#not only is this the demonization of fictional women it is the infantilization of fictional women

[curufiin]

Okay i am pissed enough about this:

MIRIEL WANTS TO BE LEFT THE FUCK ALONE IN MANDOS.

edit: read my bloody reblogs and comments before you make an opinion bc i am not repeating “how is any of this Indis’ fault actually” again

NOTHING Finwë could’ve said and done would’ve changed her mind. and to people who say “he should’ve waited for her”, HE FUCKING DID.

But in the bearing of her son Míriel was consumed in spirit and body; and after his birth she yearned for release from the labour of living. (all of the following are from Of Fëanor and the Unchaining of Melkor)

Then Finwë was grieved, for the Noldor were in the youth of their days, and he desired to bring forth many children into the bliss of Aman; and he said: ‘Surely there is healing in Aman? Here all weariness can find rest.’

Manwë delivered her to the care of Irmo in Lórien. At their parting (for a little while as he thought) Finwë was sad, for it seemed an unhappy chance that the mother should depart and miss the beginning at least of the childhood days of her son.

The maidens of Estë tended the body of Míriel, and it remained unwithered; but she did not return. Then Finwë lived in sorrow; and he went often to the gardens of Lórien, and sitting beneath the silver willows beside the body of his wife he called her by her names. But it was unavailing; and alone in all the Blessed Realm he was deprived of joy. After a while he went to Lórien no more.

Now it came to pass that Finwë took as his second wife Indis the Fair. She was a Vanya, close kin of Ingwë the High King, golden-haired and tall, and in all ways unlike Míriel. Finwë loved her greatly, and was glad again. But the shadow of Míriel did not depart from the house of Finwë, nor from his heart.

But the children of Indis were great and glorious, and their children also; and if they had not lived the history of the Eldar would have been diminished.

From Peoples of Middle Earth:

points that may explain the conduct of Feanor are here recalled. Miriel's death was of free will: she forsook her body and her fea went to the Halls of Waiting, while her body lay as if asleep in a garden. She said that she was weary in body and spirit and desired peace.

Her weariness she had endured until he was full grown, but she could endure it no longer. (If you want to come at me with some drafts quote bs, right back at you. Here she raised Feanor to adulthood.)

But Miriel was reluctant, and to all the pleas of her husband and her kin that were reported to her, and to the solemn counsels of the Valar, she would say no more than 'not yet'. Each time that she was approached she became more fixed in her determination, until at last she would listen no more, saying only: 'I desire peace. Leave me in peace here! I will not return. That is my will.'

When it became clear at last that Miriel would never of her own will return to life in the body within any span of time that could give him hope, Finwe's sorrow became embittered.

It was judged that Finwe's bereavement was unjust, and by persisting in her refusal to return Miriel had forfeited all rights that she had in the case; for either she was now capable of accepting the healing of her body by the Valar, or else her fea was mortally sick and beyond their power, and she was indeed 'dead', no longer capable of becoming again a living member of the kindred of the Eldar.

Death by free will, such as Miriel's, was beyond his thought. Death by violence he thought impossible in Aman; though as is recorded in The Silmarillion this proved otherwise.

From Morgoth’s ring:

But since it is not to be thought that the living shall, by his or her will alone, confine the spirit of the other to Mandos, this disunion shall come to pass only by the consent of both. And after the giving of the consent ten years of the Valar shall pass ere Mandos confirms it. Within that time either party may revoke this consent; but when Mandos has confirmed it, and the living spouse has wedded another, it shall be irrevocable until the end of Arda. This is the doom of Namo in this matter.'

It is said that Miriel answered Mandos saying: 'I came hither to escape from the body, and I do not desire ever to return to it'; and after ten years the doom of disunion was spoken.

It is said that Miriel answered Mandos, saying: 'I came hither to escape from the body, and I do not desire ever to return to it. My life is gone out into Feanaro, my son. This gift I have given to him whom I loved, and I can give no more. Beyond Arda this may be healed, but not within it.'

Then Mandos adjudged her innocent, deeming that she had died under a necessity too great for her to withstand. Therefore her choice was permitted, and she was left in peace.

Ulmo actually says that had Finwë waited longer, Miriel mightve returned, to which Vairë literally immediately responds with

'Nay!' said Vaire suddenly. 'The fea of Miriel is with me. I know it well, for it is small. But it is strong; proud and obdurate. It is of that sort who having said: this I will do, make their words a doom irrevocable unto themselves. She will not return to life, or to Finwe, even if he waiteth until the ageing of the world. Of this he is aware, I deem, as his words show. For he did not found his claim on his desire for children only, but he said to the King: my heart warns me that Miriel will not return while Arda lasts…

I can’t be bothered to find more but seriously. This isn’t even about Finwë or Míriel or Indis anymore, is it. This is about all of you demonizing and chastising a woman for daring not to be the perfect mother, blaming another person’s FREE DECISION on her, and then turning around and getting defensive when people call you misogynist.

And the way you guys talk about Míriel too borders on involuntary confinement as well. Míriel was absolutely miserable on Arda, and she found peace again in death (which cannot be compared to human death because we cease to exist when we commit suicide. Elves do not. So elven death is more akin to returning to some faraway home where you are still existing in the world than poof, gone.), but you guys seem to so want her to be forced to stay in a place that she hates because… oh no! Her child would be affected! That’s fucking ridiculous. Míriel should be allowed to choose what she believes is best for her, and y’all need to stop blaming it on Indis or Finwë because this is not the moral high ground you think it is.

Stop demonizing women in media because they dare do something that your favorite blorbo dislikes. You are part of the problem.

[gwenthebard]

This post is going to be a pure rant, but random things I've put up with as a pansexual trans woman with a preference for men:

-people assuming Im a "love all women and 3 specific men" pansexual, not listen when I say "women are like 20% my attraction", and then get frustrated when I dont find women they find hot hot

-have other trans women insinuate to my face that my attraction to men as a trans woman is me being comp het, and eventually Ill be sapphic again once im more confident in myself

-have other trans women insinuate to my face even if I prefer men I should avoid dating them, and then just unironically say radfem talking points demonizing men

-people above will only find a man "safe" and hot if he's gnc and subby, and if you find any sort of other man hot they will continue with the vaguely radfem talking points while infantilizing your attraction

-cis men who show interest in trans women will inevitably get accused of being eggs or chasers, depending on if theyre gnc or not. Gnc men are considered something to be normalized and celebrated until that point

-a trans woman who knows a lot of sapphics because she was friends with a couple makes perfect sense, and a cis woman whose friends with a lot of trans women because she knows a couple is an ally, but a cis man who knows a lot of trans women because he knew a couple [see point before]

-will get sometimes inappropriately sexualized by men for openly liking men, and get objectified for it

-dom or switchy sapphics, trans or not, will start acting toppy or dommy to you within a couple days, which can either be really nice or annoying depending on the mood. Often will get treated as a generic good, but seen as intrinsically bad from even a man youve been flirting with

-will hear people describe a generic or conventially ugly woman as a goddess, but if you say a generic or conventionally ugly man is hot you'll be told your standards are too low

-I can simp Ianthe Tridentarius or Minthara for a week straight with little push back and people understanding "she never did anything wrong" is a joke, but if I find a fictional man hot people will resort to group discussion or reading his wiki page looking for reasons to say why I shouldnt simp him

-I like toxic fictional characters. Can say "I support womens rights, but I also support womens wrongs" all day, but the moment the target of attraction is a fictional man you're infantilized by people acting like you cant be trusted to not know those things only belong in fiction

-hammering this point by now, but literally if I want to simp a fictional man I need to go out of my way to not bring up any red flags or even the most generic good guy will be seen in a bad light

[beardedmrbean]

Oh sorry didn’t know you have a special tag for me now. Of course ac mirage is glorified and gaming form of Baghdad. But what the gaming does as while we play in a golden age, the character we plays as those we fight for suffering from the corruption and wickedness of the time as no era is perfect.

Well you lived through it, but I think a lot of modern historian have guilt over the reactions towards Arabs after the Iraq invasion and 9/11. So they double down hard on Muslim “achievements” to show they are not savages

But it lead to them infantilizing brown people and demonizing the west.

Which we got women king because black activists hatred towards white people. I wonder how many native Africans are going to treat black Americans like me like a plague after that movie?

But why I pointed out mirage is that, audiences want non white civilizations to be shown as PEOPLE not the equivalent of fictional young adult novels noble savages take on them. Show the good, show the bad, show the humanity

Also I think the main issues with Islam stuff is because the left will call out Christians crimes against people. While forcing a Hindu to be side by side with a Muslim. Obviously varies, but I learn about the Kashmir Hindu genocide that happened on January 19th, 1990

It disturbing that such a religious genocide happened only about 10 years before my birth.

You gave yourself that tag, sort of at least, called yourself that and it made me laugh so I decided to run with it.

Well you lived through it, but I think a lot of modern historian have guilt over the reactions towards Arabs after the Iraq invasion and 9/11. So they double down hard on Muslim “achievements” to show they are not savages

Bush 1's Iraq war didn't really do much in the way with public opinion, up till 9/11 the Muslim community was a pretty solid republican bloc

Then they moved left, political party wise culturally they're still pretty solid red they just know the DNC will bend over and take it from them in the name of diversity points.

Case in point, imagine what would have happened if the city council that banned all but government flags on government buildings had been made up of white Christians.

They're be riots, and you will be hard pressed convince me otherwise.

Which we got women king because black activists hatred towards white people. I wonder how many native Africans are going to treat black Americans like me like a plague after that movie?

Can't find the video but at one point there was a gifset of it on here where the person was asking black Africans, probably in South Africa, if they taught about American slavery in their schools.

Their answer was a good one and the response on here to the gifs was exactly what you would expect from the perpetually offended, self absorbed, and self important people who would comment on this kind of thing.

'The whole world isn't America' they have their own history to teach and SA wasn't involved in the transatlantic slave trade anyhow, not that I'm aware of at least.

The response on here can be summed up in a single reaction image.

I'm seeing stuff with a bunch of African countries acknowledging their role and apologizing including Benin which contains the territory of the former Dahomey empire.

Not shockingly at all they're also still unironically seeking reparations, which I'm sorry no refunds on the merchandise you sold us (to put it crassly)

Depictions we're likely going to have to deal with, which I'm ok with that to a point, it's a romanticized picture of the people, time, and place.

We imagine knights on horseback charging into battle full armor on then going to do battle on foot when their loyal steed is killed.

We don't think about the fact that they couldn't take that stuff off to go to the bathroom so they just shit their armor and did battle with poopy feet, among many other nasty gross things.

So to A point I think fictionalizing things for entertainment isn't so bad, just so long as they don't go too far with it, people have different lines for that kind of thing too.

As for that last bit, posted this a couple days back.

Here's a highlight for you

Some took notice when this centuries-old religious conflict flared in 1989, as Sudan's jihad slaughtered 2.5 million Christians and enslaved perhaps 200,000 more. It ended only in 2005, when the U.S. helped broker a peace deal; in 2011.

I haven't verified those numbers, but it's Newsweek I feel like someone probably did.

Also these guys,

made the mistake of kidnapping a bunch of girls, if they'd just kept kidnapping boys to brainwash into becoming child soldiers nobody would have cared,

example

but wait no they're talking about the boys right there!!!!!!!

Yes well

10+ times as many boys per year and now they're mentioning finally

Sorry this took a while, I had a bunch of other stuff going while I was putting it together.

[dracotheocracy]

Bond. James Bond.

Plz give me all the info you've got on hand!

i am so glad you asked. fair warning: i will have nothing good to say about james bond.

now this wouldn't be a mars ask if i didn't set up dubiously necessary context before getting into it: i have a relatively well-documented history of being hooked into medias that are like watching car crashes (e.g., the irregular at magic high school, white collar). as it tends to happen in trash fire fiction i have seen some really problematic shit- irregular's main ship, for example, is an incest ship that's pushed by the narrative to the point where i think it isn't inaccurate to call its narrative somewhat pro-incest, and white collar is a police drama produced in 2010 which i think tells you most of what you need to know about the narrative it pushes about justice. all this, especially when compounded by some legitimately terrible writing, scratches a certain itch in the part of my brain that likes to tear shit apart.

the james bond novels will quickly become my latest victim, as i have to read From Russia, with Love for a course on spy fiction i'm taking this semester. i will likely have this tumblr post pulled up during the discussion we have about it in about 9 hours as what's under the cut is essentially a close-ish reading of the first 10 chapters of the novel.

tw misogyny, queerphobia, racism, sexual violence, demonization of mental illness

i have watched my fair share of james bond movies. they do not fucking prepare you for how bad the novels are. i am 10 out of 38 chapters into this novel (one of 14 novels!) and i have developed something of a hatred for ian fleming.

in 10 chapters the plot is only just beginning to get rolling, so in terms of actual writing quality i can give no judgements beyond "well i can sort of tell that by the end i am going to think 'hm this was not that good.'" now the bond franchise was never meant to be a literary masterpiece so it doesn't actually have to be all that good, it just has to be entertaining, and because my idea of entertainment is looking on in horror as some aspect of the writing finds a way to get worse somehow, by god has it been delivering thus far

what i CAN tell you is that ian fleming is teaching a masterclass on how to write with the male gaze. three female characters have been introduced in these first 10 chapters- a nameless masseuse who's really just there to make sure the opening of the novel is suitably erotic, rosa klebb, and tatiana romanov.

he has made a point of mentioning all of their breasts within give or take 3 paragraphs of their introductions, dear lord i might even be giving him too much credit. the nameless masseuse took her shirt off and was just tits out for most of the scene she was in actually, but that didn't really matter as much relative to the other glaring issue with that scene that i will be getting to later. he's also referred to his female characters as women as opposed to calling them girls maybe, once per character, so far. maybe that's a quirk of british english in the 1950s that nobody would think anything of, but it's something that adds up to the point that it's very much worth noticing to me- all of these women are grown adults and while i find myself unable to articulate exactly why it feels wrong to me that they're repeatedly called girls. it could be because i find it infantilizing, maybe, i feel like the word usage here diminishes their agency

the nameless masseuse doesn't really get a lot dedicated to her appearance relative to the named women, and the opening scene happens mostly in her point of view. there is also a man in this scene who i will be getting to in full later, but for now i will point your attention towards two quotes:

"[S]he wondered why she loathed this splendid body, and once again she vaguely tried to analyse her revulsion. Perhaps this time she would get rid of feelings which she felt guiltily certain were much more unprofessional than the sexual desire some of her patients awoke in her." "Now was the time when many of her patients, particularly the young ones on the football team, would start joking with her. Then, if she was not very careful, the suggestions would come. Sometimes she could silence these by digging sharply down towards the sciatic nerve. At other times, and particularly if she found the man attractive, there would be giggling arguments, a brief wrestling-match and a quick, delicious surrender."

this scene is written from her perspective and it's here to introduce the male character in it. but who cares about that, what is it telling us about the masseuse? well. she thinks her patients are hot and has sex with them sometimes. that's really about it, i think her portrayal in the scene as a whole would indicate that she's plain or a little dumb but there isn't much character to discern because ian is far more concerned with talking about the man in this scene in a way that's pretty sexually charged while also establishing the first bits of information you get about him as the reader. the only purpose of a female POV in this scene is to make it more erotic, i think it's pretty clear he doesn't really care about this character's anything beyond the inherent sex appeal she gets by being female and the ability to write a somewhat erotic description of a male character without it coming off as weird and homosexual.

our next female character is rosa klebb. i will be getting back to something more important about her later, for now i'd like to focus on how fleming, from a male character's perspective, describes her.

"She was short, about five foot four, and squat, and her dumpy arms and short neck, and the calves of the thick legs in the drab khaki stockings, were very strong for a woman. The devil knows, thought Kronsteen, what her breasts were like, but the bulge of uniform that rested on the table-top looked like a badly packed sandbag, and in general her figure, with its big pear-shaped hips, could only be likened to a 'cello."

i'll be honest this is an excuse to show off one of the titty quotes and rosa klebb is a pretty big offender. a lot of the impression we get of her in the beginning is done less to give us an impression of her and more to establish the kind of character our current POV man, kronsteen, has. kronsteen is an emotionally detached, manipulative, and insightful (in the dnd insight skill way) chess master who works for the MGB. he's the criminal mastermind smart guy who makes all the plans. now i suspect the purpose of rosa's physical description doesn't have much to do with showing anything particularly notable about kronsteen's character, there's a paragraph dedicated to the rules he uses to read/judge people that tells you far more about him than this does even if you try to analyze it, mostly because this is also how ian talks about women in the absence of a POV character

which brings us to tatiana romanov! who has her physical appearance described in a scene that is set in her POV:

"One of her early boy-friends had said she looked like the young Greta Garbo. What nonsense! And yet tonight she did look rather well. ... She smiled at herself in the mirror. Yes, it was wide; but then so had Garbo's been. At least the lips were full and finely etched. There was the hint of a smile at the corners. No one could say it was a cold mouth! And the oval of her face. Was that too long? Was her chin a shade too sharp? She swung her head sideways to see it in profile. The heavy curtain of hair swung forward and across her right eye so that she had to brush it back. Well, the chin was pointed, but at least it wasn't sharp."

"In fact Corporal Tatiana Romanova was a very beautiful girl indeed. Apart from her face, the tall, firm body moved particularly well. ... Her arms and breasts were faultless. A purist would have disapproved of her behind. Its muscles were so hardened with exercise that it had lost the smooth downward feminine sweep, and now, round at the back and flat and hard at the sides, it jutted like a man's."

wild guess. shot in the dark. she's this novel's bond girl. ian gives a glowing description of her features during which he establishes that she thinks a lot about her appearance and is perhaps somewhat insecure about it, but still believes herself to be beautiful. the stuff i took out and replaced with the ellipsis is really much of the same as what follows the ellipsis. the second quote is switching briefly from romanova's POV to that of the narrator, and of course it ends on a description of her tits and ass because, well, why not. now i will give some amount of grace in that romanova does have, like, a personality, but much like the masseuse she's, bland might not be the correct way to describe it, but she has this very gentle, [in a sarcastic tone of voice] divine feminine quality to her. to quote the next chapter, "This was a beautiful, guileless, innocent girl." i admit reluctantly that ian did a decent job of showing us this before telling us- her demeanor when she gets a call from a superior officer in the MGB betrays as much with her immediate panic over what she might've done to get a call at unusual hours from her superiors and pretty meek acceptance of what she probably sees as certain death, and her concern with her appearance in the parts i quote might come across as a bit superficial but the insecurity, the way she appraises herself, paints her less as vain and more as a shy beauty (to be conquered by bond later of course)

we return back to the scene with the masseuse, this time to talk about donovan grant, or granitsky. he is a major villain.

"Donovan Grant was the result of a midnight union between a German professional weight-lifter and a Southern Irish waitress. The union lasted for a quarter of an hour on the damp grass behind a circus tent outside Belfast."

i am genuinely curious why ian thought it necessary to mention that his parents fucked for 15 minutes in the sex that conceived him. we must note the nationalities of his parents because with the prior james bond knowledge that dr. no, a major villain from earlier in the bond timeline, has a german father and a chinese mother, makes me suspect there might be a pattern in what heritages ian likes to give his antagonists. (READ: GERMAN AND [INSERT OPPRESSED NATIONALITY HERE]). it should be noted that granitsky's father immediately fucks right off and he's raised in southern ireland. dr. no, i'm fairly certain, was also raised in china as his father was a german missionary if memory serves. ian throughout the first couple chapters establishes that communist spies are pretty culturally and racially diverse, which would be cool i guess if the communists weren't evil in this setting. later in his exposition about granitsky's backstory he describes the spy school he attended in leningrad, specifically its makeup: "Germans, Czechs, Poles, Balts, Chinese and Negroes..." (about the use of the word Negro, the bond novels were written in the 50s. for clarity). there's a mention in a later chapter of a particularly accomplished black soviet agent. i will update this post if there's any racial diversity on the MI6 side of things but... somehow i doubt it...... anyway, i point this out just to make a note that the side we're rooting for here is the side of the white englishman where his villains tend to come from less privileged cultural backgrounds

i'm not done with donovan. he gets worse. his character says a lot about society and particularly how little ian fleming thinks about like, anything. donovan grant is a high ranking assassin in the MGB. he's a boxer that defected from british armed forces oh also he's a serial killer

"It was about this time that his body began to feel strange and violent compulsions around the time of the full moon. When, in October of his sixteenth year, he first got 'The Feelings' as he called them to himself, he went out and strangled a cat. This made him 'feel better' for a whole month. ... Often he had to go very far to find what he wanted and, after two months of having to satisfy himself with geese and chickens, he took a chance and cut the throat of a sleeping tramp."

grant is diagnosed 2 chapters later with manic depression that flares up once a month. he has to go out and kill people or drink his urges away once a month because he has manic depression that is explicitly stated. it's almost 1am so i'm not going to dignify this with an especially winded explanation of what's wrong with this scene. that's a wildly inaccurate portrayal of what we now understand as bipolar depressive disorder and a demonizing one at that, because, you know, evidently manic episodes make you go out and kill people right that's definitely accurate and based in verifiable fact right. he was diagnosed as a narcissist also while we're on the topic of demonizing portrayals of already very stigmatized mental illnesses

"When he killed the occasional girl he did not 'interfere' with her in any way. That side of things, which he had heard talked about, was quite incomprehensible to him. It was only the wonderful act of killing that made him 'feel better'. Nothing else."

so as an aro/ace myself i dig into this one particularly hard. there is one hell of an implication here about an asexual's capacity for love, compassion, you know, emotions, the things many people argue make us human. it's just incredible to me, really, that ian decides to introduce this character's asexuality by saying "he doesn't rape the women he kills because he does not experience sexual desire." it's very, very clearly not something that's supposed to reflect positively on donovan, which is just insane because you'd figure this would be a "well at least he doesn't rape women he only kills them :|" but instead it's "he doesn't rape the women he kills how awful and weird!"

the train of logic there is relatively easy for me to piece together i think. if someone is okay with murder, that is, on the sliding scale of evil actions, generally placed above being ok with sexual violence. at least i suspect this is reliably true in the 50s when this novel was written. the intended takeaway from this as a result is probably something along the lines of, "well, this person already has something deeply wrong with him. someone who would commit such a grave sin as killing another human being shouldn't have any qualms with crimes that are of a lesser magnitude, ergo if he's killing the woman why does he not rape her as well? it must be because he has no sexuality!" which is going to be treated as a bad thing. this is james bond. this is a series that deals heavily with sexuality, the bond girl is a known staple of the series for a reason, right, and the stance ian takes is that sexual desire is part of what makes us in some respects human, and that something is wrong with you if you don't experience it.

grant is not the only queer character in From Russia, with Love, check this out:

"It was said that Rosa Klebb would let no torturing take place without her." "For, or so they whispered, she would take the camp-stool and draw it up close below the face of the man or woman that hung down over the edge of the interrogation table. Then she would squat down on the stool and look into the face and quietly say 'No1' or 'No10' or 'No25' and the inquisitors would know what she meant and they would begin. And she would watch the eyes in the face a few inches away from hers and breathe in the screams as if they were perfume."

"Rosa Klebb undoubtedly belonged to the rarest of all sexual types. She was a neuter. ... The stories of men and, yes, of women, were too circumstantial to be doubted. She might enjoy the act physically, but the instrument was of no importance. For her, sex was nothing more than an itch. And this psychological and physiological neutrality of hers at once relieved her of so many human emotions and sentiments and desires... She was a lone operator, but never a lonely one, because the warmth of company was unnecessary to her."

there is so much wrong with this. she's rumored to be a neuter i.e having non-functional sex organs in this context, i think. i do believe ian is trying to indicate that she might be intersex here. she fucks both men and women, maybe she's bisexual, and she does not get any emotional fulfillment out of relationships and sex to her is "nothing more than an itch." sex is often described as the ultimate form of intimacy and i do think there's an argument to be made for an aro/ace reading of this if what we're being told here is, essentially, that she gets no emotional fulfillment from sex and it's merely a pleasurable act. regardless there's something to be said about the only two characters thus far with unusual sexual identities being a serial killer and a torturer. they're both portrayed as incredibly cruel and incapable of forming meaningful relationships with other people and the fact it happens twice in the same book i think is indicative of a pattern in how ian (and his time period more broadly) views queer identities.

um yeah so that's my review of the first 10 chapters of From Russia, with Love by ian fleming like and subscribe for more

[gotham-is-the-best-worst-show]

Talking About The Isabella Arc part 1

CW: Helluvaboss discussion

I hate for one of my first posts on here to be negative, but I feel so mad that we were pitted against Ed in the whole Isabella situation.

I really wish that we would have got to see Ed's side of the story. I felt like the whole time, we were so disproportionately seeing it from Oswald's perspective, that it really was unfair to Ed as a character.

I know that Oswald is an extremely important character to the show, and Ed's character is usually an accessory to Oswald, but . . . As a Riddler kinnie, it’s so unfair.

The thing about me is I love fictional relationships in which both characters are equally bad people, doing equally selfish things to each other. It’s like candy to me, it’s so interesting to explore and write about, and it’s always exciting.

And that is one of my favorite parts about Oswald and Ed's dynamic, that they are equals. When one of them has the upperhand, the other will eventually come out on top.

I think that their power dynamic is very compelling. Oswald helped to begin Ed's criminal career, and Ed seems lost without his guidance. But also Oswald is hopelessly in love with Ed and will always be waiting for the day Ed reciprocates.

I feel that they both love each other so much for reasons that are selfish. Oswald loves Ed for the same reason Fish Mooney loved Oswald: she 'made' him. Ed loves Oswald because he gives him a sense of identity he can’t have on his own.

I really hate the way that gay men who are in unrequited love are sometimes so infantilized by the framing of the narrative. I’m thinking about the character of Stolas in Hellavaboss (I despise that I have to mention that show).

In the beginning of Helluvaboss, the show is a lot more honest about Stolas' morality and selfishness as a character than it gets as it goes on.

In the beginning, we see Stolas as an entitled noble who cheats on his wife with an imp, using Blitzo for his own shallow sexual gratification while being belittling to Blitzo, uncaring about the effect this has on his daughter until she brings to his attention the way it damages their relationship.

Blitzo, too, is shown to be cold and callous to Stolas for reasons that are understandable, but also it is clear he is using Stolas too, for Stolas' grimoire.

I think that this was a good set up.

I was really hoping for Stella to be a somewhat sympathetic character who is lashing out because she is being betrayed by her husband who she loved, because I am very much not into the way that (often) queer-created media or queer fanon likes to demonize women who get in the way of the gay ships. (Examples: hatred for and abuse of Harley Quinn because she gets in the way of BatJokes, hatred for and abuse of Lizzie Midford because she gets in the way of SebaCiel)

This sort of thing happens with any ship, that people hate certain characters for getting in the way of their ship, but it’s just annoying to me the misogynist undertones when it comes to women characters. (Saying Lizzie deserves to die because she has an annoyingly high voice . . . Um . . . She’s a preteen girl . . . Of course she has a high voice . . . It’s okay to not like her voice, but most people who say that obviously hate her more for being a ship cockblock)

It’s so much more interesting to be able to have sympathy for all sides.

And also, I was hoping to watch a show that is honest about its own character's immorality, and lets us feel for them anyway. No moralizing bullshit to only make us feel for the 'good guys' and hate the 'bad guys'. Just a show about horrible people all around that we can nonetheless relate to and enjoy.

But as it goes on . . . Things fall apart.

The show started to frame Stolas in an infantilizing light, making Blitzo out to be the villain only because Stolas is in love with him, which is so fucked up, because Blitzo doesn’t have to love Stolas, or anyone at all. That’s just kind of true of anyone. Nobody has to be in love with anyone, even with people who they are in a sexual relationship with, and that’s a fact of life.

Even though Blitzo obviously has romantic feelings for Stolas, that’s also not an excuse. He doesn’t owe Stolas anything. This whole relationship was based off of mutual selfish gain, and so, it’s really not Blitzo's responsibility that Stolas caught feelings.

It seems to me a very easy way to manipulate the audience. Because the majority of the fanbase of Helluvaboss are queer people and they know very well what it feels like to be in unrequited love (often with a straight person, or else someone who is struggling to be honest about their identity), they are more likely to sympathize with Stolas.

And Stella is demonized completely, so she’s just a bitch who abuses Stolas because she’s a bitch and does the bitchiest things the writers can think of to make you hate her.

All this would be fine if the show stopped doing this weird thing where it tries to retcon its own characters' morality and manipulate the audience into thinking characters who are horrible people are worthy of sympathy and love and other characters who are also horrible people aren’t deserving of sympathy and love because of the manipulative framing which screws with the plot and makes the characters uninteresting pity-bait or hate-bait.

This is something that Gotham does sometimes, but it’s not such a glaring issue, I feel.

[orion-nottson]

omegaverse is problematic, so let’s talk about it

A/B/O is fun and all, and I can respect it as a kink, but we have to remember it often:

Promotes and normalizes sexism and misogyny (i.e. femininity = weak/bad/punishment, masculinity = strong/good/desirable).

Specifically objectifies, commodifies, and sometimes infantilizes women/AFAB individuals.

Is hyper-patriarchal and exploits uneven gender power dynamics and weaponizes traditional gender roles.

Fetishizes and sexualizes LGBT+ relationships (healthy and unhealthy).

Specifically fetishizes transgender and intersex individuals (i.e. mpreg).

Glorifies and romanticizes domestic abuse, toxic relationships, and abusive relationships.

Animalizes and bestializes people (especially contextually problematic when the person is a POC).

Implicatively paints rape culture in a positive light.

Idealizes unhealthy, toxic, and/or abusive behaviors (i.e. jealousy, possessiveness, anger, etc).

Creates an implicit racial hierarchy wherein the stand-in for race is the rank/“subgender” (i.e. Alpha at the top (White-coded), Sigma (sometimes), Beta, Omega at the bottom (POC-coded).**

If you like A/B/O, whether as a consumer or writer or whatever, I’m not saying that you support any of these ideas. What I am saying, however, is that there needs to be a conversation held about Omegaverse, and its implications and thematic elements. For most of these, it really isn’t hard to see them manifest in A/B/O works (especially the gender and LGBT stuff), because for a lot of them they have become normalized within the genre. I feel that is irresponsible and unwise. These are issues that affect real world people daily, to varying degrees of harm, and a lot of violence occurs to the often marginalized groups that A/B/O tends to exploit.

All I ask is that you recognize these themes in A/B/O and Omegaverse media, because your silence or ignorance on the matter can perpetuate the problem. To be responsible consumers and producers of content, we have to be cognizant of its inherent problems.

I don’t have a complete or all-encompassing list of solutions, but here are some I’ve thought of:

Avoid gendered roles, obligations, and behaviors.

Diversify your A/B/O subgenders.

Don’t resort to stereotypes.

Frame abusive/toxic/criminal behaviors and acts as completely unacceptable, detested, and wrong.

Avoid portraying rape/sexual assault/violence as a “natural” or “inherent” urge/quality.

Subvert the hyper-patriarchal narrative by not always making The Man™ the head honcho.

Resist the temptation to make your LGBT couple’s only personality trait as “We’re queer and we fuck” (same goes for hetero couples tbh).

Remember that characters are still people, even though the work is fictional.

Please be careful about how you write/portray POC characters.

And for any work that may contain sensitive/offensive content, tag your work properly. Always disclose what your story contains.

Again, this post is not meant in any way to call out or demonize you if you enjoy A/B/O. It’s a valid kink, and I even like certain aspects of it. I just believe that it’s always smart to be conscious of the highs and lows of the things you enjoy.

I’m also happy to discuss this with anyone, so please feel free to reach me in any form to talk about what you agree with, disagree with, or are confused by. I always seek to start conversations, not fights, so I do ask that we keep discussions and arguments respectful.

Take care, everyone!

~

** I put asterisks after this last point mostly due to it being conjecture. I don’t have much concrete examples/evidence for this, as it’s a theory I’ve garnered from implicit themes in some A/B/O media. While I do think it holds weight and can be realistically proven, I still need to polish my thesis and do more research on it.

[bluewatsons]

George Scialabba, The Dialectic of Love and Authority, 20 The Baffler (October 2015)

If irony alerts had been invented before 1977, they might have saved Christopher Lasch a lot of grief. The title of his controversial book Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged misled many of his critics. Lasch was widely taken to mean that a haven is what the family used to be before it was besieged by feminism and sexual liberation. Feminists retorted that this was a nostalgic fiction: the traditional family had never been any such idyll, especially for women. Lasch could only be an apologist for patriarchy, misappropriating psychoanalytic theory in a reactionary effort to restore male authority. Reviewing Lasch’s final, posthumous collection, Women and the Common Life, the usually astute Ellen Willis took him to task for his “fail[ure] to take patriarchy seriously” and his “adamant denial of any redeeming social value in modern liberalism.” No doubt this had the long-suffering Lasch growling in his grave.

Haven in a Heartless World is a densely argued book, and Lasch himself was not certain what his arguments implied, practically. (He died in his prime, at sixty-one, before he could spell out the programmatic implications of his far-reaching critique of modernity.) But far from idealizing the nuclear family, Lasch portrayed it as a doomed adaptation to industrial development. The transition from household production to mass production inaugurated a new world—a heartless world, to which the ideology of the family as a domestic sanctuary, a haven, was one response. The premodern, preindustrial family was besieged (and vanquished) by market forces; the modern family is besieged by the “helping” (which has turned out to mean “controlling”) professions. The latter development—the subordination of the family to the authority of a therapeutic ideology and an impersonal bureaucracy—is the story told in Haven in a Heartless World and its successors, the very well-known Culture of Narcissism and the not very well-known The Minimal Self.

Lasch makes extensive use of psychoanalytic theory, whose intellectual reputation stands pretty low nowadays. But it’s not necessary to enroll in the church of High Freudianism in order to find Lasch’s account plausible. Belief in ego, superego, and id is optional; the essential thing is to recognize that our minds have a deep structure—an unconscious—formed very early and subsequently difficult to access. The unconscious is the mold of our character, which is our usual pattern of action and reaction. In Lasch’s formulation:

As the chief agency of “socialization,” the family reproduces cultural patterns in the individual. It not only imparts ethical norms, providing the child with his first instruction in the prevailing social rules, it profoundly shapes his character, in ways of which he is not even aware. . . . The union of love and discipline in the same persons, the mother and father, creates a highly charged environment in which the child learns lessons he will never get over—not necessarily the explicit lessons his parents wish him to master. He develops an unconscious predisposition to act in certain ways and to re-create in later life, in his relations with lovers and authorities, his earliest experiences. Parents first embody love and power, and each of their actions conveys to the child, quite independently of their overt intentions, the injunctions and constraints by means of which society attempts to organize experience. If reproducing culture were simply a matter of formal instruction and discipline, it could be left to the schools. But it also requires that culture be embedded in personality. Socialization makes the individual want to do what he has to do; and the family is the agency to which society entrusts this complex and delicate task.

Different personalities are adaptive in different societies; what one “has to do” varies according to the prevailing relations of authority. And since families are the means by which societies form personalities, the family’s structure and dynamics alter in response to social change. Changes in economic and political life, like the rise of capitalism and the nation-state, “reverberate in the individual’s inner being.”

On Good Authority

For better and worse, modern parents are far more sensitive to outside influences than their premodern predecessors. Arranged marriages are now all but unknown in developed societies, corporal punishment is virtually obsolete, and the sexual double standard is under heavy fire. Meanwhile, each child’s respect for diversity and, of course, self-esteem is diligently cultivated. And all these changes are enforced or encouraged by an array of professionals and agencies. All good; but this anxious, busy solicitude comes at a price: authority is no longer localized in a self-sufficient household that controls its own subsistence and work rhythms. According to Lasch, this displacement of authority from the child’s immediate environment to far-removed, abstract entities—the state, the corporation, the medical and educational bureaucracies—makes it harder for the child to achieve emotional independence. Love is necessary but not sufficient; “love without authority,” Lasch wrote, “does not make a conscience.”

Why? Psychoanalytic theory offers a speculative but intricate and coherent explanation. Because the human brain is more complex and slower to mature than any other mammal’s, the human infant is uniquely helpless at birth, unable to distinguish between itself and the rest of the world. It cannot distinguish between the source of its needs (its own body) and the source of their satisfaction (mainly its mother), which gives rise to a feeling of omnipotence. When some of those needs eventually go unmet, the infant becomes aware of its separation from the rest of the world, and in particular from its parents, which gives rise to helplessness and rage. Gradually it dawns on the infant that the source of its gratifications and the source of its frustrations are the same: the parents. This recognition is bewildering and intolerable; it cannot be coped with, only repressed.

The return of the repressed, either as symptom or as fantasy, is inescapable: this is the psychoanalytic equivalent of the law of gravity or the conservation of energy. And precisely because the infant is so helpless, its fantasies—of undifferentiated union with its parents, of annihilating them, or of being annihilated by them—are, by way of compensation, outsized. If the infant is to live with these conflicting impulses and the ambivalence they generate, it must scale them down, reduce them to life-sized, manageable proportions.

Throughout human history until industrialization—that is, until seven or eight generations ago—children had the everyday experience of watching their parents at work, where they were seen to make mistakes and also to possess useful skills that they were willing to teach. This reduced the idealized or demonized parents of the child’s fantasies to life size. Even more important, the regular experience of love and punishment from the same source taught a vital lesson: that those with the ultimate authority over the child could be trusted, and that their disapproval did not threaten the child’s very existence. This fundamental, gradually accumulating emotional security enabled the child to slough off archaic fantasies and grow up. When the ultimate authority in a child’s life is no longer localized in a pair of adult humans but rather is invested in abstractions like a company or a social-welfare bureaucracy, those fantasies persist. The child’s ambivalence toward authority has no focus and so can’t be put to rest. Later in life, still plagued by these unconscious specters, the adult develops what Lasch identified as the neurotic personality trait of our time: narcissism.

“Narcissism” has an everyday and a psychoanalytic meaning. A story in the September 4 New York Times illustrates the everyday meaning: “The political rise of Donald J. Trump has drawn attention to one personality trait in particular: narcissism. Although narcissism does not lend itself to a precise definition, most psychologists agree that it comprises self-centeredness, boastfulness, feelings of entitlement and a need for admiration.” Trump is certainly a narcissist in this sense, but the psychoanalytic sense is different: a weak, beleaguered self rather than an overbearing, assertive one. A disciple of Lasch’s (i.e., me) has described the narcissistic personality in these terms:

wary of intimate, permanent relationships, which entail dependence and thus may trigger infantile rage; beset by feelings of inner emptiness and unease . . . ; preoccupied with personal “growth” and the consumption of novel sensations; prone to alternating self-images of grandiosity and abjection; liable to feel toward everyone in authority the same combination of rage and terror that the infant feels for whoever it depends on; unable to identify emotionally with past and future generations and therefore unable to accept the prospect of aging, decay, and death.

At least in Lasch’s time, the clinical literature was rife with descriptions of symptoms like these, replacing the obsessional and hysterical neuroses of Freud’s time as the most common forms of psychological distress.

Human Scale

The discerning reader will have noticed that the foregoing account of emotional development is almost entirely sex-neutral. Roles and functions are not assigned by gender. There is no sexual division of labor, no Oedipus complex, no penis envy. “The emotional underpinnings of the formation of conscience are universal,” Lasch emphasized. “The crucial experiences are those of fear of separation, of dependence and helplessness—the infant’s discovery that he lives in a world that is not completely secure and dependable.”

This is not a single-mindedly Freudian account. For all his reliance on psychoanalytic categories, Lasch said clearly that “what is crucial in my view . . . is not the division of sex roles inside the family, in terms of which parent provides authority or love, but the division of labor in society, which has relieved the family of all [economic, educational and authoritative] functions.” Lasch may or may not have been a feminist, depending on whether one’s standard is John Stuart Mill or Andrea Dworkin. But he fully acknowledged the justice of women’s claims for economic and sexual equality. He was unruffled by the (then distant) prospect of gay marriage. His only consistent policy proposal was that the contemporary notion of career be redefined to make parenting and professional success fully compatible—to “make it possible for both men and women to work more flexible hours, shorter hours and, when possible—through technological advances like personal computers and fax machines—to work at home.” This is not an antifeminist agenda.

It was not feminism but mass production, political centralization, and the ideology of endless growth and ever-increasing consumption that had placed impossible strains on the family and made psychological maturity so difficult, Lasch argued. Every organism can flourish only within limits, at a certain scale. We have, in our social relations of authority and production, abandoned human scale, and the psychic costs are great.

The main developments of the last few decades, the information revolution and the triumph of neoliberalism, have only intensified the pressures besieging the family. Increased economic insecurity and the robotization of work—the central strategies of neoliberalism—have undermined the authority and self-confidence of parents still further and confronted adolescents with the prospect of adulthood as a war of all against all. Inside and outside the classroom, a tidal wave of advertising-saturated media aims to enlist children as fledgling consumers. The internet and social media diminish interaction among family members, especially across generations, while face-to-face encounters, with their greater emotional immediacy, are less and less the default mode of communication among adolescents. The hyperconnected life, for all its allure, is a centrifugal force.

The family, in whatever form, can only thrive within a healthy psychic ecology. It has gradually dawned on everyone who does not have a financial interest in denying it that massively tinkering with our physical environment is bound to have drastic effects on public health. It’s taking even longer to recognize that the same is true of our mental environment. The unending flood of commercial messaging, utterly empty of information or art, resembles the miasma of toxic particulates that infect the air of even the most developed countries. The continual stream of social messaging is analogous, in its lack of nourishing substance, to the ubiquitously available junk food that none of us can help succumbing to occasionally. The automation of work and the financialization of the economy leave most of us as bewildered and vulnerable as the progress of science and technology leave all but the intellectual elite, who can actually understand the seemingly magical forces that make our more sophisticated machines run.

It is just as the environmentalists (and, come to think of it, the Marxists and the Freudians) say: Everything is connected. Pull on one thread and the whole fabric unravels. To strengthen the family, we must rethink the division of labor, which means reevaluating productivity, efficiency, and growth, which means challenging the distribution of economic power and wealth. We may even need new conceptions of “rights,” “individuality,” and “freedom.”

An equal share for men and women or whites and blacks in administering a toxic society is hardly a worthwhile goal, and certainly not a radical one. Answering Lasch’s criticism of contemporary feminism, Ellen Willis wrote in 1997: “Since the ’60s . . . a major current of feminist thinking has criticized careerism and called for a restructuring of work.” If that current is still alive, and if it hopes to get beyond leaning in, it will need to incorporate Lasch’s critique of progress as expanded consumption and his insistence on limits and human scale.

[thefudge]

omg cmbyn discourse is just... like guys it's fiction. It's about first love and desire and exploring your sexuality at the brink of adulthood. Like??? There are so many movies with a similar age difference between straight couples but ppl want to dismiss this one bcuz it's not 100% certified unproblematic??? Not even going to go into how in the 80s, a lot of people were out having consensual sex at age 17 with older people

(cont.) also I’m so tired of ppl trying to delineate everything “problematic” as a white ppl thing. like i just saw a post that said only white ppl buy into cmbyn but the book was written by an Egyptian born Sephardi Jew with Turkish heritage. gay relationships with large age gaps are a thing everywhere in the world. i can’t help but think that ppl are becoming increasingly blind to the complexities and nuances of reality

^^^^

i think we’re seeing a cultural shift where yes, the notion of abuse is being re-examined and cases of abuse are more efficiently prevented, but also anything can become abusive these days just by using a set of artificial parameters. so, human stories about, you know, people are becoming increasingly demonized precisely because people are people. 

this reminded me of a talk i had with a friend, where i expressed the idea that it would’ve been interesting to see octavia spencer as the main character in the shape of water and to see her connect with the fish. but my friend quickly pointed, and she’s right, that Concern Trolls would immediately shout “problematic!!” because this would somehow mean a hypersexualization of black women and a codification of a black women as “monsters”. Now, these arguments are silly, but powerful, because they are rooted in historicity and no one is denying the malignant representation of black women in past (and present) media, but this kind of “concern” also makes sure that we don’t see a black woman in a modern gothic romance. it’s ironic, because while these folks think they’re being progressive, they’re just upholding the old status quo, whereby black women are less visible, less important. and all this because they are deadly afraid of any kind of content that doesn’t toe the line. any story which has the potential to blur boundaries and play with complicated tropes and ideas MUST be bad, it MUST have a rotten core. the only Good Story is one that’s straightforward and easily digestible.  

this to me speaks of a strange moral insecurity. it says “i am afraid that if i let this loose, i will be contaminated.” because a lot of these people always go for the worst case scenario, they say “well, all of you ship this because you want to write gross torture dubcon” for instance. so they can’t imagine a situation where that’s not necessary. yiiiikes. same with call me by your name. these folks can’t picture a humane narrative between a 17 yo and a 24 yo that doesn’t involve violence and pain. and so it goes with all things “wrong” in their mind - they’re wrong to the extreme. so for instance, antis would picture the most graphic kind of beastiality between octavia spencer and the fish and say “black women are being abused and fetishized” or some such. they have no space for gentle, transformative stories, because they operate with preordained notions that “these are the limitations of black women in the media, you can go no further than this.” similarly, “these are the limitations of teenagers in the media, you can go no further than this.” 

and like you mentioned, it’s always queer stories that get this kind of talk. i have not yet seen anyone jumping up and down about elena gilbert falling in love with a 150 yo vampire (and an actor who is clearly not 17) on TVD. in fact, stelena is considered an example of a healthy, functional ship because it prioritizes elena’s desires. it’s also extremely hetero and white. whomp there it is. it’s a lot more palatable than call me by your name where the narrative is messy and the characters aren’t always likable. we want our “slash” m/m couples to be “cute” and “digestible” and “pure”. so many women writing for m/m and consuming m/m on this site infantilize them like crazy: “my son, my bby”. if that “son” suddenly developed agency and rejected the cutesy narrative…well then, this whole thing would be perverse. if, let’s say, 17 yo elio fell in love with a 15 yo boy, they’d say it’s still not quite “okay”, since 15….well, that was once 14…hmm….that’s too young. or at least they’d say “let’s not sexualize them, please”. because for them ANYTHING you could possibly write about the dynamic HAS to be vulgar, has to be sexual and graphic. it’s…disturbing. it’s a reflection of their imagination more than ours. 

[restoringsanity]

I could understand why the people who conflate fiction with reality don't like age-gap/abuse/incest ships, but what I don't get is the 'don't ship someone with their oppresor'. Are these people againts m/f, interacial or straight/bi relationships?? Because I've seen people practically advocating for segregation (especially when it comes to interracial ships) and I can't understand how someone could ever think that is a good idea. Idek if they are serious or is just a bad excuse to hate on ships.

i mean, the whole aging up discourse is just one more way to say women (and “”“women”“”) are degenerate sex demons. “even when there’s no room for sexuality, you go ahead and change the rules! are you just horny all the time? is sex the only thing on your minds? why do you like something so dirty and shameful so much?!” and then they wonder how women that are anti-abortion, slutshamers, victim-blamers, anti-sex ed, etc, can be like that. maybe look in a mirror before asking that.

I’m not super fluent in identity politics and activism speak, but -

Are these people againts m/f, interacial or straight/bi relationships??

Kind of. (Note: When I say ‘ship’, I mean the fictional concept. When I say relationship, I’m speaking of the real life equivalent.) Concerning interracial ships, they’re not disallowed (I think?), but rather considered mandatory. If you don’t actively choose to like the interracial ship, then you’re a racist. So, on one hand ‘don’t ship people with their oppressors’, unless it’s an issue of performative intersectionality. Up for interpretation, though. If it’s a m/m ship, don’t draw/write the person of color topping (because ‘thug’ stereotypes, somehow), but also don’t draw/write them bottoming (because infantilization, and also oppressive notions), and don’t you dare draw/write them like that.

Racism is a delicate subject, and we should be having conversations about it - but not like that. If we’re going to be talking about the issues people of color have to face, and you bring up ships, I’m going to stop talking to you. That is trivializing the suffering of millions to micromanaging inconsequential fictional content. Shipping isn’t activism.

Concerning m/f, heterosexual and bisexual ships - well, why don’t you ask our dearest radfems? I’m a feminist. I even believe in the wage gap, which makes me an ‘extreme feminist’ to some. I’m not a radical feminist, though. I’m currently quite disinterested in even having conversations with militant radical feminists.Their ‘a woman can never consent to sex with a man’, and ‘every instance of a woman having sex with a man is rape’, and ‘all men are oppressors’, their anti-kink and neo-sex-negativity bullshit has begun leaking into shipping discourse. Where do you think the whole ‘pedophilia’ angle is coming from? (So much of radical feminist rhetoric matches extreme conservative/traditionalist/puritan notion, point for point.)If you follow the logic through all flavors of discourse, you eventually realize that what ties a nice bow around it all is victimhood/victimization/self-victimization, etc. “Sex makes victims, so - sex is bad. Unless it’s between women.” (Mmmm, that pure, pure wlw content.) Because apparently victims can’t victimize each other. I’m certainly not calling all women victims. I’m not doing that. I believe women have agency - which is apparently a controversial idea to people who think ‘women can never consent to sex with a man’/etc. Why do you think TERFs don’t like transwomen and transmen? Transwomen are ‘male invaders’ and transmen have ‘internalized misogyny’. TERFs put themselves into a position of having to defend themselves against who they perceive as aggressors, from the outside and inside both. I’d guess it’s a form of selective hyper-vigilance (for a lack of better terminology).

shipping ‘incest’ -> ‘romanticizing’/’normalizing’ abuse, disrespectful/harmful to victims/survivorsshipping ‘abuse’ -> ‘romanticizing’/’normalizing’ abuse, disrespectful/harmful to victims/survivors shipping ‘pedophilia’ -> ‘romanticizing’/’normalizing’ abuse (CSA), disrespectful/harmful to victims/survivors shipping ‘age gaps’ -> ‘romanticizing’/’normalizing’ abuse (’power imbalances’), disrespectful/harmful to victims/survivorsshipping ‘a victim with their oppressor’ -> ‘romanticizing’/’normalizing’ abuse (oppression), disrespectful/harmful to victims/survivors

That’s the one angle, whenever a ship is criticized. It’s always decisively identifying a victim, and an aggressor.consensual kink (BDSM/etc) -> ‘romanticizing’/’normalizing’ abuse (sexual abuse), disrespectful/harmful to victims/survivors yaoi/BL -> ‘romanticizing’/’normalizing’ abuse (sexual abuse ‘tropes’), disrespectful/harmful to victims/survivors… and so on.

To what end? I don’t know. There’s just something about controlling people that is so, so enticing. No matter who you are - the concept of power is oh so tempting, and you’ll reach for it in the smallest of ways.

“My body, my choice” isn’t usually up for debate among radical feminists, unless it is. Too often the body in question is a collective one. Radical feminists have decided that women can decide for other women what to do with their bodies, and with their lives. Whether it’s a matter of sexual activity (kink/etc), identity (transitioning/etc), or career (stay-at-home mother), among other issues.Women are supposed to decide for themselves how they want to dress, because it’s their body - unless it’s catering to the ‘male gaze’. We are against slut-shaming, unless a slut needs to be shamed. We are sex-positive, unless the sex isn’t ‘pure’.I wouldn’t be surprised if the statement ‘pro-abortion, but only if the fetus is male’ has already been made.

As a feminist, it pains me to see that some feminist movements have become oppressive. As someone who endorses and supports the idea of social justice, it pains me to see that some extreme iterations of it have become a farce.

The whole ‘shipping discourse’ is neither an issue of feminism, nor social justice, or activism to me. It’s fucking embarrassing. More often than not (on Tumblr especially), it’s always about someone’s personal agenda, and what they want - and if they can’t have it, and if not everyone wants the same, they’ll fucking come for whoever wants something else.

[samjbatty]

An exploration of the ways in which the narrative of Dracula responds to late-Victorian attitudes toward the “Other”.

Dracula is an 1897 gothic horror story written by Irish author Bram Stoker. It is one of the earliest novels in the Vampire Fiction genre and created many of the hallmarks of the genre still seen today. The novel tells the story of a group of Englishmen hunting down a Transylvanian vampire to prevent him from spreading the undead disease in England. Due to its context as a piece of Victorian literature written at the beginning of the decline of the British Empire, the book is often read as an allegory for immigration, reverse colonization and race mixing. Other critics have read the story as a criticism of the concept of a powerful “New Woman”. In this essay I aim to analyse both these interpretations, specifically with Count Dracula as an allegory for reverse colonization and the female vampires as criticisms of feminism.

 It is important to note that Dracula (Stoker, 2008) is often categorized as a number of genres beside vampire fiction. These often include gothic fiction, horror but most importantly invasion literature. Invasion literature is a genre, popular between 1817 and 1914, which told stories of hypothetical invasions by foreign ‘others’. The genre was fueled by the anxieties of the British people as their Empire began to weaken. This is often where readings of Count Dracula as an allegory for reverse colonialism come from. Critic Arata believes, “A concern with questions of empire and colonization can be found in nearly all of Stoker’s fiction… [However] Only in this novel does he manage to imbricate Gothic fantasy and contemporary politics.” (1990) Arata also states that a reader cannot deny the political overtones of Dracula’s immigration to England. Lines such as “This was the being I was helping to transfer to London, where, […] he might, amongst its teeming millions, satiate his lust for blood, and create a new and ever-widening circle of semi-demons to batten on the helpless. The very thought drove me mad” (Stoker, 2008) seem to be written as to echo of the racist rhetoric of a jingoistic patriot. Stoker depicts the character of Dracula as savage, animalistic and uncivilized in his vampiric actions as a tribute to how vampires had been portrayed in the past but also to reflect the stereotype of foreign people in Victorian Britain. Arata (1990), calls attention to how the archaic, primitive forces unleashed by Dracula “threaten to overturn the progressive, scientific world of contemporary Britain.” Stoker highlights this in the character of Abraham Van Helsing, a doctor who performs many efficient and successful blood transfusions – a relatively new operation in 1897. Stoker also has many of the characters state that they cannot believe such events are taking place in the Nineteenth century. From these examples, Stoker seems to be very overt in his portrayal of Count Dracula as a primitive ‘other’ invading Britain.

 However, I believe that Stoker’s portrayal of the anxieties of invasion in a much more subtle way by depicting Dracula as a gentle mannered aristocratic man when he is interacting with Harker earlier in the novel. This parallels the fear of the undetected invader, in which the foreign ‘other’ masquerades as something unthreatening before taking over from the unsuspecting victims. This concept is supported by the line “"Well I know that, did I move and speak in your London, none there are who would not know me for a stranger” (Stoker, 2008) in which Dracula explains that blending in in London would help him to be a better predator. Stoker’s Dracula was the first novel to include shape shifting in the vampire’s repertoire of abilities, lending further credit to this reading. This allows the character to transform himself into animals such as rats, bats and wolves as well as a sentient fog in order to remain undetected. (Stoker, 1990) Another interesting aspect of Stoker’s vampire is that he is one of the first who does not sleep in a coffin but in a crate of Transylvanian soil instead. This highlights the depiction of Dracula as an immigrant who must sleep in his home soil to gain the power he needs to corrupt the Englishmen.

 An aside on this interpretation is that the heavy use of Christian symbols of faith, such as crucifixes, holy water, communion wafers and rosary beads, as means to weaken or defeat vampires implies a pro-Christian stance on religious conversion. This can bee seen in instances such as when Van Helsing “placed the Wafer on Mina's forehead, it had seared it—had burned into the flesh as though it had been a piece of white-hot metal” (Stoker, 2008). It is clear to see how the vampiric curse could be read as a new foreign religion and how Stoker utilizes the traditional vampire slaying methods to show that a strong faith in Christianity can overcome the ‘other’. This ties closely with the idea of reverse colonization as it takes the same concept of the ‘other’ but places their take-over in a religious context as opposed to a political one. Using this idea of religious conversion, Stoker creates a number of female vampires throughout the novel who seem to some critics to represent a criticism of the “New Woman” and the very early suffragette movements.

 The female vampires in Stoker’s Dracula (2008) play a much larger role in the novel than one would assume. There are many more female vampires than male and the main plot centers on keeping Mina, Harker’s fiancée, from fully turning. Since the release of the book, critics have argued over Stoker’s position on the female characters. Judith Wasserman explains the “fight to destroy Dracula and to restore Mina to her purity is really a fight for control over women” (1977). Senf disagrees, praising Stoker for seeing beyond the dichotomy of “angels or monsters” (1982), in his portrayal of Mina. Senf believes that whilst Stoker is not misogynistic in his treatment of women, he is “ambivalent […] to a topical phenomenon – the New Woman” (1982). However, to most readers, this rings false with the treatment of every character but Mina Murray.

 Many critics, such as Demetrakopoulos, believe the story can be split into two parts, each centering on a “different type of woman” (1977). The first vampire encounter in the novel is between Harker and three sisters. Harker describes the women as “thrilling and repulsive” (Stoker, 2008), using animalistic imagery such as “the red tongue as it lapped the white sharp teeth” (Stoker, 2008). This is typical of how all vampires are portrayed throughout the novel – they are primitive and carnal. However, Stoker also portrays the female vampires as very overt in their sexuality. The sisters are shown bending over, arching their necks and licking their lips in a suggestive manner. Swartz-Levine points out that as the female vampires become more sexual they become less and less humanized as Stoker switches from using possessive pronouns – “her lips” – to the definite article – “the lips” (2016). Swartz-Levine believes that the behavior exhibited by “Dracula’s brazen—and therefore monstrous— women do not adhere to standards of middle class morality” (2016). This behavior extends to the first ‘type’ of woman at the center of the novel – Lucy Westenra.

 Lucy is a young English woman who is stalked and converted by Dracula when he first arrives in England. She is Mina’s best friend and Arthur Holmwood’s fiancée. Before she is turned Lucy is seemingly portrayed as a proper young woman, stereotypical of Victorian expectations, however during a conversation with Mina the reader comes to realize that she is much more naturally sexual than her friend. Stoker shows this through the way Lucy views marriage - stating “Why can't they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her” (2008). Lucy’s ‘indecent’ behavior is implied to be the very reason she fell victim to Dracula. The result of this reading is that Stoker is condemning Lucy’s attitudes towards sex and as a punishment worsens them. As a vampire Lucy is portrayed very similarly to the sisters; she is violent and sexually aggressive. Stoker’s disapproval of an openly sexual, female character fits with Victorian attitudes, as Demetrakopoulos explains, “In the Victorian view, only fallen […] women enjoyed sex” (1977). Lucy’s sexuality reaches its peak in her death scene wherein Arthur pierces her heart with a wooden stake. Lucy becomes “The Thing” further dehumanizing her in the same way as the sisters (Swartz-Levine, 2016). Stoker begins to highlight Lucy’s mouth, using language that conjures images of sexual organs. With lines such as “Then he struck with all his might” (2008), and the phallic imagery of the stake, the scene is often read sexually. Despite the moment evoking images of an act of violation and an allegory of gang rape, it is clear that Stoker wants the reader to view the event as chivalrous. This suggestion is the “Victorian version of [the]‘blame the victim’” (Swartz-Levine, 2016) mindset that is seen so often today towards victims of sexual abuse.

 The focus of the second part of the novel, which Demetrakopoulos refers to, is Mina Murray (1977). She is a schoolteacher who is engaged to Harker. It is often argued that Mina is the most complex character. This is perhaps because she is the only female character whose perspective we see certain events from. She is described as intelligent and caring displaying both stereotypically masculine and feminine qualities, underscored by Van Helsing’s comments that Mina “has a man's brain […] and a woman's heart” (2008). When the group slaughters Lucy, Dracula begins to pursue Mina as his next victim. It is interesting to note that when Mina is forced to drink Count Dracula’s blood, she is described as “a kitten”, which infantilizes her maintaining Stoker’s perceived notion that good, proper women are desexualized (Demetrakopoulos, 1977). Mina is severely idealised throughout the novel, acting as caregiver for most of the fully-grown men in the group. It can be argued that this is Stoker’s way of showing that Mina is a caring individual, who also has the competency to keep up and work well with Professor Van Helsing. Critics such as Demetrakopoulos argue whether Mina was truly supposed to be a feminist or “New Woman” as many of her references to the movement can be read as either mockery or discomfort. Swartz-Levine argues for the latter, stating “Stoker helps to characterise his heroine by her discomfort at [the “New Woman’s] frankness [toward sex]” (2016). She argues that having Mina be a “New Woman” but also less sexually open than other members of the group, creates a multi-faceted character. When Mina drinks the Counts blood she does not fully turn but instead has a telepathic link with him, which Dracula uses to control her. However Mina, despite being scared of the link, manages to reverse this with Van Helsing’s help allowing them to track Dracula down. In general, Mina seems to be Stoker’s attempt at a strong, feminist heroine yet his Victorian ideals of female sexuality and stereotypes of women as reserved caregivers prevent him from succeeding.

 In conclusion, Stoker’s vampires are definitely indicative of Victorian opinions towards the ‘other’ in terms of gender and race. Count Dracula is depicted as a Transylvanian aristocrat who immigrates to England in order to spread his undead curse. This reflects the Victorian anxiety of reverse colonialism as well as religious conversion. Arata, in particular calls attention to the primitive forces, which Dracula uses to “threaten […] contemporary Britain” (1990). In the same way, Stoker’s female vampires reflect the Victorian attitudes towards women. This is a much more complicated allegory as the gender politics of the time were very complex. Stoker tries to create a complex heroine in Mira but ultimately falls into the trap of idealising her whilst presenting the other female characters with no depth whatsoever, as evil seductresses. I believe that supernatural beings will always be indicative of society’s attitudes towards the ‘other’ and that Bram Stoker’s Dracula follows this notion completely.

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References and Bibliography:

Arata, S. (1990). The Occidental Tourist: 'Dracula' and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization. Victorian Studies, 33(4), pp.p.621-645. Available at: Leeds Trinity University Library http://lib.leedstrinity.ac.uk  [Accessed 25 March 2017].

 Craft, C. (1984). "Kiss Me with those Red Lips": Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker's Dracula. Representations, (8), pp.107-133. Available at: Leeds Trinity University Library http://lib.leedstrinity.ac.uk  [Accessed 25 March 2017].

 Demetrakopoulos, S. (1977). Feminism, Sex Role Exchanges, and Other Subliminal Fantasies in Bram Stoker's "Dracula". Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 2(3), p.104. Available at: Leeds Trinity University Library http://lib.leedstrinity.ac.uk  [Accessed 25 March 2017].

 Light, D. (2012). New Directions in Tourism Analysis: The Dracula Dilemma: Tourism, Identity and the State in Romania. 1st ed. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Available at: Leeds Trinity University Library http://lib.leedstrinity.ac.uk [Accessed 25 March 2017].

 Morgan, S. (2007). A Victorian woman's place. 1st ed. London [u.a.]: Tauris. Available at: Leeds Trinity University Library http://lib.leedstrinity.ac.uk [Accessed 25 March 2017].

 Pikula, T. (2012). Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Late-Victorian Advertising Tactics: Earnest Men, Virtuous Ladies, and Porn. English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920., Vol. 55(Issue 3.), pp.p283-302. Available at: Leeds Trinity University Library http://lib.leedstrinity.ac.uk  [Accessed 25 March 2017].

 Rose, A. (2008). Gender and Victorian reform. 1st ed. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Pub. Available at: Leeds Trinity University Library http://lib.leedstrinity.ac.uk [Accessed 25 March 2017].

 Scott, N. (2007). Monsters and the Monstrous. 1st ed. New York: Rodopi. Available at: Leeds Trinity University Library http://lib.leedstrinity.ac.uk  [Accessed 25 March 2017].

 Senf, C. (1982). "Dracula": Stoker's Response to the New Woman. Victorian Studies, Vol. 26(1), p. 33-49. Available at: Leeds Trinity University Library http://lib.leedstrinity.ac.uk  [Accessed 25 March 2017].

 Stoker, B. (1897). Dracula. [e-book] Oxford, Oxford University Press. Available at Planet eBook http://www.planetebook.com/ebooks/Dracula.pdf [Accessed 25 March 2017]

 Swartz-Levine, J. (2016). Staking Salvation: The Reclamation of the Monstrous Female in Dracula. Midwest Quarterly. Summer 2016, Vol. 57(Issue 4), pp.p345-361. Available at: Leeds Trinity University Library http://lib.leedstrinity.ac.uk  [Accessed 25 March 2017].

  Wasserman, J. (1977). Women and Vampires: Dracula as a Victorian Novel.

Midwest Quarterly

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