It

For @bigplaceexchange this year, I got to write for the lovely Viggorrah on Ao3 about Ashley and Kaidan and how much I love their friendship. This fic is based on a tumblr post I saw once and stupidly didn't save that's stuck with me; ping me if you know the one I'm talking about.

Because sometimes, the way forward is a silly t-shirt, a good friend, and a little bit of Latin.

----

We headed to the bar, baby Don’t be nervous No shoes, no shirt And I still get service Watch

 - LMFAO, “Sexy and I Know It”

——

“What.”

“Hm?”

Kaidan pops his head up out of his reverie, turning to look at whatever it is that’s pissing Ashley off in this particular moment. 

“What. Is. That.”

Her flat growl immediately puts him on high alert. He scans for threats in a quick, sharp glance around the area. The salarian working that kiosk? Looks harmless. The batarians reading at that tea shop? Maybe, but they seem pretty engaged in their books. That guy crossing the promenade with the mustache? Tacky, but non-threatening.

He furrows his brow. Nothing in particular stands out to him amongst the crowds and bric-a-brac of Zakera Ward. 

Focus, Alenko. Put Eletania out of your mind. You’re an officer, never off duty. Try again.

He sweeps their surroundings again in an instant, coming up empty. But the look on Ashley’s frozen, gobsmacked face is unmistakable. What is he missing?

“Williams, what’s—“

She pushes past him, rushing toward the kiosk, and for a fraction of a second, he preps for combat. He squares his shoulders, plants his feet, feels the hair on the back of neck stand up as he begins reaching for the biotic energy inside him. Whatever that salarian’s up to, he’s got Ashley’s back.

And then she turns around, and he sees the unrestrained glee on her face.

“LT, look! Look at this!”

She waves him over. The blue aura around his fingertips fades as he walks forward, utterly confused. The kiosk itself isn't particularly remarkable, reminding him of those kitschy, ticky-tacky souvenir stands in every mall in Vancouver. Apparently some things are universal. Mugs with asari quotes he guesses are famous, keychains with turian names that must be common, hats of various sizes to fit the heads of various species all gathered together in a garish display of consumerism and unnecessary excess.

But Ashley is focused on a single shirt.

She holds it up proudly, looking at it in wonder. “What is this?” she squeaks. Actually squeaks. He hasn’t known her that long, but he would’ve bet the Normandy itself that Gunnery Chief Ashley Williams was incapable of squeaking in something like pure delight. She turns it around, holding it up to her torso to show it off. Dark blue background, bright gold letters. At first he thinks it’s a misprint. “SEC-C?” he says cautiously, brow furrowing.

All at once, the pun hits him like a geth stalker falling from the ceiling.

“SEC-C!” Ashley shouts with laughter.

Kaidan groans.

“Oh, c’mon LT,” she says, impish mischief all over her face. “Get your head outta whatever funk it’s been since we left the planet of the apes and bask in the glorious mess of this shirt with me.”

He rolls his eyes, not at all in the mood for this. “‘Mess’ is the right word.”

She sticks her tongue out at him.

“And surely that pun doesn’t translate, I mean do turians even have—“

“That one’s been pretty popular with our human patrons, sir,” pipes up the annoyingly helpful salarian. “Shall I ring it up for you?”

“No.”

“Yes,” Ashley says enthusiastically, pushing between them and eagerly proffering her omnitool. 

In moments, the transaction completed, the pair are standing in the center of the promenade, alternately admiring and abhorring the piece of fabric in Ashley’s hands.

“Is this not the greatest thing you’ve ever seen?” Ashley says, voice full of awe.

Kaidan levels a look at her. “You can’t be serious.”

“It’s incredible,” she murmurs, taking in every inch of her prize.

“Please tell me you’re not going to wear it.”

Without a word, she strips off her regulation uniform tunic, throwing it over Kaidan’s shoulder. He barely has time to blush, avert his eyes, decide if he even should avert his eyes, before she dons the new shirt. She pulls at it, testing the fit, the feel, the way it drapes over her lithe, solid shoulders.

“Something’s not quite right.”

“No kidding,” he mutters, idly folding her uniform tunic and tucking it under one arm.

She ignores him, looking down at the shirt with a critical, almost tactical eye. Suddenly, she snaps her fingers, nodding once.

And without a word, she reaches up and tears off both sleeves.

“You have got to be kidding me,” Kaidan says.

Ashley strikes a pose, bare arms flexing with her balled-up fists on her hips. “What do you think?”

He won’t deny that she looks good. Really good. Well, he won’t deny it to himself, but out loud? Absolutely. “You look ridiculous.”

She grins, dangerous sparkle in her eye. “C’mon. Don’t you think I look—“

“Please don’t say—“

“SEC-C?”

The sound of his deep sigh is thoroughly drowned out by her joyous, I-am-too-pleased-with-myself cackle.

He sits down on a nearby bench, watching his fellow soldier delight in accosting random passers-by with manic enthusiasm. His exasperation is mostly feigned, if he’s honest with himself. It’s good to see Ashley happy, unburdened, for even just a moment on this tour. So much of what they’ve seen, the evil they’re up against, is hard to process. Might as well enjoy the little spaces of joy they can find.

He watches in horror as Shepard, wide eyes unseeing, crumples to the ground.

Kaidan takes a deep breath, willing the panic tightening his chest to ease. Shepard’s fine, he’s up in the Council chambers. Stop it.

“C’mon. Your turn.”

He snaps his head up, Ashley’s outstretched hand dominating his field of vision. “Huh?”

She pauses for a second, and when he doesn’t take her hand fast enough, she reaches down, grabs his arm, and roughly hauls him to his feet. “Your turn,” she repeats.

“For what?”

“This was for me,” she says, gesturing to the ridiculous shirt. “Now we do something for you.”

He shakes his head. “No, we don’t—“

“That wasn’t a suggestion, LT.” Her grip on his arm tightens. 

He purses his lips, bemused. “You know I outrank you, right,” he says flatly.

She shrugs. “Fuck that. We’re off duty.”

“Ashley—“

“You need a drink. More than one.” She tugs his arm, not letting go, but with little enough force that he could easily stand his ground if he wanted to.��My choice, he realizes, genuinely touched by the veiled tenderness of the gesture.

So he allows her to move him. A little. A grin lights up her face, infectious in a different way from the one at the kiosk.

He can’t help but grin back.

Read the rest on Ao3.

[renlyslittlerose]

Do you think tumblr would cut me off mid-funk if I posted a photograph of a figurine I bought today, of a penis and balls with a mustache?

Because I feel he ought to be shared

[dailyanarchistposts]

Chapter Four. The Cult of Masculinity

The monumentalism of fascism would seem to be a safety mechanism against the bewildering multiplicity of the living. The more lifeless, regimented, and monumental reality appears to be, the more secure the men feel. The danger is being alive itself. —Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies [88]

Roberta Pughe was in second grade when her family moved to Fort Lauderdale. The family attended the church run by the Reverend D. James Kennedy on Commercial Boulevard. She grew up, along with the congregation, which eventually moved to a sprawling white building on Federal Highway.

By the time she was a teenager she was doing part-time modeling, taking tennis lessons from Chris Evert’s father and studying classical piano. She was an honors student and captain of the cheerleading team at Stranahan Public High School. When Pughe was 13, her mother was diagnosed with polycystic kidneys, a condition in which multiple cysts in the kidneys deplete their function. This moment of panic, of looming mortality, changed the household. Although she would learn to cope with the illness and survive for many years, her mother believed that her life was about to end.

“It was somewhere in there that she told me that she was going to die,” Pughe says. “Her two kidneys were functioning as one. So she was going through her own depression and had a born-again experience.”

Her mother, who had once attended Kennedy’s church as a Sunday ritual, threw herself into the activities of the congregation. She led coffeehouses and home Bible studies. She took part in healing services, and pastors from the church came to the home and did a hands-on healing with oil in an effort to thwart her disease.

Roberta and her brothers fought their parents’ efforts to pull them into the church. They made fun of the teenagers who attended Westminster Academy, the church-run high school. Roberta, who retreated to the third balcony during Sunday services, passing notes to her friends, paid little attention to the sermons preached by Kennedy before a congregation that had swelled to 10,000 people.

“Then one day, Nicki came along, who was a 25-year-old stud,” she says. “He was very, very good-looking, with brown eyes, brown hair, a mustache and he rode a motorcycle. I went after him. He was my ticket to God. He started taking me to Bible studies. I started attending Bible studies two weeks before my sixteenth birthday and had a born-again experience.”

The embrace of the new community, the sense that she had found an extended family, was at first exciting and appealing. But it also soon brought with it radical changes. She was told to adopt a more “Christian” lifestyle. Funk and pop music, her nonbelieving friends, the part-time modeling jobs and even the secular high school were, she was told, thwarting her attempts to be a Christian. She destroyed her Motown and Michael Jackson records. She gave up modeling. She transferred to Westminster Academy, Coral Ridge’s Christian school. She walked out on her old community.

“I was doing TV shoots, was in magazines,” she says. “I was doing lots of stuff that now was sinful. All of it stopped. I started going to the Greenhouse Christian fellowship at the church four nights a week, where we did Bible study.”

Pughe turned her back on the world of nonbelievers. She struggled to obey. She suppressed her periodic waves of anger and frustration at the abrupt, painful and difficult changes imposed upon her, believing she had no right to question the demands of the church’s male hierarchy. She feared the judgment and disapproval of her new community. She feared that she would displease God. She kept down her longings for freedom and escape from the claustrophobic community. She was told to blame these feelings on Satan. She wanted to be “a good Christian woman.” The infusion of Christian jargon and clichés into her vocabulary, the inability to speak with others who might have validated her doubts and anxieties, left her unable to articulate or confront her feelings of dislocation. No longer sure what she felt or believed, she worked harder to obey.

Pughe soon believed that God would punish her if she failed to carry out the demands of the men who spoke for God, those who now defined right and wrong. And the more she struggled with her inner turmoil, seeking to please God, which meant pleasing the male hierarchy that now dominated her life, the worse she felt. All these anxieties, however, remained unnamed, unrecognized.

She began working at the GangWay Ministries for youth at the church and was involved in Kennedy’s Evangelism Explosion program, designed to teach people how to spread the Gospel in 20 minutes. The continuous dialectical training, much of it numbing in its boredom and repetitiveness, made it hard to articulate her doubt. Her life was filled with church meetings, new lessons to be learned and lectures. Solitude and reflection, along with thought itself, became difficult. Her head was spinning with slogans, clichés and religious jargon tht gave believers the illusion of knowledge.

I meet her late in the afternoon in her office in New Jersey, where she now is a family therapist. “It is a fear-based model,” she says. “The idea is to make people afraid and to then proceed to share the Gospel. I began training ministers from around the world. We were training ministers [on] how to train their youth to go out and proselytize. We used to go cold turkey onto the beaches. We used to go to shopping malls. There was a pamphlet with questions, and you had to ask all of them. You would go up to people cold, and you’d always start with the two questions.

“‘So would you like to accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior right now?’ we would ask,” she remembers. “We can pray the prayer.”

She went to Calvin College in Michigan, a Christian school, when she graduated from Westminster Academy. It was the only college to which she applied. During her senior year at college she decided to go to seminary, although she could not be ordained because she was a woman. Her father announced, however, that he would not pay for seminary. He told her it was time for her to get married and start a family. This, he assured her, would make her happy.

“In my senior year, I remember hearing on the radio an advertisement for the Miss Greater Grand Rapids Scholarship Pageant, which was a part of the Miss Michigan Pageant, which was a part of the Miss America Scholarship Pageant,” she says, “and I could win $2,500 in scholarship fees, which would cover my first semester of seminary. I entered the contest. I threw together a bathing suit, high heels, and I think I played ‘Für Elise.’ I pulled something out of my bag of tricks and I won.”

She started competing for the Miss Michigan contest. She practiced three hours a day on the upright piano at Calvin Seminary. Many of her professors were cheering her on, telling her that, like the biblical figure Esther, she had been called to such a time as this. She was going to use the platform of the Miss America scholarship pageant, she told herself, to spread the Gospel. Her victory seemed ordained by God.

“This was a legitimate way a woman could have a pulpit,” she says. “I bought all this. I was still quite asleep. This is what is so scary. I was anesthetized. I was programmed to believe all this. It was reinforced by my family and the church. There was this double authority that came from God. The male authorities in my life spoke for God. God spoke through my father, who was very authoritative and who held the power, as did the twelve male pastors in the church. All the leaders in my life were male. On Sunday in the sermons God spoke to us as a male. I had nothing to plug into other than what these men told me, and they were all telling me the same thing.

“My female truth was not diminished, it was completely silenced,” she remembers. “It was obliterated. I had a mother, who was not a questioning female, who had also been socialized to be obedient. The good woman, they tell you, is the obedient woman. I did not have any model of a woman who owned her own feminine truth.”

She looks back on the time as one filled with fear, fear of not conforming, of disapproval in the eyes of the men who spoke for God, of falling out of God’s favor, of not living up to Christian standards and incurring God’s wrath and punishment.

“I was not conscious of this fear,” she says, “and fear has a lot of power when it is not named. I didn’t even know I was afraid. I was not allowed to be afraid. The message that is communicated is there is nothing to be afraid of. When you hear someone say this, then that is when you should be most afraid.”

She entered the contest, now certain that God had chosen her to be Miss America and spread the Gospel.

“I met Cheryl Pruett, who had been the previous reigning Miss America,” she says. “She too was an evangelical, born-again and from the South. She was just as convinced that God was raising Christian women to take the platform.”

The state pageant was at Muskegon. She spent a week being paraded around before local groups, smearing Vaseline on her lips and keeping a smile pasted on her face. She lost ten pounds during the week before the pageant and did not have time to take in her gown, which now hung on her. When she mounted the stage, many of the professors from the seminary had come to watch.

“There I am in my bathing suit and my four-inch heels and, you know, professing God, you have three minutes to say who you are in an evening gown,” she says. “I said something about God and my mission for God. So I was playing the piano, at that point I had played Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in G Minor. I suddenly went blank. I thought, ‘What are you doing here?’ It was a moment of clarity as I sat there on that stage. I didn’t win. I was in the top ten, but that blank moment during the prelude lost me points. I was devastated.”

She left the seminary. She joined the staff for youth ministries at Coral Ridge, where she was the only woman. But even as she evangelized to others, she struggled with anger and betrayal. She felt God had called her to the beauty pageants and then abandoned her.

“How could God lead me down this path and promise me this? And then not come through?” she remembers asking herself. “I blamed God for failing to make my secret fantasies come true. I never acknowledged, of course, that these were secret fantasies, that what I wanted was fame and fortune. I wasn’t allowed to name these fantasies, not even to myself. I was going to buy my dad a Jag, because that was his favorite car, and he would never have bought it for himself. I was going to be proud on some level that I had attained this powerful position, when in my denomination, women couldn’t even preach from a pulpit. So I had done it. You know, it was a big ‘Fuck you!’ Now you’re telling me I can’t? Watch me do it. But watch me do it within your confines, watch me do it within the restraints you put on me. But I was not aware of the expense to myself.”

She drifted slowly away from the church, marrying, moving to Boston, raising two boys, finishing a two-year seminary degree and studying to become a licensed marriage and family therapist. During those years she slowly deconstructed her life and what had been done to her, until she quietly left the evangelical church, believing it had stunted her as a woman and forced her into a system based on submission.

The hypermasculinity of radical Christian conservatism, which crushes the independence and self-expression of women, is a way for men in the movement to compensate for the curtailing of their own independence, their object obedience to church authorities and the calls for sexual restraint. It is also a way to cope with fear. Those who lead these churches fear, perhaps most deeply, their own internal contradictions. They make war on the internal contradictions in others. Those who are not subdued, who do not bow before the church authorities, are seen as contaminants. Believers are driven into a primitive state, a prenatal existence, a return to the womb and a life of submission. The assault on freedom, human equality and reason, however, also engenders feelings of omnipotence. Death and decay seem to be overcome. All are empowered by God, promised a utopian paradise and immortality. The movement feeds off of power and powerlessness, off of subjugation and control. It induces mass delusion. And the crowd, stripped of personal initiative, soon projects its dreams and aspirations for power through the leader. The surrender of personal power allows believers to indulge in fantasies about becoming instruments of a limitless, divine power. As the spiritual vacuum grows, as fear increases, violence in the name of God becomes not only seductive but imperative. The movement, to compensate for the loss of personal power and submission, fosters a warrior cult and feeds its hapless followers a steady diet of battles, wars and apocalyptic violence.

Images of Jesus often show Him with thick muscles, clutching a sword. Christian men are portrayed as powerful warriors. The language of the movement is filled with metaphors about the use of excessive force and violence against God’s enemies. Christ’s stoic endurance of the brutal whippings in Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ reflects the brutal, masculine world of this ideology, a world that knows little of tenderness, personal freedom, ambiguity, nurturing and even pleasure. Jerry Falwell, in a New Yorker interview, said Christ was not a gentle-looking, willowy man: “Christ was a man with muscles,” he insisted.[89] Falwell and Gibson see real men, godly men, as powerful, able to endure physical pain and suffering without complaint. Jesus, like God, has to be a real man, a man who dominates through force.

Hypermasculinity becomes a way to compensate, especially since the unspoken truth is that Christian men are required to have a personal, loving relationship with a male deity and surrender their will to a male-dominated authoritarian church. Submission to church authority, after all, is a potent form of emasculation. It entails a surrendering of conscience and personal control and deadens emotions and feelings. Glorified acts of force and violence against outsiders, against nonbelievers, compensate for this unquestioning submission. The domination men are encouraged to practice in the home over women and children becomes a reflection of the domination they are taught to endure outside of the home.

There runs through the fundamentalist belief system a deep dread of ambiguity, disorder and chaos. Accordingly, the cult of masculinity keeps all ambiguity, especially sexual ambiguity, in check. It fosters a world of binary opposites: God and man, saved and unsaved, the church and the world, Christianity and secular humanism, male and female. These tidy pairings keep life from slipping back into a complicated nightmare. Reality, thus defined, is made predictable and understandable, something deeply comforting to believers who have had trouble coping with the messiness of human existence. There is, in this “Christian” worldview, clearly demarcated order and disorder. Behaviors that do not conform—such as homosexuality—are forms of disorder, tools of Satan, and must be abolished. A world that can be predicted and understood, a world that has clear boundaries, can be made rational. It can be managed and controlled. The petrified, binary world of fixed, immutable roles is a world where people, many of them damaged by bouts with failure, despair and their own ambiguities, can bury their chaotic and fragmented personalities and live with the illusion that they are now strong, whole and protected. Those who do not fit, who are not subservient to dominant Christian males, must be proselytized, converted and “cured” (if they are gay or lesbian) through quack therapy. If they remain recalcitrant they must be silenced. The decline of America is described as the result of the decline of male prowess. This decline has led to weakness and moral decay. It has resulted in a bewildering human and social complexity that, often seen as feminine, is the work of Satan. By submitting to the Christian leader, and to a powerful male God who will destroy those who misbehave, followers avoid dealing with life. The movement seeks, above all, to banish mystery, the very essence of faith. Not only is the binary world knowable and predictable, but finally God is knowable and predictable.

Fundamentalism, Karen McCarthy Brown wrote, “is the religion of those at once seduced and betrayed by the promise that we human beings can comprehend and control our world. Bitterly disappointed by the politics of rationalized bureaucracies, the limitations of science, and the perversions of industrialization, fundamentalists seek to reject the modern world, while nevertheless holding onto these habits of mind: clarity, certitude, and control.”[90]

Since life has a way of not respecting these artificial lines, since ambiguity, inconsistency and irrationality are part of human existence, the only way believers can push forward is to pretend that these troubling aspects of our internal and external reality do not exist. They create a parallel reality, one that allows them to escape from the reality-based world into a world of their own creation. “Unconscious motives, deep longings, and fears are denied,” Brown wrote, “and responsibility for them is abandoned, as fundamentalism makes a pretense of being all about cut-and-dried truth and clear and recognizable feelings.”[91]

Popular Christian conservative leader and talk-show host James Dobson has built his career on perpetuating these stereotypes. Born to evangelist parents, Dobson grew up in Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas. He says he was born again when he was three at one of his father’s church services. He attended Pasadena College and received a PhD in child development from the University of Southern California, where he went on to teach.[92] His first book, Dare to Discipline, encouraged parents to spank their children with “sufficient magnitude to cause the child to cry genuinely.”[93] It has sold more than 3.5 million copies since its release in 1970. He has built a massive empire based on his advice to families as a Christian therapist. He is heard on Focus on the Family, a program broadcast on more than 3,000 radio stations; runs a grassroots organization with chapters in 36 states; and runs his operation out of an 81-acre campus in Colorado Springs, Colorado, a campus that has its own zip code. He employs 1,300 people, sends out four million pieces of mail each month, and is heard in 116 countries. His estimated listening audience is more than 200 million worldwide, and in the United States he appears on 80 television stations each day. He is antichoice, supports abstinence-only sex education exclusively and is fiercely antigay.[94] He calls for prayer in public schools, but only if led by students, since teachers might encourage Christian students “to pray to Allah, Buddha or the goddess Sophia.”[95] He has backed political candidates who call for the execution of abortion providers, defines stem-cell research as “state-funded cannibalism” and urges Christian parents to pull their children out of the public school system.[96] On his Family.org Web site he discusses “the countless physiological and emotional differences between the sexes.” The article “Gender Gap?” on the Web site lists the physical distinctions between man and woman, including strength, size, red blood cell count and metabolism. For a woman, Dobson writes, love is her most important experience: love gives woman her “zest”; it makes up her “life-blood”; it is her primary “psychological need.” Love holds less meaning in a man’s life than a woman’s—though a man can appreciate love, he does not “need” it.[97]

“Genesis tells us that the Creator made two sexes, not one, and that He designed each gender for a specific purpose,” Dobson goes on. And these differences mean different roles: they mean the man is the master and the woman must obey.

One masculine need comes to mind that wives should not fail to heed. It reflects what men want most in their homes. A survey was taken a few years ago to determine what men care about most and what they hope their wives will understand. The results were surprising…. What [men] wanted most was tranquillity at home. Competition is so fierce in the workplace today, and the stresses of pleasing a boss and surviving professionally are so severe, that the home needs to be a haven to which a man can return. It is a smart woman who tries to make her home what her husband needs it to be.

Dobson says that to achieve this tranquillity wives have to be submissive. He instructs the husband in how he “should handle his wife’s submission” and goes on in Family.org to insist that “submission is a choice we make. It’s something each one of us must decide to do. And this decision happens first in the heart. If we don’t decide in our hearts that we are going to willingly submit to whomever it is we need to be submitting to, then we are not truly submitting.” Of course, the choice not to submit to the male head of the household, Dobson makes clear, is a violation of God’s law.

The hierarchy fears romantic love. Sex, especially eroticism, in its most passionate, romantic form, threatens the iron control of the church leader. In Freudian terms, romantic love allows the id, or the “it,” to be unleashed in a drive to satisfy uncontrollable passions. Restraint and self-control over these desires and passions are disarmed by romantic love. At the height of romantic love our fractious internal world suddenly appears whole. Men no longer rule women and women do not rule men. Male and female are ruled by the need to be affirmed by the other, by the lover. It is a moment of magical well-being, at least until passions cool and libido is tamed. Freud feared the intoxicating effects of romantic love, which he called “the overestimation of the erotic object,” for the same reason he feared religion and totalitarian movements. Freud cautioned against any emotion or movement that promised to unify the psyche behind a collective cause. The assault against romantic love within the radical Christian conservative movement is an assault by the male hierarchy against its most potent competitor.

“Freud had no compunction in calling the relationship that crowds forge with an absolute leader an erotic one,” wrote Mark Edmundson:

(In this he was seconded by Hitler, who suggested that in his speeches he made love to the German masses.) What happens when members of the crowd are ‘hypnotized’ (that is the word Freud uses) by [a] tyrant? The tyrant takes the place of the over-I, and for a variety of reasons he stays there. What he offers to individuals is a new, psychological dispensation. Where the individual superego is inconsistent and often inaccessible because it is unconscious, the collective superego, the leader, is clear and absolute in his values. By promulgating one code—one fundamental way of being—he wipes away the differences between different people, with different codes and different values, which are a source of anxiety to the psyche.[98]

An absolute leader, called in Freudian terms the collective superego, is morally permissive. This is part of the leader’s attraction. Murder may be wrong, but the murder of infidel Iraqis or Islamic terrorists—or the genocidal slaughter of nonbelievers by an angry Christ at the end of time—is celebrated. This moral permissiveness is exciting and seductive and empowers followers to carry out acts of violence, often with a clean conscience. Those nonbelievers who are hurt or killed are at fault for turning their backs on God. Blind adherence to an absolute leader, especially one who permits violence, hands followers a license to unleash hidden, prohibited lusts and passions usually kept locked within the human heart. It permits followers to kill in the name of God.

“Freud believed that the inner tensions that we experience are by and large necessary tensions,” Edmundson wrote, “not because they are so enjoyable in themselves—they are not—but because the alternatives to them are so much worse. For Freud, a healthy psyche is not always a psyche that feels good.”[99]

These male church leaders, as Susan Friend Harding observed in The Book of Jerry Falwell, speak almost exclusively in their public pronouncements to other men. They implicitly privilege men in their rhetoric. She recounts a story of Falwell joking in 1986 at Temple Baptist Church about surrendering unconditionally to his wife, Macel. Falwell said he let Macel get what she wanted. This was a decision he made. As an aside he quipped that, while he had not thought of divorce, he had thought of murder a few times.

“The anger and the threat of force here were ironic,” Harding wrote, “but still served as little reminders of men’s ostensible physical authority, their ‘power-in-reserve’”:

More unambiguously, this flash of rhetorical violence revealed to whom the entire joke about his marriage was addressed. It was addressed to men. In this way it not only upheld public male authority, it enacted it. Indeed, the whole sermon, the entire Moral Majority jeremiad, and fundamentalism in general were addressed to men. The joke, the sermon, the jeremiad, and fundamentalism were essentially men’s movements, public speech rites that enacted male authority. Not that they were “for men only” but that they, their rhetorics, were addressed primarily, or rather directly, to men. Women were meant to overhear them.[100]

“These men suffered a loss of their own masculinity,” Roberta Pughe says, “so they have taken on this extreme form of masculine power, the power to oppress and to dominate. On the extreme end of the masculine continuum, it is the oppressive force that kills, that destroys. There is no room for anything else. Everything else is a threat. The feminine is a threat. Children are a threat. Homosexuality is a threat because it embraces a feminine, nurturing side between men. All power has to be concentrated at the top and be destructive.”

And she concedes that she still fights the fears instilled in her by the church.

“Here I am, a woman, 46 years old, seasoned and trained in my field, and I still am terrified to speak what I believe,” she says. “It gets clogged right here in my throat. I tremble at the thought of speaking my own thoughts when I go back to them, into their circles. They see me as a heretic, a backslider, and say I am not a Christian any longer. They say I have lost my way. So there’s nothing, from their point of view, that I have to offer.

“The goal of the movement is to create a theocracy, but they must dominate women first to keep the system in place,” Pughe says, the late afternoon light spilling into the windows of her office. “They want to have one nation under God, based on their view of God and their interpretation of the rules that this peculiar God puts in place. They are doing this underground. They have huge networks. They are deeply connected, and they’re connecting with people who have lots of money and lots of power, and these people are very smart and savvy. They know how to put forward a public front that hides the private agenda. They have found a niche to be heard, to provide something. They run home Bible studies. They offer people a sense of belonging and connection. They know the family’s falling apart. The divorce rate is high. Families are in flux. Roles are in flux. Men and women are trying to figure out what we’re doing together. And the church is filling the niche, providing the extended family. There is no extended family, so the church is providing it for these people. Their ticket to power is family values. That’s the hook. People are hungry for that. But with this church family comes the imposition of an extreme male power structure. First, they use this power structure to control the family, then the church, and finally the nation.”

The use of control and force is also designed to raise obedient, unquestioning and fearful children, children who as adults will not be tempted to challenge powerful male figures. These children are conditioned to rely on external authority for moral choice. They obey out of fear and often repeat this pattern of fearful obedience as adults. Refusal to submit to authority is heresy. Raised in a home and a school where he or she is taught to see the world as one where the possibility of attack and danger lurks behind every crevice, the child learns to distrust outsiders. The benign and trivial take on satanic proportions. There is no safety. Satan is always present. The pathology of fear, ingrained in the child, plays itself out in the constant search for phantom enemies who seek the destruction of the adult believer. These elusive and protean enemies, always there to lure the believer toward self-destruction, must be defeated to establish a world, ushered in by Christ’s return, where no one will be able to do them harm, where the irrational is abolished and the binary lines of right and wrong are enforced by a Christian government. Only then will the believers be safe.

One of the tools used to keep believers obedient is the “prophecy” of the Rapture. One day, without warning, the saved will be lifted into heaven and the unsaved left behind to suffer a seven-year period of torment and chaos known as the Tribulation. This event will, believers are told, suddenly and unexpectedly tear apart families. Those who are not good Christians will lose their mothers and fathers or their children. The big-budget films Apocalypse, Revelation, Tribulation and Left Behind, based on the Left Behind series by LaHaye and Jenkins, have popularized these fears, the films employing Hollywood stars such as Gary Busey, Margot Kidder and Corbin Bernsen. The films show parents left behind as their infants have been raptured into heaven, screaming “My babies, my babies!” There is a shot of abandoned teddy bears and diapers on the airplane seats. Children come home to find their parents gone. The world descends into anarchy, with trains, planes and cars, now without engineers, pilots or drivers, crashing in deadly fireballs. In an instant, the United States, with as much as half its population lifted into heaven, is reduced to the status of a developing country, dominated now by an ascendant Europe that carries out the will of Satan through the Antichrist.

This conditioning of children to fear nonconformity and blindly obey ensures continued obedience as adults. The difficult task of learning how to make moral choices, how to accept personal responsibility, how to deal with the chaos of human life is handed over to God-like authority figures. The process makes possible a perpetuation of childhood. It allows the adult to bask in the warm glow and magic of divine protection. It masks from them and from others the array of human weaknesses, including our deepest dreads, our fear of irrelevance and death, our vulnerability and uncertainty. It also makes it difficult, if not impossible, to build mature, loving relationships, for the believer is told it is all about them, about their needs, their desires, and above all, their protection and advancement. Relationships, even within families, splinter and fracture. Those who adopt the belief system, who find in the dictates of the church and its male leaders a binary world of right and wrong, build an exclusive and intolerant comradeship that subtly or overtly shuns and condemns the “unsaved.” People are no longer judged by their intrinsic qualities, by their actions or capacity for self-sacrifice and compassion, but by the rigidity of their obedience. This defines the good and the bad, the Christian and the infidel. And this obedience is a blunt and effective weapon against the possibility of a love that could overpower the dictates of the hierarchy. In many ways it is love the leaders fear most, for it is love that unleashes passions and bonds that defy the carefully constructed edifices that keep followers trapped and enclosed. And while they speak often about love, as they do about family, it is the cohesive bonds created by family and love they war against.

Joost A. M. Meerloo, the author of The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing, wrote:

Living requires mutuality of giving and taking. Above all, to live is to love. And many people are afraid to take the responsibility of loving; of having an emotional investment in their fellow beings. They want only to be loved and to be protected; they are afraid of being hurt and rejected. It is important for us to realize that emphasis on conformity and the fear of spontaneous living can have an effect almost as devastating as the totalitarian’s deliberate assault on the mind…. Trained into conformity the child may well grow up into an adult who welcomes with relief the authoritarian demands of a totalitarian leader. It is the welcome repetition of an old pattern that can be followed without investment of a new emotional energy.[101]

All those who do not subscribe to this male fantasy, or who were born female or gay, must be pressured to conform. By disempowering women, by returning them to their “proper” place as a subservient partner in the male-dominated home, the movement creates the larger paradigm of the Christian state. The men’s movement Promise Keepers, which at its height a decade ago drew tens of thousands of men into football stadiums, called on men to “take back” their role as the head of the household. The movement used the verse from Ephesians that calls on wives to “be subject to your husbands, as to the Lord” (Ephesians 5:22) to give the stance biblical authority.[102] Women were not allowed to attend the events, although some could volunteer at concession stands outside. The founder of the group, former Colorado football coach Bill McCartney, called the movement’s battle against abortion the “Second Civil War” and lambasted gays and lesbians as “stark raving mad.” He dismissed gays and lesbians as “a group of people who don’t reproduce, yet want to be compared to people who do reproduce, and that lifestyle doesn’t entitle anyone to special rights.”[103] The organization mounted campaigns such as “Real Men Matter,” in which men were instructed to recover their maleness in a “morally bankrupt, godless society.” The goal of the movement, strongly supported by Dobson, was designed to help men regain their place in society. And while Promise Keepers as an organization is on the wane, the agenda it promoted is firmly embedded in the masculinity cult of the Christian Right.

In the megachurches, the pastor, nearly always male, is obeyed by the congregation. It is the pastor who interprets the word of God. This pattern is established on a smaller scale in the home. The male leader governs through a divine mandate, a mandate that cannot be challenged since it comes from God. And these leaders speak often about taking their cues directly from God. These concentric male fiefdoms, radiating out from the home, do not permit revolt, discussion or dissent. And once women buy into this message, one that supposedly protects their families, makes their boys into men, their husbands into protectors and themselves into godly Christian women, they cede personal, political and economic power. Those who are weak or different, those who do not conform to the rigid stereotype, those who have other ways of being, must be forced by the stern father to conform and obey. If they do not bend, they will be destroyed by God.

The consequence of this disempowering of women was poignantly captured when Dobson interviewed Karen Santorum, wife of Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, on October 17, 2005, in the studios of the Family Research Council for his radio program. Karen Santorum home-schools her children, the principal role for women with children, according to Dobson and many others in the movement.

“Have you ever looked out at the women who are in these exciting careers and making money and advancing in the corporate world, and so on? Have you ever looked at that and said, ‘Did I do the right thing?’” Dobson asked.

“I really believe that the devil really tries to work on mothers at home,” she told Dobson. “We all know he’s the master of lies, and he will do everything he can to try to make mothers at home feel that way, like we’re so inadequate, we’re not fulfilled. And through my prayer life and just my relationship with Jesus, I feel without a doubt this [being a housewife] is the most important thing I can do. It is what God wants for me; it’s what He wants for my family. So I have in the early days—I did once in a while—Rick would be leaving to go to some nice event in a tuxedo, and I’d be on the floor cleaning up milk. I’d be like, ‘What’s wrong with this picture?’ And I feel so blessed and honored to be home, and I know that my presence in their life will make a difference.”[104]

The televangelists Benny Hinn and Pat Robertson rule their fiefdoms as despotic potentates. They travel on private jets, have huge personal fortunes and descend on the faithful in limousines and surrounded by a small retinue of burly bodyguards. These tiny kingdoms, awash in the leadership cult, mirror on a smaller scale the America they seek to create. There is no questioning. Followers surrender their personal and political power, in much the same way women and children surrender their power to the male at home. The divinely anointed male leader rules a flock of obedient and submissive sheep. All must hand over their freedom. All must cease to think independently.

The earnestness on the part of believers often gives the mass movement its air of honesty, sincerity and decency. Believers are not brainwashed. They are not mindless automatons. They are convinced that what they are doing is godly, moral and good. They work with the passion of the converted to bring this Christian goodness to everyone, even those who resist. They believe that what they promote is moral and beneficial. And just as they fear for their own souls, they fear for the souls of those around them who remain unsaved. This often well-intended earnestness, although employed for frightening ends, is a powerful engine within the movement. These idealists are willing to make great personal sacrifices for the cause of Christ. They justify the disempowerment and eradication of whole peoples, such as Muslims or those they castigate as secular humanists, as mandated by God. Nonbelievers have no place on the moral map. It is a small step from this toxic rhetoric and exclusive belief system to the disempowerment and eradication of nonbelievers, a step a frightened and enraged population could well demand during a period of prolonged instability or a national crisis.

The ruling elite of the movement, the James Dobsons and Pat Robertsons, are at the same time very distant from the masses. They assume a higher intelligence and understanding that give them a divine right to rule. These men are—writ large—the powerful, all-knowing father. Those they direct become as powerless, credulous and submissive as children.

Danuta Pfeiffer, who from 1983 to 1988 was the co-host on The 700 Club with Pat Robertson, sat with me and her husband one evening on the patio of her home outside of Eugene, Oregon. She reached heights, because of her celebrity status, usually reserved for men, although it was always clear she had a role subservient to Robertson’s. She was the first person to be allowed to lead the mandatory half-hour chapel service held before lunch at the Christian Broadcasting Network, where The 700 Club is filmed. She was sent to speak at national Christian women’s groups and later mixed audiences, numbering in the thousands, at several of the nation’s largest megachurches.

She was also told, however, that being a single woman at the broadcasting network was inappropriate. She said she was “pressured” to get married and did, although the shaky union, not one she would have made on her own, soon fizzled and ended in divorce.

“An adviser at the network told me that marriage was the ‘appearance of appropriateness,’ and since I had been a single woman, traveling at times alone with the very married Pat Robertson, it was time to ‘be appropriate,’” she said, a wood fire throwing up sparks from the fireplace on her patio. “I had been a ‘baby Christian’ for only two short years. I was just beginning to learn that Christians perceived an unwed woman [as] a source of temptation. This was a man’s world. And I had to be anchored to a man in order to move freely around them.”

Her reception at the gatherings she addressed was frightening. Crowds swarmed toward her, asking her to touch them and heal them. Her status was nothing compared with that of Robertson, she said, “who stands for his followers as the embodiment of God’s conscience.

“They were seeking a message, a healing, hope, a little encouragement,” she remembered. “They wanted a little piece of God. They thought I could give it to them. People wept when I prayed for them, touched them or hugged them. It was as if they were meeting a rock star.”

She was increasingly disturbed by the power that had been thrust upon her and the emotions unleashed by those who begged her for guidance in every aspect of their lives. She understood how pliant these people had become and how cleverly they were being manipulated. The realization led her finally to leave the movement. Her experience was a window into how willingly followers handed over their consciences to these leaders, abandoned all moral responsibility for the word of those who had elevated themselves to the status of quasi-deities.

“They trusted us more than their family,” she says. “They thought we had a clearer path to God because we were on television. They thought we were on television because God put us there. We were prophets to these people. We were seen as people who could walk on clouds and heal and pray. We were God’s special messengers. Pat was seen as having the ear of God. He had words of knowledge that could identify their deepest fears and illnesses. We would identify people on the air by speaking about the color of their clothes or an illness they had. We would say, ‘There is a woman with a blue blouse crying at this moment. She has bad hearing in one ear. She is being healed right now.’ And viewers would claim these healings. They saw our presence on the show as a sign that we were anointed. They wanted to know how to live, how to operate on a daily basis, how to communicate with their family and friends, what jobs to get and how to interpret the world around them, even the daily news. They wanted every type of emotional, spiritual and physical information. We had this kind of authority over their lives. They abdicated their hopes and lives to us because we spoke for God.”

[the-90s-music-colosseum]

had i known that when do i get to sing my way would actually get into the bracket i would've written better propaganda!! so i guess this is my chance now, if you're accepting propaganda of course.

not only is the song a banger with wonderful lyrics, the music video is a great parody of 50s movie trailers that manages to be funny and tongue in cheek while telling a complete story. the 90s were a low point in sparks' career and i think that kind of reflects in the the song lyrics and video theme, but they managed to do a brilliant job with it and i'm so sad it's not more popular!!

if that isn't enough, haha funny mustache man does funny dance. i rest my case. as a funk rock enthusiast i really enjoy lenny kravitz of course, but i do think sparks has the better MV in this matchup!!

Great propaganda!! Thank you!

When Do I Get To Sing My Way vs Are You Gonna Go My Way

[whencallstheheart]

I almost didn’t watch season 9 either, but it’s worth it just because Nathan is hilarious!!! I think they told Kevin McGarry to just be himself lol. And I agree, you do realize quickly that Lucas and Elizabeth are very disfunctional.

Once Nathan got over his funk (and shaved that awful mustache), he was a lot of fun. So snarky. It did feel like a shift towards him being more goofy when the moments allowed.

I don't think we were supposed to think that about Lucas and Elizabeth though which makes it even more confusing. They were supposed to be in love and enjoying their courtship and then they eventually got engaged at the end of the season. The shift away from Lucas didn't come about until season 10 with Lindsay taking over. Without her, they'd still be trying to convince us Lucas and Elizabeth are a perfect match (if any of us cared to continue watching). Hopefully one day we'll finally get all the details about how everything went down because I remain really baffled by the whole situation.

[askwendyokoopa]

It Just Keeps Happening?

After 8 years of being mutuals, @neko-shadow blocked me for no apparent reason. I felt that much time warranted something, so naughty baby did a no-no, and I contacted him from an alt and found out... it was because he didn't like me sexually harassing him? Like that thing I had been doing for 8 solid years, and he had been coming back for each day. Whatever, maybe I'm victim-blaming. It just seems like once we had established that I was bugging the Mun and not just the Muse, we could open a discussion and move past it. But no, the best solution was apparently to just cut all ties forever.

So, I was in a funk, barely posting, when @red-man-of-mustache convinces me to start roleplaying again. We were mutuals for 9 years, except for some amount of time when he remade his blog-- it's not important. And just recently boom, full block, everywhere. No explanation. This time it can't be the flirting, right? He sent me the eggplant. I know, that roleplay is a comedy of errors, maybe some other post was too risqué? But my blog has maintained it's PG-13 rating, and has it clearly listed.

So, whatever, I'm insecure, my insecurities are something something, I think people misunderstand the reason people say "You don't owe them an explanation." I think that's for your cheating boyfriend who beats you and stole money, he knows why, he just wants you to explain it to his face so he can emotionally manipulate you. You could still say "I'm leaving you, cheater!" or something, via note.

So airing out your dirty laundry on tumblr isn't emotionally manipulative? Fair enough. It's just, if I sent an anonymous ask, he can't answer it without showing everyone, so I left a comment on a post from a side blog someone asked me to make some year, and them never interacted with it... that was a whole thing. Anyhow, the idea was that he could reply in the comments section that most people would never see, but he deleted it. So... someone tell Papa Pasta that he has confused and saddened me... IDK.

It's happened a few more times, but these two stick out because of just how long they stuck around before ghosting me.

[dustedmagazine]

Listed: Immaterial Possession

Photo by Jessica Gratigny

Immaterial Possession puts the viscerality of bass-driven rock, the hypnotic drone of East European folk and the dippy energy of art punk into a blender lets it whirr.  The Athens, Georgia band—comprised of Cooper Holmes, Madeline Polites, John Spiegel and Elephant 6 scion Kiran Fernandes—met at an arts commune.  Their self-titled debut came out in 2020, and the follow-up, Mercy of the Crane Folk, this year. Reviewing it, Jennifer Kelly noted that, “If you’ve ever wondered what the B-52s might sound like on a serious Incredible String Band bender, well, possibly a lot like Mercy of the Crane Folk.”

Selda “Gitme”

Selda is the queen, a 1970s Turkish songwriter, political activist and cultural icon. This song has such great energy. You immediately blast off on the Turkish spaceship to the cosmic love song.. the desperation in Selda's powerful voice steers you.  (Madeline)

The Stranglers, “Hanging Around”

Love this track and whole record Rattus Norvegicus for its up-front, guttural driving bass lines and menacing vocals. The keyboard runs ascending into the air counter the low earthiness. The record cover is also a perfect fit for the music, classy yet dingy, calm but aggressive, mysterious but mundane. (Cooper)

Isaan style street music from Bangkok 

Isaan music from Northeastern Thailand is some of the coolest music ever.. it's got the perfect blend of psychedelia, folk, improvisation, and party rhythm. And it's for all occasions. (Madeline)

The players are effortlessly cool too. Almost anything we find in this genre gets us going. (Cooper)

Bizunesh Bekele, “Debdabe Lakibign”

This video is one of my favorite tracks lately. I love the shuffle beat with the overdriven krar, a six-stringed harp, and the sweet synth licks mixed with the vocal. (Kiran Fernandes)

Hany Mehannah, “Shahr Al Assal”

Super groovy 1970s Egyptian music, scored for film. This is one of my faves from Hany Mehanna, a wonderful composer and keyboardist. His flourishing expressiveness of the Farfisa organ is a great influence on my organ playing in Immaterial. (Kiran)

The B52s, “Give Me Back My Man”

A big favorite from the B-52s catalogue. Cindy Wilson's vocals are so raw and glorious.. her swing from chill to scream is a cathartic explosion. And the beat and bass line is everlasting in electric spirit.  I listen to this one when I need a jump. It’s also a favorite karaoke number. (Madeline)

Buffy Sainte-Marie, “God Is Alive Magick Is Afoot”

A friend shared this with us after one of our shows. Buffy Sainte-Marie is a radical badass woman. It's “experimental” (as implied by a traditional pop sense) in the way that you are partaking in her hypnotic spell work. Just found out Leonard Cohen wrote the lyrics. That explains my gravitation to this one; Cohen is a favorite lyricist. (Madeline)

Barış Manço, “Dere Boyu Kavaklar”

Another groovy 1970s Turkish funk master. That mustache is its own instrument. I sit patiently, although in starving anticipation, for that delicious lead riff.. for that, we'll go to wherever he's luring us..(Madeline)

Aphrodites Child, “End of the World”

A 1968 Grecian epic banger. Appropriately, in the Greek mythological tradition, it's both deeply romantic and ominous in nature. Very incredible, shapeshifting vocals. Sometimes the visions of the werewolf come into my head with this one. Other times, it just feels like an apocalyptic fury of love. You could probably use this song as an easy Rorschach-ian test to see what's going on in your brain today. (Madeline)

The Bats, “Smoking Her Wings”

A friend put this on a mix tape. I love this sweet song! A driving tune with a perfectly soft and floating nostalgic melody. When I listen, I feel like I am falling in love in the summer of 1987 and want to cry over something yet I know not exactly what. (Madeline)

Velly Joonas, “Stopp, Seisku Aeg!”

A 1970s Estonian songwriter and artist. This funkadelic, melancholic, song has got a viola(?) line that cuts through like you're swimming up to the shimmering surface of the Baltic sea to take a breath. I love the rhythm in the vocal lines. I've listened to this song on repeat many times. Thank you Velly! (Madeline)