#patriarchal helplessness and helplessness under patriarchy. we are not the same

[jessaerys]

the way the heavily implied sex work themes in thumbelina (1994) did something permanent to my brain chemistry

[zlobonessa]

also I'm about to get a bit more serious and a lot more annoying but it's really interesting to me how you can actually analyse regulus as a parallel to subaru in the aspect of patriarchy and toxic masculinity — and failing at it, actually.

subaru's issues with traditional masculinity are evident. arc 3 conflict is stemming from his inability to accept the fact that he cannot just be the great traditional hero saving a day and his lady without regards for her wishes. he grew up in a shadow of his father, a man who succeeded in getting everything that is promised by patriarchy — a loving family, a career, respect from his community. subaru cries a lot and scared for his life. he is a loser, he is vulnerable, he is insecure. he is everything that a patriarchal man shouldn't be.

so what does regulus have to do with any of this?

from a first glance at regulus you could assume that he is the one who played patriachy and won. he has a harem! he is violent and he can afford to be violent, he disregards other people's opinions and other people's lives. his wifes are supposed to obey him and if they don't, they are prostitutes snd whores and traitors. his rights are the only ones that matters. he is the one in charge. he is The Man.

but what if we look a little closer?

under scrutiny you can notice he is not actually completely secure in himself — rather the opposite. he directly tells as much:

he also compares himself to reinhard, yet another perfect man (just like subaru does) and not in his own favor:

his wives also notice the pattern:

and subaru puts the final nail in the coffin:

in other words, everybody can see through his scrawny ass.

we can still dig deeper here.

regulus appearance is described as averege (absolutely not impressive enough to get a girl he likes to llke him). he is not physically strong, he immediately loses the confidence that he'll win the fight the moment subaru and emilia take away his main advantage. he is the youngest son, a problem child. he is not particularly liked in his hometown. he is poor, which is a very important detail: combination of poverty and patriarchy produces its own type of helplessness, insecuity in masculinity. you forced to take unrewarding, most often physical, exhausting jobs that destroy your human dignity AND do not pay enough for you be a successful family provider. regulus is a failure in patriarchal society and he desperately wants to escape this position.

unfortunately, the only way he sees is up, and the only climbing technique he knows is the same patriarchal violence that put him down in the first place.

[also, sidenote: it's really funny how he is is only archbishop who gets the fanciest clothing and a whole ass manor.

class traitor.]

the authority of greed for regulus is a way to fight his insecurities by establish his dominance — patriarchal among others. he is the strongest now, nobody can humiliate him. he uses extreme violence to get his way. he forces a woman he likes to become his wife, knowing him, probably under the pretence of saving her from these incomplete swines. he knows better what is best for her, right?

well if it doesn't sound familiar.

that's also who subaru can be. cruel, cold, unable to ask for help and allow himself to be vulnerable, uncaring about what women he supposedly does all this for actually thinks about that. we can clearly see this in the if routes, but a lot of it is present in the main route too, to less extreme degree.

(also..... harem if lmao)

but as we established earlier, all of this doesn't actually makes regulus happy. he is still insecure, he lashes out at the barest hint of threat to his ego, he still deeply discomforted by interaction with reinhard. upholding the ideal of traditional masculinity doesn't help him and eventually leads to his doom. regulus is another dark reflection of what subaru could be — if he had not found another way, if he had been way too stubborn to change, to find support and to free himself from harmful, cruel ideas.

[writerswhy]

On Alicent and religion

So, I came across this Midnight Mass gifset and these two quotes:

He doesn't understand yet that guilt comes to you not from the things you've done, but from the things that others have done to you. -Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace

I would like to be found. I would like to see. Or to be seen. I wonder if, in the eye of God, it amounts to the same thing. As it says in the Bible, For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face. If it is face to face, there must be two looking. -Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace

And since then, I’ve been mulling over Alicent’s relationship with religion for the past few days because if there’s one thing that irks my soul, is when (western) writers write religious women as tradcath bitchy hypocrites (as opposed to religious men who use their religion as some sort of selfless sacrifice), especially when said woman is a victim of abuse. 

Instead of exploring Alicent’s religiousness as a way to cope with the abuse she endures, as part of her socialization and the community and culture she comes from, as a way to validate her innate kindness in a world where she’s surrounded by Machiavellians and careless people who can get away with things she cannot, the show manages to victim blame her by the way they frame her religiousness. That it’s another chain in this patriarchy without ever engaging with the actual patriarchs who actively abuse her on-screen. 

Something else that I want to highlight is that these systems that Alicent faces are faceless and abstract which makes the grief and anger and helplessness nearly impossible to work through. As a result, she ends up internalizing these roles - daughter, wife, mother - and when they contradict each other, or when external forces push and pull her, she ends up blaming and sacrificing herself. (As opposed to a man in Westeros like Aegon - her mirror - who can whore and drink and fight with little consequence, he may even be praised.) 

One day I’m gonna sit down and actually take my time to write these thoughts down, but here are some quick notes that I’m trying to sort through. (Note that it’s difficult for me to reconcile some of these with the Alicent(s) we see onscreen. Cooke is one of the best actors on the show but the writing for her has not been my favorite. I feel like Carey’s Alicent was more cohesive and consistent, so some these points apply more to ep 1-5 Alicent than later on.):

1. The first instance we see of her religiousness comes from a place of love. She visits the sept to feel closer to her mother and shares this with Rhaenyra to help her grieve. She uses her religion to comfort herself and connect with loved ones - living and dead. (Aegon does the same when he hides in the sept under the mother. Did he learn this from her? Did he learn this while studying the Faith of the Seven?)

2. If this greater being meant to comfort her and guide her tells her through its teachings that the very behavior she’s punished for is actually holy and human (that’s it’s right), does it help Alicent feel less alone? And if she has someone to share this belief with, like Criston? 

3. Does she channel the gods when she needs to compromise with who she is and who she needs to be? For example, Alicent was compassionate and loyal to Rhaneyra when defending her claim early on. After Rhaenyra’s betrayal, fearing for her children and honestly, it’s okay if she was offended and felt played by Rhaenyra, when she shows up to the wedding dressed in green, as a Hightower (no longer a dutiful wife), did she draw strength from the mother and father to seek justice for her and her children and to protect her family? 

This third point is so interesting to me because that’s what many real people do in real life everyday. We have to find ways to cope with life and learn how to understand ourselves, our wants, and how we can make them fit in this world. Obviously you don’t need religion to do this, but many do and in my community, religion is what keeps us grounded yet hopeful. Some of us live lives where if it were not for their religion, they’d feel less human under the systems that dehumanize them.

[mxdam]

fairy tales and the female gothic

"gothic" is a bit played out as a term. what is the gothic? is it Dark Macadamia? is it crimson peak? is it ebony dark'ness dementia raven way?

the gothic as a genre is generally agreed to have begun with the novel the castle of otranto by horace walpole, one of the worst pieces of crap ever composed in the english language. i'm so serious, don't read it. walpole (1717-97) was an antiquarian, sort of a hobbyist historian whose particular interest was in the medieval period (this was pretty hot shit in england at the time, but we can talk more about 18th century foundations of horror and ghost stories later). by talking about otranto we can identify certain hallmarks of the gothic genre:

an illusion of historicity. walpole pretended that the novel was actually derived from a medieval italian manuscript which he'd "discovered" and translated for a modern audience.

a focus on the family unit, lineage, inheritance: conrad, the sickly heir to otranto, dies horribly at the beginning of the story and this is seen as heralding the downfall of the family line.

an interest in corruption, violence, unequal power dynamics: manfred, the lord of otranto and conrad's father, wields the power of life and death over peasants under his rule and the inhabitants of the castle cower under his whims.

the appearance of unusual and/or supernatural occurrences that undermine ordinary reality and emphasize the themes of the story

an almost taken-for-granted exploration of patriarchal power and control, in the literal sense of rule of the father, with commensurate interests in sex, control, and incest: after conrad's death, manfred decides to divorce his own wife, conrad's mother, and marry isabella, his dead son's fiancee. both women are helpless to do much but run away.

what does this have to do with fairy tales? in our previous installment, we talked about the ways in which fairy tales reflect and reinforce patriarchal realities for women; that's one connection. another connection hinted at by marie mulvey-roberts in her essay, "from bluebeard's bloody chamber to demonic stigmatic," is that the prototypical gothic story is a fairy tale: the tale of bluebeard.

in bluebeard and its variations across cultures, we see a story that reflects "a time when women were deprived of legal rights within marriage," such that "the ‘Bluebeard’ fable is a test of wifely obedience and subjugation to the will of her husband" (mulvey). perhaps not for nothing, the most famous rendition of this story, la barbe bleue, was written by charles perrault, the same guy who gave us cendrillon, or "cinderella," upon which the disney cartoon and countless other renditions were based. in it, a young woman is married to a man whose knowingly-impossible demand of absolute obedience from his many wives inevitably results in their slaughter. the protagonist barely escapes with her life.

there are numerous parallels between the gothic and this story: a fascination with violence, corruption, and evil, a focus on lineage and the family unit (the male-female couple being the basis for all nuclear family and for all structures of biological inheritance), and above all an exploration of patriarchy. bluebeard can almost be considered the ur-text for what has come to be called the "female gothic," gothic stories written primarily by women (ann radcliffe, the bronte sisters, jane austen, octavia butler, angela carter, shirley jackson, toni morrison, jean rhys, daphne du maurier, etc) which explore the complex webs of interpersonal relationships and power structures that shape and control the lives of women, and how those women react to, challenge, or submit under the force of those structures.

in the next installment, i will talk about the wicked stepmother and the female gothic. stay tuned 🥸

[horizon-verizon]

the Wicked Stepmother acts the way she does beyond "she's just jealous/powerhungry/sadistic/whatever inherently unsympathetic motivation you can think of". Which Hot D, for all of its flaws, actually tries to do. Show!Alicent is deeply, profoundly Wrong, but not completely unsympathetic. She has layers and shit.

A)

The point of the OG post was not to decide on whether or not HotD's Alicent was "sympathetic" or not. That wasn't the concern. The concern was that the writers claimed the original story/female antagonist was sexistly written, and that they would rewrite it into something not sexist, but bc they did not understand the original character/story they created a sexistly-written female antagonist anyway.

F&B doesn't play the Wicked Stepmother trope "straight", as OP explains. What makes a TRUE Wicked Stepmother Trope narrative is there being a:

a passive, innocent, purely reactive girl, that patiently suffers and awaits for her Prince [...] that will save her from her evil Stepmother" so that "the willful and driven woman that is punished in the end (stepmother) Vs the passive perfect feminine figure that is rewarded in the end (stepdaughter)

There needs to be a passive young girl/perfect young female victim to be rewarded for suffering her wicked stepmother's manipulation attacks against her.

Rhaenyra is not a "perfect victim". In fact she's the opposite:

she is not patient, she has a toleration limit that grows shorter as she gets older because of all the attacks (thus she's a lot more "real")

she is willing to murder

she has extramarital sex & has, what some people have argued, are illegitimate children

she is very proud of her heritage and position & is told or accused of being "haughty" (as if Aemond or Aegon weren't, but that reveals how women and girls are told they shouldn't "think they're all that" since they are already undervalued)

she wears very fine clothing and loves to show off her looks and said position through her looks

she rides a dragon, which traditionally is actually the enemy of "Christian" European medieval society (the final or major boss of a knight's journey to prove himself and protect his domain), so she's not as helpless as a true Cinderella perfect victim

And thus it's not just about the stepmother herself. It's the Innocent StepChild AND thus who does the story "reward"/"punish" and why It's about rewarding one woman for not being self-motivated outside of survival so that a man can save her from a woman whom the story casts as evil because she wants power. As OP states, Daemon actually dies, unlike fairytales WS princes who survive to the end to live happily ever after with the female protagonist.

B)

We also don't really need to "sympathize" with a woman to judge whether she's been sexistly written/treated or not. If we can't acknowledge Cersei is evil, yet you can see how sexistly or non-sexistly she's written AS WELL AS sympathize with her at times for the i-world abuses & sidelining she gets. She is not "perfect" or blameless by any means, but she is definitely a victim of patriarchy.

Show!Alicent received much sympathy because she's first coerced into marriage and then raped, and next to that Rhaenyra looks like she's being too "spoiled" in her refusal to play by the same rules as "perfectly" as Alicent when even in the show she's still suffering from systematic & personal patriarchal abuses, AND Alicent didn't willfully start out wanting to obey the rules so much as was coerced.

Here's what xenonwitch had to say:

Instead of a woman who saw the individual power she could hold under patriarchy was far greater than allowing a woman to rule (and thus subvert or challenge the patriarchal status quo) as we see in Alicent (and real life Women for Trump and/or Conservative Women) the writers decided that a woman could only align with patriarchy if she had been brutally crushed beneath it and deprived or all agency. Hence Alicia becomes a doll for the men in her life to play with.

Why would making a character (who has already been victimized in the story and is only now starting to make political moves and exchanging it for a fate where she is stripped of all agency and violently abused be a “more interesting” story?

Because these writers and showrunners cannot find ambitious women compelling, and are far more satisfied watching women suffer and be victimized. To them, a woman must suffer in order to be relatable, compelling, and capable of empathy. Ambition and agency alone are dull and off putting.

Even though we're encouraged to feel more for Alicent, ultimately the basis for why we should make sympathy conditional on extreme debasement alone, so Show!Alicent is still subject to sexist writing.

We're encouraged to make an unfair comparison & judge who deserves sympathy; as if we should not cater to or support a woman when she's victimized when there is a rape victim to pour ALL our support or resources to. If there's a rape victim, suddenly other women do not experience serious sexism and suddenly the most victimized victim has the right to victimize other victims.

C)

I talk about this HERE.

Alicent maybe less criticized and slandered against than Rhaenyra in the original story, but there are a few examples of misogynist writing or people being sexist towards her in F&B. One is where she's not allowed to swear into the verbal agreement Larys Strong makes at the Green Council (it hinges on her womanhood disqualifying her from being an active & equal partner in their enterprise even though she enabled the council in the first place). Another is that Alicent, for a time, was suspected & lightly rumored of seducing Viserys for him to not marry Laena & thus climbed her way to her position by being "loose". She's still held to Andal beauty standards of women in that she's praised for being "still" slim after 4 pregnancies (her worth is being evaluated by how "hot" she is to men, even men who are supposed to not actively engage in sexual activities [septons & maesters]), as all women are.

Finally, narratologically, Alicent uses men's expectations of her as woman/queen Consort & their desires against her stepdaughter, which is not something the TRUE, conventional Wicked Stepmother has really done in popular media ever since its inception in fairy tales. She's an undercover-disobedient woman rather than an overt one, bc her cause is traditional (boys-first), and seems like she's just trying to get her boys their "rights", so most people around her do not think her cruel. Her cruelty is masked or excused behind the public perception. Whereas the stepmother's cruelty is more or less openly acknowledged in-world and to the readers, it's just that they also need to be "saved".

Ok I've rambled about this before but I want to do it once more.

You may need to sit down for this one but the Wicked Stepmother Trope is a reflection of very real life situations. There were and still are, "wicked" stepmothers. This is not just a stereotype. Irregardless of the societal reasons behind this (patriarchal structure of society), we cannot deny the fact that women, deprived of any real political power in the outside world, often abuse the little power they had inside their own household, at the detriment of other, weaker family members. Women are people, not holograms. Women historically had power however limited, and they too abused that power when they could, and they could do that against children because children are weaker. This is a centuries old societal problem that still exists today, especially in more traditional cultures. It is not mere construction. If you are not familiar with this issue, you have lived a very privileged life and I am happy for you.

However, let's suppose for a moment that the Wicked Stepmother Trope is indeed problematic and has a misogynistic nuance. I believe this is often the case and I will explain why.

If you want to deconstruct the Wicked Stepmother Trope, you have to be sure that there is a proper Wicked Stepmother Trope to begin with in the source material. You also have to make sure that the Wicked Stepmother Trope isn't already deconstructed in the source material. Which is EXACTLY the case in Fire and Blood.

So let's take a typical example of the Wicked Stepmother Trope : Cinderella. Let's compare Cinderella with Fire and Blood for a second.

There is no Wicked Stepmother resembling Cinderella's stepmother in Fire and Blood, for the simple reason that there is no Cinderella héroïne. What is a Cinderella héroïne : a passive, innocent, purely reactive girl, that patiently suffers and awaits for her Prince (a man) that will save her from her evil Stepmother (a woman). All these elements need to exist in order to talk about a proper Wicked Stepmother Trope. This trope gets this misogynistic nuance only when it is paralleled with the poor innocent fairytale heroine. It's the antithesis of the willful and driven woman that is punished in the end (stepmother) Vs the passive perfect feminine figure that is rewarded in the end (stepdaughter), that gives the Wicked Stepmother Trope the misogynistic nuance it has. And this is very important.

Now back to Fire and Blood.

Well, Rhaenyra isn't a Cinderella character at all. She is willful, she's radical, she claims her birthright, she makes mistakes, she dares, she goes against the status quo. She fits the stepdaughter role, and she too has a dashing Prince that tries to save her. Except that he doesn't. He dies, and so does she, horribly. She is not rewarded by patriarchy for her youth, beauty and submissiveness (very important factor if we wanna talk about misogyny in fairytales). Quite the contrary, SHE is punished by patriarchy.

Alicent fits the stepmother role, except that she doesn't fit the misogynistic Wicked Stepmother Trope because her punishment does not constitute an exemplary punishment for NOT being a Cinderella type of female. It's this juxtaposition to Cinderella that makes the trope misogynistic to begin with.

If anything, the Wicked Stepmother Trope is ALREADY deconstructed in the source material. By not respecting that, the writers achieved of course the contrary result : a deeply misogynistic narrative. Rhaenyra is basically a whore. The entire Dance stems from the fact that Rhaenyra had extramarital sex and that's it. That's literally it. The main antagonist was reduced to a rape victim, and had no ambition whatsoever. Since Rhaenyra wasn't a rape victim and had sexual freedom, morally she comes across as more ambiguous than the pure one dimensional victim that show!Alicent is. Rhaenyra had a choice, Alicent doesn't. So the whole BS that both women are equally victims of patriarchy comes at the expense of the actual female protagonist, the willful, daring, non-conforming female character trying to preserve her agency : Rhaenyra. It also comes at the expense of creating characters that feel real and consistent and are not just the product of a power-point on misogyny in uni.

Book!Alicent does not fit a stereotypical misogynistic Wicked Stepmother Trope, a trope whose main goal is to reward submissiveness and punish willfulness. It's already deconstructed in the source material. The author did all the work, all they had to do is copy it. They didn't, which is why we have takes like "oh if Rhaenyra didn't want to be burned alive she shouldn't have had a paramour in Court".

[horizon-verizon]

Why are there many radfems/terfs who like Alicent? Does it has anything to do with the childbride thing?

Basically, since both (some) RadFems and (all) TradCaths wish to regress women to this status of "thing that is helpless or diminutive against male aggression/authority" (and not say or believe it is possible for a woman to have power), then Alicent is their goddess and representation of what they think is the "reality" of a woman, what she is and looks like.

A)

I and @rhaenyragendereuphoria wrote/reblogged about why some people liked the ship Rhaenicent HERE. Many of the points we bring up still apply to just Alicent, since this ship is really about Alicent and her using Rhaenyra's "cool" to further her own (how the shippers feel if not admit). 

To make this shorter, let’s apply a trope to Alicent. rhaenyragendereuphoria mentions how Alicent fits under and is written towards the Proper Lady trope which:

is a gentle yet strong being, incorruptible and pure as the driven snow, as unlike The Vamp as she comes, and Madonna-like in her virtues. She sacrifices herself for the good of her family, religion, and country. She is intelligent enough to smoothly run a household, and wisely spends her husband's money for the good of her family, never guilty of negligence or selfish frivolity. She possesses the wit, taste, and esprit necessary to be a star of Society, and never crosses the border of good taste and civility. She is devoted and loyal, never treacherous or scheming. Her manners are never less than impeccable, and her good will and charity are a beacon to those lucky enough to live around her.

And even the Team Mom trope (episode 2 where she “guides” Rhaenyra). 

Now Alicent doesn’t fit totally into Proper Lady trope because she actually  schemes and is treacherous against Rhaenyra, her supposed friend. But the fact she tries to uphold the conservative priorities of “sacrifice” (sacrificing oneself for the supposed “greater good” of the conservative social order/feudal class and gender hierarchy by dutifully following the rules). 

Basically Alicent is the perfect “good girl” -- the feudal version -- because she pushes for people to obey the hierarchal social order and its rules, but Alicent’s character on HotD also is very contradictory and changed drastically so that her motivations are confounding. I basically pinned two-three different and related options: 

feel she “deserves” to gain the rewards of having her sons inherit the throne

make all Rhaenyra subordinate to her (psychologically making up for her “sacrifice” in gving up her body) and have this one girl/former recognize her superior authority

make Rhaenyra and women also have to follow the rules so she doesn’t have to feel as miserable and jilted as she does

So Alicent comes across as this victim of both the patriarchal system in place and a victim of not getting what she deserves for “playing her part” and obeying that very system. She is “relatable”, as @la-pheacienne says:

People don’t relate to these exceptional heroines because they are not looking for exceptional characters. They are looking for a more successful or a more glamourous version of themselves.  

 Does this sound counterintuitive, since such hierarchies don’t “care” about how you feel and actually prioritizes the will of the ruler/clan-or-house head? Yes. Just don’t tell that to a green stan and not expect to get a bunch of ad hominem “arguments”.

B)

Though they hypocritically bleat about how the patriarchy in Westeros is their culture or something that no one then could escape, they, yes, use the idea that Alicent was a child bride (15 when married) in HotD (even if you tried to say the same of her original character she wasn’t since she was 18 when she married Viserys in the book), they don’t care about history and how environment and/or know that Westerosi nobles have been marrying their young girls from the time they got their first period. 

Ancient and medieval people -- even going into the early-mid 1800s -- died a lot sooner than they do now in Western societies due to lack of knowledge and tech, so everyone married much sooner. Plus, as la-pheacienne says in another POST, where they say:

The problem with the word “grooming” is that it’s not a neutral word. It’s a word with a very heavy meaning, that frames an individual who has a perverse, unnatural sexual desire for children whereas the society this individual lives in has decided (fortunately) that these children are not to be considered in a sexual way. So this individual breaks a fundamental moral code of the society they live in, and they do it so skillfully that they go the extra mile as to manipulate their way into basically, committing the crime that constitutes child sex abuse. It is a crime punished by law. You go to prison for it. Everybody knows it is perverse, unnatural behaviour, everybody tries to protect their children from it, and children themselves have a certain knowledge that it is NOT ok for an adult to approach them that way.

Grooming cannot be applicable to Alicent and Viserys, Rhaenrya and Viserys. grooming can’t be used as a serious criticism when the persons involved expect to get married this way and actually can find/use power through such unions. The problem with Alicent marrying Viserys, as presented in HotD, should have been how Otto pressures her into it, not how Viserys chooses her. Because Viserys doing that is actually him choosing not to go for a girl even younger, a 12 year old.

Child-brides work in the context of a world where such marriages intentionally flout rules/laws/ against them in the larger context where the idea of youth vs childhood itself becomes totally realized. And it wasn’t in the ancient/medieval ages. We’d have to wait until the 19th century when people focused more on instructing children and the Romantics for that one, and even then the idea of childhood came from the Romantics wanting to isolate themselves from the sociopolitical demands and smog of the then industrial age. a “return” to the “innocence” of early life. Some wrote works that emphasized:

childhood came to be seen as especially close to God and a force for good [...] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose Émile, or On Education (1762) not only rejects the doctrine of Original Sin, but maintains that children are innately innocent, only becoming corrupted through experience of the world.

But they use “child bride” with ignorance and the intent to prove how Alicent is the “real” and only victim aside from Aemond. The actual protagonist/the story’s central interest. And it certainly doesn’t help when the actual show and its writers refuse to frame Alicent as anything but a deluded misogynist in no uncertain terms more than they display her as helpless time and time again: Olivia Cooke plays her as frantic and beset by here fear that Rhaenyra would kill her kids and she looks very pathetic and helpless when she protests against Aemond’s eyes lost. there is her with Larys.

All of these come across as Alicent being beleaguered by disobedient, “over”- privileged royals (meanwhile, her father is Hand and she comes from the richest, one of the most influential houses in Westeros).

Finally, if Alicent is a child bride, their “sympathy” should extend to Rhaenyra, who was canonically forced to marry Laenor when she was 17 and he was 20. It should extend towards Daenerys Targaryen, who not only marries Drogo at 13, she is actually sold into sexual slavery to the same man who becomes her first husband. But it doesn't, because Valyrian/Targ girls are all evil for being Targaryen.

That in of itself tells you that Alicent being a child bride is not the real reason why many of the stan her or think she is "right". They stan her because many of them think she is more relatable and deserves a reward for her obedience to the patriarchal system in place that victimizes her in the first place. They love her because she is the "good girl" who should have found success. Nothing more, nothing less.

[annebrontesrequiem]

Femininity and Bridgerton

So 27 days ago a lovely anon said that they’d be glad to hear my thoughts on femininity and Bridgerton, and since I’m now finally free from school I decided to stop playing Genshin Impact and binging Disney movies and actually do something.

This is going to probably be very long (spoilers it’s 1,800 words long), so more under the cut.

So, a few things. Firstly I am specifically talking about Bridgerton, as the way that femininity is portrayed in media is a very complex and arduous topic. Secondly this is obviously just my opinion and you can absolutely disagree, even tell me if you do I love listening to different perspectives. Thirdly I’m talking about a show that is very heteronormative (the painter and Benedict aside as I’m focusing mostly on Daphne in this post), and presents a very specific part of straight, cis, upper class femininity. So keep that in mind as well. Also as I’m going to be talking about patriarchy, femininity, and masculinity I know that there might be a few TERFs that crawl out of the woodwork and just… don’t. This isn’t for you and while I’m at it please go read some actual feminist texts. Also I know that this is a period piece but I will be addressing that don’t worry.

Also I am going to be talking about that one scene so trigger warning I’m going to be talking about sexual assault.

Also full Bridgerton season one spoilers.

----

So, all that set up out of the way, let’s talk about femininity in the Bridgerton series.

A good deal of Bridgerton focuses on the ways in which women are often confined by their role as women in society, as well as how they subvert that role for their own gains. This is used well in some cases, such as when the Viscountess uses the network that is forged between servants and women of the upper class to subvert Daphne’s marriage to Nigel Berbrooke. Being a period piece with a (mostly) diverse cast it also allows for women of color, specifically black women, to be portrayed in a very feminine light, where in society at large they are usually not allowed to inhabit such a space. However in attempting to subvert the status that women often occupied in Regency England the show accidentally reinforces views of femininity and its value.

Let’s talk about Eloise and Daphne. Eloise is very outspoken about the difficulties that comes with being a woman in society, wishing to break out of the confines of femininity. Daphne, on the other hand, wishes to stay within the traditional woman’s sphere, get married, have children, run a household. And while in text these two women often debate the meaning of their position as women, each making very valid points about their status and how they’re confined by it, the framing makes it seem that Eloise’s position is ultimately the “better” one.

Full disclosure, Eloise is my favorite Bridgerton character. I love her outspokenness, her determination to make something out of her life, the fact that she attempts to make the oppression of the society around her explicit. However I think the way she is framed as this, for lack of a better term, “girlboss” in the making is often reductive. The show seems to have this idea that Daphne is in some ways inferior in goal to Eloise. That is, Eloise’s value isn’t that she is an ambitious person whose status as a woman hampers said ambition, but rather that she is in some ways morally and intellectually superior to Daphne by rejecting her femininity and repressing qualities that are considered less masculine and thus lesser.s It presents this idea of women’s empowerment wherein one is only empowered if they deliberately step out of traditional femininity, either in appearance or in life path, rather than confronting a society that sees femininity as inferior. Daphne’s wish to continue in the traditional sphere of womanhood is somehow lesser, and she only becomes truly empowered later in the series when she becomes more aggressive (we’ll talk about that later).

That Eloise has her own book where she presumably falls in love and gets married makes this all the more confusing. Does she then lose her intellect and her status as an empowering woman? The messages feel very mixed. In portraying Eloise as enlightened for actively resisting the woman’s sphere and Daphne as needing to learn to be more “assertive” to gain said enlightenment, the show accidentally presents femininity as inherently passive, inferior to the assertion that is more traditionally masculine. This is something that modern period dramas often fall into. Empowered women are only empowered by attempting to transcend their femininity, to become more masculine. The bottom line isn’t to present women and femininity as equal in all ways to men and masculinity, but femininity is something reductive that must be shed to truly become equal.

Since we’re talking about Daphne I want to examine her character arc within this lens as well. Daphne is adamant that she wants a love-match. She is also very aware of the importance of presentation, as well as the importance of reputation. This is a very solid foundation, as is a way where Bridgerton taps into the complexity of the role of women in regency society in a good way. However as the show goes on this complexity seems to fade in favor of making Daphne, again I’m sorry, a “girlboss”. This is made explicit in the scene in which Daphne violates Simon’s consent, as well as the way in which this act is framed.

Now you can tell immediately from the framing of the scene in which Daphne violates Simon’s consent what this is supposed to be interpretated as. From the music to the triumphant looks on Daphne’s face, this is supposed to be a moment in which Daphne has finally gained control of her life. And yet in doing this, and in presenting this whole scene as a result of Simon’s “betrayal” – and thus something his has to take the blame for – the show is making a value judgement. Daphne can only become strong by becoming “assertive” (ie aggressive) to the point of violating someone’s consent.

The topic of rape culture is a very long and arduous one which I will not be diving into, but I do wish to point to the fact that men are supposed to be aggressive, both sexually and otherwise. Men are the ones who always “want it”, who are uncontrollable, and who are willing to be aggressive to get what they want. This toxic idea of sex and masculinity is what I felt Daphne dipped into during this scene, and instead of presenting it as horrifying or a betrayal on Daphne part, it is presented as the climax of her character arc. I believe a showrunner once said that it was imperative to the “education” of Daphne Bridgerton. Thus is Daphne’s strength no longer her determination to be happy within the sphere she has been placed in by patriarchy, but her willingness to take back her life, no matter the cost. And yes this could’ve been a message about how men are also assaulted, but that is not at all what the showrunners wanted you to get out of this scene.

Lastly I want to touch on the men in the Bridgerton universe, because the devaluation of femininity also affects men no less than it does women. All the men in the Bridgerton universe are either bad people or rakes. Name me one (1) man in the Bridgerton universe who is presented as feminine, either in appearance or personality. And no femininity is not the same as being gay, the painter is not feminine. To be a man worthy of screen time or romance in the Bridgerton universe one must be as traditionally masculine as possible, and ready to make that your defining character trait.

Now I know that this is a large romance novel issue, as someone who has read three of the Outlander books I am unfortunately aware of how romance novels fall into this derivative state. But just because something is common that doesn’t mean it is any less worthy of criticism. The argument that it’s simply being “period accurate” is also something I don’t accept. Yes the regency era was incredibly patriarchal, but that does not mean that the women within it were helpless and could only break out of that helplessness by rejecting their own femininity. Jane Austen is a classic example, but I will also point to women such as Elizabeth Gaskell, the Bronte Sisters, and George Eliot in terms of English women who were highly intelligent and worthy of acclaim despite still associating themselves with their status as women in society. For a broader historical view I’d also like to present Catherine the Great and Empress Josephine who, despite being viewed in an often very derivative manner by the men around them, rose to great prominence and power.

In the end this is a larger societal issue and not one that my post will magically fix. But I will say this: we need to stop telling women and girls that the only way to get rid of patriarchy is to reject femininity. In doing so we say that masculinity is indeed the better trait, that by repressing one’s emotions and one’s femininity one can attain equality. We also need to stop telling men that the only way to ensure their own value to be aggressive, to tap into that toxic masculinity which we spoon feed them from birth. This hurts everyone, men, women, non-binary people. It makes the world a worse place and only when we stop trying to wiggle our way out of femininity and actually acknowledge its status as equal to masculinity will we achieve this.

I believe Bridgerton wanted to do that, wanted to present the complexities and anxieties of women living in a patriarchal world and the way in which they can subvert that world to their advantage. However it falls into the same trap it seems to be attempting to get out of, and at the end of the day one is left with a sense of vapidness. Though I may like Bridgerton (so much so that I binge watched the series twice and am even considering reading the books) I think that we need to acknowledge its flaws, because only then will we be able to move forward and make media that is more enjoyable, more nuanced, and ultimately better in terms of expectations and norms.

Like I said this is a very complicated topic, but I hope I got my point across well. Thank you if you read all the way through this and I hope you have a lovely day!

[a-queer-seminarian]

Hagar and Sarah - was reconciliation ever a possibility?

Sarah inflicts horrific abuse on Hagar (see Genesis 16 and 21): enslavement, rape and forced impregnation, beatings, and finally, banishment into the desert. It seems impossible that their story could ever have ended with renewed relationship and solidarity. As Jewish Cuban-American anthropologist Ruth Behar puts it in “Sarah and Hagar: The Heel-prints upon Their Faces,”

“The story of Sarah and Hagar is a story about women wronging women. It is a story so sad, so shameful, so sorrowful, that to own up to it is to admit that feminism has its origins in terrible violence and terrible lack of compassion between women.”

And yet, people across centuries have imagined what reconciliation between these two women could have been like. I’m compiling some of those visions here.

Many of them rely upon Sarah recognizing that she and Hagar share much suffering: Sarah too is used as property by men in their patriarchal world; Sarah too may have experienced rape when Pharaoh takes her from Abram in Egypt (see Wil Gafney’s Womanist Midrash); Sarah and Hagar alike are valued for their fertility and little else. If only Sarah had realized that patriarchy is what sets her above and against her fellow woman! If only she could have seen Hagar as a sister in solidarity, rather than a slave to abuse and cast away!

“Only at the end, When I witnessed my young son screaming under his father's knife, Only then Did I realize our common suffering.”

- Lynn Gottlieb

[image description: a painting of two women with curly brown hair and brown skin embracing; the one being held has a blue shawl with “Sarah and Hagar” written in Hebrew on it, while the one embracing her has a bright blue dress. A dove with an olive branch hovers behind them.]

“Sarah and Hagar” by Jewish artist Hilary Sylvester, who says: “Sarah the mother of the Jewish People and Hagar the mother of the Arab people finally find reconciliation through Mashiach.”

___________

Hagar’s and Sarah’s conflict & the Israel / Palestine conflict

In the article “Reconciling Hagar and Sarah: Feminist Midrash and National Conflict,” Noam Zion explains,

“In Jewish and Muslim interpretation, Hagar and Sarah represent the matriarchs of Abraham’s blessed heirs, the Arabs and the Jews. In classical sources, the break between the two women is never mended, but feminist readers of the Bible, Jewish and Muslim, have used midrash-style poetry to rewrite the ending of their story. Part of this endeavor is the hope of rewriting the contemporary conflict and reconciling between their putative descendants.”

...On a covenantal level, this story has an all’s well that ends well conclusion. God’s promises to Abraham and to each of the matriarchs will be fulfilled, as Isaac and Ishmael will each become great nations. But what about the interpersonal level? Is there ever a happy ending to the familial and, thus, national conflict?”

They continue with examples of reconciliation between various members of the story:

Reconciling Ishmael and Isaac: “The Torah itself implies a reconciliation of sorts between the brothers. First, after Abraham’s death, Ishmael returns “home” to encounter his brother once more at their father’s funeral: ‘His sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the cave of Machpelah’” (Genesis 25:9).

Reconciling Abraham and Hagar: “In the biblical text, Hagar...is never mentioned after the story of the expulsion, leaving his breach with Hagar unresolved. In another example of midrashic rewriting of the narrative, some rabbis identify Keturah, whom Abraham marries after Sarah’s death (Genesis 25:1), with Hagar. (In the biblical text, the two are not identical.) ...Thus Abraham renews his responsibility and his affection for Hagar as soon as Sarah, who could not stand her, is buried.”

Reconciling Hagar and Sarah: “The one character who is never reconciled with either of the offended parties, in either the biblical text or the midrash, is Sarah. ...For these reasons, some contemporary feminist readers and poets have felt an urgent need to add a new episode to the narrative to bring the two women together.

Further, these feminist poets wish to reimagine the relationship between the nations born of these matriarchs in a period of ongoing violent conflict between Muslims and Jews in the Middle East and the fragile beginnings of a new religious and ethnic dialogue between American Muslims and American Jews in North America.”

___________

Common Suffering: Sarah Repents

In the opening to her poem “Achti,” Arabic for “My Sister,” Jewish Renewal rabbi Lynn Gottlieb suggests that Hagar is not a name but a derogatory epithet, and imagines Sarah’s regret:

I am pained I did not call you By the name your mother gave you. I cast you aside, Cursed you with my barrenness and rage, Called you “stranger”/ Ha-ger, As if it were a sin to be from another place.

Noam Zion says of the poem, “For Gottlieb, Sarah’s sin derives in part from her blindness to the patriarchal system that pressures wives to be fertile and generates an inhumane competition between women, breaking down their solidarity. Sarah admits to having tried to steal Hagar’s womb, as if another woman, her womb and her child, could be property.”

They used me to steal your womb, Claim your child, As if I owned your body and your labor

“Having offered an original interpretation of Hagar’s name, Gottlieb does the same with “Sarah.” Etymologically, her name is connected to “ruler” (שַׂר, sar), but Gottlieb’s midrash connects it to “see-far” (שׁוּר, shur). Thus Sarah ought to become, by virtue of her name, the far-seeing woman, the prophetess. ...Yet she realizes to her chagrin that Hagar sees visions of God, while God has stopped communicating with the woman meant to be a prophetess:”

I, whom they call “See Far Woman” / Sarah, Could not witness my own blindness. But you, my sister, You beheld angels, Made miracles in the desert, Received divine blessings from a god, Who stopped talking to me.

”Using the midrash on Sarah’s name, Gottlieb has Sarah contrast her own moral blindness with Hagar’s power of vision in having seen God. By contrast, Sarah never speaks to God or sees him. What she does witness, however, is the near death of her son Isaac:”

Only at the end, When I witnessed my young son screaming under his father's knife, Only then Did I realize our common suffering.

“...Gottlieb says Sarah’s trauma, seeing her son almost slaughtered by her husband, led her to repent. When Sarah is herself shunted aside and her son taken—without consulting her—to be sacrificed by the same Abraham and the same God who drove Ishmael away and exposed him to death, Sarah then discovers herself as an unwitting collaborator of patriarchy who betrayed her sisterly duties to Hagar by actively expelling a helpless woman and child into a life-threatening situation. Now that she has suffered, she develops an empathy with Hagar based on their common motherhood.

...She concludes her poem in the form of a ritual self-accusation, a vidui, the traditional confession characteristic of Yom Kippur, which follows soon after Rosh Hashanah, and is part of the same festival complex:”

Forgive me, Achti For the sin of neglect For the sin of abuse For the sin of arrogance Forgive me, Achti, For the sin of not knowing your name.

“In the spirit of her poem, Gottlieb takes it upon herself, through the character of Sarah “our mother,” to confess what—in her political and moral opinion as a left-wing liberal—are the sins of the Jewish people in their “abuse,” expulsion and depersonalization of Palestinian refugees which Sarah’s command to Abraham to expel Hagar and son Ishmael foreshadows.“

___________

Sarah Seeks Hagar

Eleanor Wilner has a long poem called “Sarah’s Choice.” In it, Sarah tells her son Isaac that she is going to go find Hagar and Ishmael “whom I cast out, drunk on pride,” and invites Isaac to come with her. He asks her how he should great Ishmael:

“As you greet yourself,” she said, “when you bend over the well to draw water and see your image, not knowing it reversed. You must know your brother now, or you will see your own face looking back the day you’re at each other’s throats.

In Reading Genesis: Beginnings, Kissileff writes, “The poem closes with the chilling foresight, emphasized by the pauses in the final line, that brings us back to the Bible as we know it:

“But what will happen if we go?” the boy Isaac asked. “I don’t know,” Sarah said, “But it is written        what will happen            if you stay?”

“What will happen, of course, is that Isaac’s own father will attempt to sacrifice him -- and that the future history of his people will be one of unending conflict with his ‘brother.’ Whenever I read this poem, I catch my breath at the last line. ...”

__________

Hagar writes to Sarah

“Hagar Writes a Cathartic as an Exercise Suggested by her Therapist,” by Syrian American poet, novelist, and professor, Mohja Kahf:

Dear Sarah, life made us enemies But it doesn’t have to be that way. What if we both ditched the old man? He could have visitation rights with the boys alternate weekends and holidays. Yeah, especially the Feast of the Sacrifice— everybody has forgotten anyway that it began with me abandoned in the desert watching my baby dehydrate for days— I dared God to let us die.

Anyway, you and I, we’d set up house, raise the kids, start a catering business, maybe. You have brains. So do I. We could travel. There are places to see besides Ur and this nowheresville desert with its tribes of hooligans

No. Your lips always thin when you disapprove, like the mother I can hardly remember from before I wound up in your house. I was barely more than a girl. You are the one Who brought me there from Egypt. You used to laugh back then. In those days, You could bear to look at me.

Oh, Sarah, you need years of therapy Can’t you admit that what he did to me was cruel? Admit it – for just one second It won’t make you hate him forever just long enough to know the world won’t fall apart. Long enough to pity him, yourself, me Laugh, Sarah, laugh Imagine God, the Possibility. Sincerely Love, Hagar

[fictional-redheads]

Tropes of Toxic Masculinity in the Male “Heroes” of Buffy the Vampire Slayer

“It's terribly simple. The good guys are always stalwart and true. The bad guys are easily distinguished by their pointy horns or black hats, and, uh, we always defeat them and save the day.” Rupert Giles says this faciously to his charge, Buffy Summers, at her request for him to lie to her about how easy her life as a slayer will one day come to be, in the seventh episode of the second season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fittingly titled “Lie to Me.” The term “guys” in this context, by the time the episode was written and premiered in 1997, was meant and understood to be gender neutral, but put into the larger context of the series as a whole could easily be limited to “guys” in the traditional, masculine sense. In Buffy, it is men’s actions that are most often morally ambiguous, with few exceptions. Even more, it is the men who fight beside Buffy in the battle against evil whose actions hurt her the worst, Giles included. Each of the male “heroes” in Buffy the Vampire Slayer illustrate the different shades and extremes of toxic masculinity by exemplifying an inherently flawed trope. Each of them, in accordance with their corresponding trope, take choices away from Buffy and cause lasting psychological damage with ranging degrees of acknowledgement from both her and/or the narrative. In this paper, I am going to scrutinize the three who were introduced early on and stayed through to fight the final battle alongside Buffy: Giles, Spike, and Xander.

Let’s start with the character that has been previously mentioned, Rupert Giles, typically referred to by both characters and fans alike simply as “Giles.” Giles is introduced in the pilot episode, titled “Welcome to the Hellmouth,” as a “Watcher” for Buffy (see figure 1). He has been assigned to her by the Watcher’s Council, an age-old organization dedicated to the elimination of vampires and demons from the Earth, to prepare and assist her in the fight against evil-essentially being the brains to her brawn. As the series goes on, however, Giles’ role in Buffy’s life transitions from that of detached supervisor and is built up to fulfill that of the Father Figure trope. Buffy’s own father is divorced from her mother and is never seen again in a non-dream sequence after his second-time appearance in the premiere episode of the second season. The creator of the series, Joss Whedon, admitted in an interview with the New York Times that this phase out had a relevant purpose: “It’s true that Buffy’s father started out as just a divorced dad and then turned into this sort of "evil pariah" figure of not even bothering to show up, and that was simply because we had a father figure in Giles…”

Giles’ attachment to Buffy as a surrogate child rather than simply as his trainee arguably first gets shown to the viewer in the season 1 finale entitled “Prophecy Girl.” Giles has come across a prophecy that predicts her death at the hands of the current Big Bad, the Master, and Buffy overhears him telling her love interest Angel about it so that they may form a plan without her. “Read me the signs! Tell me my fortune!” she yells, throwing his books at him (see figure 2). Buffy’s knowledge of her destiny since the pilot has been filtered through Giles, who struggles to serve his dual roles of both Watcher and father figure. In his role as the latter, he withholds information from her that he learned in his service to her as the former, and acts on his own instead in order to protect her. This will be the crux of their relationship throughout the series, and feminist scholar Gwyneth Bodger feels it is emblematic of a larger issue,

Indeed, he acts as a substitute father for Buffy, and it is here I would argue that the series departs from a feminist ideology. As a powerful figure in the series, Buffy has the potential to become the figure of the unruly or disorderly woman. In order to prevent this, she must be "owned"; her power must be channeled and controlled by a man, in this case, a father figure..

Fast forward to season three, and Giles’ role as father figure becomes explicitly textual in two episodes in particular: episode six, “Band Candy,” and episode twelve, “Helpless.” In “Band Candy”, Buffy returns home from visiting Angel to find Giles and her mother, Joyce, angry that she lied to them both that she would be with the other, rather than Angel. The mise-en-scené clearly indicates that Giles and Joyce are a united front in the way any functioning pair of parents would be (see figure 3). Later, in the same episode, having been placed under the influence of magical chocolate bars that revert them back to their teenage personalities, the two sleep together. In doing so, Giles-if only temporarily; this is the only time that he and Joyce sleep together-officially takes over all “fatherly” duties in the Summers household. Buffy is disgusted when she finds out they had sex, but only to the extent any teenager would be to discover their parents’ sex life.

In “Helpless,” just as Buffy’s birth father betrays her by missing her birthday, Giles betrays her by removing her powers for a Watcher’s Council ordered test that has historically been conducted if a slayer reaches her eighteenth birthday. Even more devastatingly, he does so right after Buffy asks him if he would like to take her father’s place in their now broken birthday tradition. He soon comes to his senses when Buffy is nearly killed by the vampire who escaped the Council’s control, but it’s far from enough to immediately salvage their relationship. “You poisoned me!” she cries, wrenching her arm from his pleading grasp, “I don’t even know you.” It is only when he arrives to help Buffy save her mother from the same vampire as earlier, and the head Watcher points out what makes Buffy and Giles’ relationship unique - “Your affection for your charge has rendered you incapable of clear and impartial judgment. You have a father's love for the child, and that is useless to the cause.” - that fences are mended, symbolically shown by Buffy allowing Giles to help clean her wounds (see figure 4). His role as father figure has been reinstated, as well as reinforced. In the same swoop, Giles is kicked out of the patriarchal Watcher’s Council, which as Buffy scholar Ian Martin puts forth in his video guide for the episode, “is symbolic of him no longer being a contributing member of the patriarchy. He disobeyed a direct order. He broke with tradition.” However, it is Martin’s next words that are haunting: “While they have appeared to have reconciled by the end of the episode, Giles’ betrayal represents a sobering loss of innocence here for Buffy, tied to her actual father ditching her at the beginning of the episode.”

The next two seasons primarily serves to build their relationship further, but are not without their caveats. In the ninth episode of season four, while Buffy is under a spell that compels her to be engaged with her tenuous ally Spike, she asks Giles if he would walk her down the aisle. Initially Giles is touched by her request, but after a moment snaps back into the reality of the situation and dismisses it, hurting Buffy in the process. In the sixteenth episode of season five, when Joyce dies from an aneurysm, it’s Giles that Buffy leans on for support. In the eighteenth episode, Buffy tells Giles “I love you,” for the first time. However, by the next episode, Giles becomes concerned that Buffy is coming to depend on him too much, to her own detriment, and begins to withdraw. Yet, if Giles were to listen to and respect what Buffy was saying, he would realize that’s not what she needed. Joyce’s passing heaped even more responsibility on her shoulders-raising her little sister Dawn and maintaining a house-so what she needed was someone to share the responsibility she was drowning under with someone she trusted and looked up to. Someone like a father figure.

This dilemma would be picked up mid-season six, after Buffy’s friends had wrenched her out of heaven and back to a “loud and violent” life. In an episode filled with stylistic exhibitionism, “Once More with Feeling,” Giles sings a song that betrays his feelings on the matter: “I wish I could say the right words to lead you through this land, Wish I could play the father and take you by the hand, Wish I could stay, But now I understand, I'm standing in the way.” At the end of the following episode, he departs to England for the rest of the season, leaving Buffy to fight her growing depression and duties alone.

Giles returns at the end of season six and mostly remains for the rest of the series, but enacts one last, glaring betrayal. In the seventeenth episode of season seven, appropriately entitled “Lies My Parents Told Me,” he distracts Buffy while elsewhere one of their new allies attempts to kill Spike, who since “Something Blue” Buffy has grown to trust and have complicated feelings for. It’s the equivalent of a shotgun-toting father facing off against their daughter’s new boyfriend, only Giles would have gone through with it. Giles also has a rather misogynistic outlook on Buffy’s motivations, believing that Buffy’s protection of Spike must be driven by her emotions despite her logical insistence that after her Spike is the best warrior they have on their side. Buffy realizes what Giles is doing, the assassination attempt fails, and Buffy literally shuts the door on Giles in her life as a father figure as she says, “I think you’ve taught me everything I need to know” (see figure 5). Buffy no longer wants or needs Giles to lie to her, regardless of the place of fatherly love those lies stem from.

Spike, of course, is far from innocent either. For the sake of brevity-Spike has more academia written about him than any other character in the series minus Buffy herself- I will be focusing on Spike’s place in the fifth and sixth seasons in which he fulfills the trope of “The Suitor.” The fifth season is when Spike really becomes a part of Buffy’s team and starts to get close enough to her that he can hurt her emotionally, when previously all they were presented as feeling for each other was animosity. He realizes that he’s in love with her at the end of the fourth episode of that season, and so his role as The Suitor begins.

Spike, formerly known to human society as William Pratt, was turned into a vampire in Victorian England in 1880 at 27 years old. The ways in which Spike goes about trying to earn Buffy’s affections throughout season five parallel a twisted version of the courtly love sensibilities that would have been popular when he was turned, even if the term itself had not yet been coined. In her scholarly article, “‘Ain’t Love Grand?’ Spike and Courtly Love,” Victoria Spah outlines and describes exactly what this means:

The term "Courtly Love" is used to describe a certain kind of relationship common in romantic medieval literature. The knight/lover finds himself desperately and piteously enamored of a divinely beautiful but unobtainable [sic] woman. After a period of distressed introspection, he offers himself as her faithful servant and goes forth to perform brave deeds in her honor. His desire to impress her and to be found worthy of her gradually transforms and ennobles him; his sufferings—inner turmoil, doubts as to the lady's care of him, as well as physical travails—ultimately lends him wisdom, patience, and virtue and his acts themselves worldly renown… Like any intricate allusion, references to the various pertinent aspects of the mythos (which itself has no definitive version) are woven subtly throughout without heavy-handed complete correspondence. Spike and Buffy are after all modern characters and as such must retain the psychological depth lacking in medieval stock characters, and thus their story is not informed solely by the Courtly Love tradition. The correspondence, ironic and teasing at times, straight-forward at others, is however quite fascinating and worth further examination.

The first stage of courtly love is, “Attraction to the lady, usually via eyes/glance.” The actor who played Spike, James Marsters, has stated in multiple interviews over the years that, “As an actor, I right away played an attraction to Buffy.” In his first episode, “School Hard,” Spike stalks Buffy, watching her dance at the Bronze and then having her fights secretly videotaped so that he can study her moves (see figure 6). Even these early scenes have, as Marsters himself admits, “a heavy sexual undercurrent.” The watching of the videotapes in particular is inherently voyeuristic, and presents a modern take on how “glance” and gaze has changed since the middle ages.

Getting back to the focus on season five, the second stage is, “Worship of the lady from afar.” After Spike realizes he’s in love with Buffy, it quickly turns into an obsession. He lingers outside Buffy’s house, chain smoking cigarettes and watching at her bedroom window. He sniffs her sweaters when she isn't home. He rehearses conversations with her on a look-a-like mannequin that rapidly turn violent when he anticipates her rejections. He even has a “Buffy shrine” dedicated to her, filled with pictures and sketches of her, her sweater that he stole after he sniffed it, a bloody gauze that was used to bandage a severe stab wound she recently got, and multiple of her stakes. Buffy is disgusted and horrified by this when she comes across it in the episode “Crush.” Her keen sense of violation is made clear when she punches Spike across the room and into the shrine, destroying it (see figure 7). It’s a beat that summarizes the worst of their relationship in these two seasons in a single snapshot: Spike sees Buffy as an object of worship that with enough prodding he can bring down to his level, but Buffy destroys that dream every time.

The episode “Crush” is a major one for their relationship, as it is when Spike reveals his feelings to her for the first time in accordance with the third stage, “Declaration of passionate devotion,” as well as the fourth stage, “Virtuous rejection by the lady.” Spike makes these declarations twice in this episode, but after Buffy rejects him the first time he makes the second one bigger, grander. He chains her up while she’s unconscious and makes an oath to either stake his sire/ex to prove his love for her, or let his ex kill her if she doesn’t admit to feeling something in return. He’s performing, putting on a show in anticipation of completion of the fourth stage. Even he knows that doing this is not the way to get Buffy to change her mind from her previous refusal. He’s taken it upon himself to move her from passive object of desire to active participant in the courtly ritual. It’s another example of him violating her agency and sense of self.

After this episode, Spike takes a turn for the better for the rest of the season. He does one last disgusting, literally objectifying thing-having a likeness of Buffy made in the form of a sex robot-but before the end of that same episode is willing to be tortured and killed before he would give up information that would lead to Dawn’s death. Spike proves with word and action multiple times before the season ends that he would be willing to die for Buffy, thus completing the fifth stage, “Renewed wooing with oaths of virtue and eternal featy.” For his trouble, Spike earns the knightly favor of exactly one kiss from Buffy before she dies in the season finale, arguably completing the sixth stage, “Heroic deeds of valor which win the lady’s heart.” However, it is worth noting that with that kiss, Spike’s redemption, or lack thereof, officially becomes yet another of Buffy’s responsibilities.

Spike’s role as “The Suitor” shifts in season six, after Buffy comes back from the dead. Courtly love has been completed, but not to any great satisfaction for him: Buffy still doesn’t love him. Per her depression, she doesn’t feel like she can love anyone, let alone a vampire without a soul regardless of his recent good deeds. Every sexual advancement that occurs between them stems from Buffy’s pain-of being torn out of heaven, of depression, of Giles leaving. Their sexual relationship for her is a form of self-harm. On Spike’s side, the first time they have sex is after they realize that Spike can hit her again, despite the government chip in his head that prevents him from hurting people. Courtly love is inherently aspirational, about being devoted to a woman who is unquestionably above you. When Spike’s ability to hit Buffy returns, Spike sees them returned to the equal playing field they had before he fell in love with her, and so turns into an abusive boyfriend kind of suitor rather than the virtuous knight he strived to be previously. Not only does he abuse her physically, but he also equips the classic abuse tactic of attempting to separate the victim from their loved ones, telling her that she belongs in the dark with him instead of dancing in the light with her friends (see figure 8). This all culminates in the nineteenth episode of season six, “Seeing Red,” in which Spike attempts the ultimate betrayal and taking away of a woman’s choice: trying to rape Buffy.

Spike goes to Buffy’s house after she’s put an end to their sexual relationship to try to get her back, while Buffy has been put through an ordeal that significantly weakens her. He forces himself on her despite her protests in the hopes of “getting her to feel it [love for him],” and then snaps out of it, disgusted with himself, when she manages to kick him off. As Buffy scholar Lani Diane Rich puts it in her video about the episode, “Spike is horrified by his own behavior and that’s good, he should be, but it doesn’t do anything to mitigate Buffy’s experience here...the shock and horror of that experience is something you carry with you always.”

Spike’s self-disgust leads him to a cave in Africa, where he endures a series of trials to earn, the viewer is led to believe, his greatest wish: the chip out of his head. In a moment of narrative spectacle in the season finale, however, the viewer is shocked to learn that it’s not the ability to hunt humans again that is Spike’s greatest wish (see figure 9). It’s getting his soul back, so he can, as he puts it, “give Buffy what she deserves.” In the established mythology of the series, the souled and unsouled versions of an individual are in many ways separate entities, with individual desires. Spike fighting for and earning his soul is akin to committing suicide so that a better version of him, a version more genuinely selfless and caring of Buffy’s needs, may rise from the ashes. The Suitor, both knightlike and abusive, is dead.

There’s a male character left in Buffy’s life who doesn’t face the consequences of his toxic actions the way Giles and Spike do: Xander Harris, the Best Friend. To be more specific, the “friendzoned” best friend, particularly in the first two seasons. When the viewer is introduced to Xander in the first episode in the series, it is immediately made apparent that he has a crush on Buffy, and equally made apparent she doesn’t reciprocate through her budding attraction to Angel. Yet, Xander continues to go forward with his feelings anyway. In S. Renee Dechert’s essay, “‘My Boyfriend’s in the Band!’ Buffy and the Rhetoric of Music,” Dechert describes a fantasy Xander has in the fourth episode,

As Xander dusts a troublesome vamp at the Bronze, an enraptured Buffy watches. After the fight, she exclaims, “You hurt your hand! Will you still be able to…?” “Finish my solo, and kiss you like you’ve never been kissed before?”... Then he jumps onstage and whips out a Hendrixesque guitar solo while an awed Buffy looks up at him. (The camera angle further empowers Xander here, shooting up at him as he stands above the crowd, the light outlining his phallic guitar and empowered-and fashionably dressed-body.) (see figure 10)

To Xander, the perfect fantasy is him being the empowered in their relationship in all masculine senses of the word-most relevantly, being the only man in Buffy’s eyes.

In the sixth episode, when he is possessed by the spirit of a hyena, his feelings are twisted into an animalistic form that prompts him to sexually assault Buffy. After the spirit has been removed from him, he pretends that he doesn’t remember his experiences while he was possessed, and Buffy never finds out he’s lying. In the first season finale, when he works up the courage to finally ask her out and she gently rebuffs him, he lashes out, “I guess a guy’s gotta be undead to make time with you,” but the narrative makes clear we are supposed to empathize and pity him for it, not resent him. In season two, in the episode “Surprise,” Xander details a whole revenge fantasy in which Buffy gets her heart broken by Angel, only to be saved by Xander. Again, it’s played off as a joke. Three episodes later, Xander uses magic to make his ex infatuated with him so he can reject and humiliate her, but it backfires by having all the women of Sunnydale, including Buffy, be infatuated with him instead. The narrative actually has Buffy earnestly thank Xander for having the “strength” and “self-control” not to rape her. Finally, in the season two finale, Xander is sent by the rest of the Scoobies to tell Buffy on her way to fight a now soulless Angel that Willow has discovered a way to restore Angel’s soul. Yet, he takes it upon himself to instead tell Buffy to “kick his ass,” giving Buffy no hope of any alternative to killing the man she loved. In the scholarly article, “‘Jimmy Olsen jokes are pretty much lost on you’: The Importance of Xander in Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” the author presents a perspective I’ve never before considered, “Xander doesn’t deliver the message in favor of disseminating more violence… Angelus was very powerful, but Xander decided that Angel’s death was more important than Buffy’s safety.” It’s the peak of male entitlement-the death of the competitor is more important than the physical and emotional wellbeing of the woman sworn to be the beloved.

Willow does restore Angel’s soul, just a moment too late, and Buffy is traumatized by having to kill the man she loves while he is the man she loves. If Xander had told her the truth, that information could have spared her from that. His role in Buffy’s trauma only gets brought up one time, five seasons later, and even then goes barely acknowledged (see figure 11). So why does Xander get to go scot-free from consequences? Cast and fans alike have posited that it’s because he’s a self insert for Joss Whedon himself.

For years, Buffy creator Joss Whedon was hailed by nerd culture as one of the leading male feminists in Hollywood. Then it was confirmed that he seemed to fire one of the actresses on the Buffy spinoff, Angel, for getting pregnant. Then Avengers: Age of Ultron got released, which featured an unfortunate scene in which Black Widow refers to herself as a “monster” because she is infertile. Then his misogynistic, stereotypical Wonder Woman script got leaked. Then his ex-wife published a letter condemning his years of infidelity and emotional abuse. And then, and then, and then. Just like Buffy experienced, oftentimes it is those who fight besides us, the ones who we feel we can trust, that hurt us the most. Perhaps our believing this time would be different was just our desire to be lied to.

@andieb4650

[itslilliegray]

Blog Post 5

In this section of the novel, I noticed how Austen uses sarcasm to sort of lambast the attributes of every female character. Of course, most of this effort goes towards analyzing sense and sensibility, but many less important women are mocked throughout the novel.

Although she most easily ironizes Marianne’s ridiculous outpourings of sensibility, creating a narrative which somewhat favors Elinor, Austen often notes the pointlessness of Elinor’s sensible self-deprivation. For instance, when the two young (and highly insufferable) Steele ladies visit the Dashwood sisters in London, Elinor takes it upon herself to act rationally and with propriety towards them. This is sensible and supposedly honorable, but who does it really benefit? The Steele girls annoy and upset Elinor endlessly, so she’s miserable and no one else is getting much out of it. Elinor often acts with painstaking sense, but her efforts ultimately seem kind of pointless and only bring her more misfortune. In another particularly ironic scene, Austen mocks Elinor’s sense regarding how she approaches her relationship with Marianne. At this point in the novel, Marianne and Elinor are vacationing in London, and both desperately want to go home. Austen describes how Marianne is self-satisfied by the romantic idea of enduring pain for Elinor’s sake by staying in London. Immediately afterwards, Austen writes, “Elinor… comforted herself by thinking that though their longer stay would militate against her own happiness it would be better for Marianne than an immediate return to Devonshire.” (p.130) Funnily, both sisters want to go home, but, by their respective sense and sensibility, they each misconstrue the other’s feelings and bring pain upon themselves.

So far in Sense and Sensibility, Austen has demonstrated that although the sisters are proud of their mindsets, both do little to alleviate the source of their problems-- their helplessness in a male-dominated society. Austen purposefully satirizes each trait according to its failure to actually improve a woman’s situation.  

In peripheral characters, Austen mocks what becomes of women who have neither sense or sensibility. These figures are either silly or insipid, on a scale ranging from good-natured to bad. The silly Mrs. Jennings, for instance, gossips incessantly but means well. On the other hand, the insipid Lady Middleton is uninterested in her company but obsessed with appearing to be an elegant host. Both women lack any emotional or mental depth. Such people should contribute nothing to society, but Mrs. Jennings and Lady Middleton are ironically the most involved in it, as they host the most parties and invite the most company over. Austen uses these women to make fun of the fact that they are in the same social standing and situation as the Dashwood sisters. While sense and sensibility make the sisters complex, highly intellectual, and distinguished, Austen remarks that these accomplishments do not grant them any more power in society than their silly and insipid counterparts. Therefore, regardless of the quality of their attributes, women are all equally unable to contribute to society.

Nevertheless, whether sensible, sensitive, insipid, or silly, all of these women remain under the bubble of pride. They retain dignity in their social acceptance, despite their vulnerability to the will of men. However, like Colonel William’s niece, they could at any time be disgraced. Austen satirizes women outcasts, too. When the colonel describes his exiled relation: “left in a wretched and hopeless situation” (p. 128), the past tense here indicates she is no longer considered worthy of even an identity. She only broke the patriarchal rules and had a baby while unmarried-- she’s still alive! But, Austen jibes, there is no life for women beyond total obedience to men.  

In this section, the women’s utter lack of free will is exposed. If they deviate in any way from the strictures of the patriarchy, they risk disgrace and exile. They are imprisoned in a world which allows them to develop their own personalities and traits, but denies them the use of their identities to contribute to society.  Though less sinister, this reminded me of our modern incarceration system. People can spend decades incarcerated, without hope of returning to society. They can still sustain their identity, and strive for self-improvement. But, the system is indifferent to growth. There is no reform, only punishment-- the varying degrees and enforcement of which seem almost arbitrary. Even if a prisoner completes their time, their convict status limits their opportunities and resources forever, often leading them back to crime. If we want to grow as a society, we need to allow people the education, resources, and opportunities they need in order to contribute constructively.

[tokendyke]

I have been meditating on separatism, talking to former separatists, and reading separatist material. I have come to the conclusion that as much as I don’t want to live on this planet anymore, withdrawing into the woods is a short-term escapism that won’t protect wimmin from capitalism (surprise, surprise). I think that obtaining a Liberated Territory of Womyn is a respectable goal, secession being a possibility depending on your country’s laws. But even after we obtain our territory, we would still be forced to contend with the forces and manipulations of worldwide capitalism. No matter whether we are in Lesbianlandia or New York City, wimmin worldwide have to struggle to survive under capitalism, and that means joining with the forces of the male-dominated left, who hate us.

What to do? We don’t want to be beholden to the men’s agendas, or place ourselves in positions of vulnerability.

Andrea Dworkin said that the left and the right are two sides of the same patriarchy. Well, I have come to decide that it is patriarchy and men who are not fully leftist or progressive in the first place.

Whether or not you want to call it left vs right, all the various strands of radical feminism represent a further expansion of progressive/left/revolutionary possibility. We are so far left, the dichotomy makes little sense and starts to look like a man’s framing of the actual situation, which it is. However, that doesn’t make it useless. Aligning ourselves with all wimmin, even if those wimmin are conservative, only works when you want to protect the dignity of all wimmin. It is a good goal but not a good political strategy. In terms of political strategy, only left/progressive/revolutionary activism has a track record of securing wimmin’s livelihood through labor and anti-racist activism. But sure, we could ignore the false left-right dichotomy, and focus on what is good for all wimmin. That still leads us to what is called leftism, and as long as the map of left/right does not replace the territory of wimmin/anti-racism/labor, then we are seeing with clear eyes.

Anyway, what to do? We hate being around men… But we need to work with them. Out of pure necessity, we need to contend with capitalism, for that is how you protect your rights in the long term. The patriarchal ruling class is as dangerous as the men around us and the Man would rather we take it lying down, so we have no choice but to face him.

The solution, sister-comrades, is to form your own parallel organizations which are not beholden to men. Where your goals are shared with other leftists you can organize parallel to men in coalitions with yourselves representing the radical feminists. When radical feminists have female-only organizations, community associations, and affinity groups that set their own agendas and organize in parallel to the male left, in solidarity with leftist causes, then no womon will ever have to join a male leftist organization ever and expose herself to the male domination that goes on.

I love proud wimmin so it is with love that I say the following. There is a certain element of being too proud to beg for scraps from the ruling class, the same one whose ideology divides us, and from the strange men around us who we may even deeply resent. The idea of working in tandem can feel nauseating to some of us, and it can feel like we are suboordinating ourselves by cooperating. These feelings are understandable with a background of being taken advantage of every time we have ever tried to cooperate. But that was under men’s groups. Notice that in coalitions, you are not suboordinating yourselves; you have bargaining power and cooperation is not required. Coalition work is diplomacy. If diplomatic relationships break down, people might go to war. The only choice wimmin have is to go to war with men at large, or conduct diplomacy as independent entities.

There is only one problem… And that is of course that radical feminism has been driven into secrecy by the New McCarthyism and transfascism. Whatever to do? I think there is only one way to go about this, and that is to first respin our webs and networks to which liberalism laid waste. We need to strengthen our bonds with each other as wimmin because we are wimmin. Wimmin need to love each other enough not to snitch on each other for (almost) anything. A day will come when radical feminism is not only tolerated, but cool again. That day is slowly approaching. When we walk out of this long, dark night, let us remember that liberalism in all forms is the enemy that did us in from the inside and if we are to succeed this time we need to be true revolutionaries, and demand more than what patriarchy will give us. Emma Goldman said, ask for bread. If they do not give you bread, take the bread. She should have added, don’t tattle on the bread thief. Solidarity with wimmin all over the world is what wimmin need to rescue ourselves from a liberal fascist hell that seeks to see us divided and helpless. Help your sister, sister-comrade. Love all wimmin.

[arisefairsun]

ok I seriously love romeo. when I read this in freshman year everyone hated him bc he was so sensitive and emotional but that was what I loved about him. even though I'm a girl I relate to him so much bc of that and he thinks with his heart far more than he does with his brain. I love how he is so different from the other boys in verona bc he doesn't want to fight, and I love his contrast w juliet. it's like they're fire and water or the sun and the moon like I just love his character so much

THANK YOU. It’s nice to know that I’m not the only one in the world who loves Romeo’s personality. Let me just ramble about him because I absolutely love this boy.

He lives in such a dark, abusive, coercive society, doesn’t he? A society that does not allow its citizens to achieve freedom—a society that despotically forces the men into violence, war, bravado, machismo, and this empty, meaningless concept of a dehumanized man that should have no feelings, no fears, because otherwise he is unmanly and shameful. It is a society that does not accept those men that do not behave as such. Look at the deification of machismo in the opening dialogue between Sampson and Gregory. Look at Mercutio’s constant mocking of Romeo for choosing to be a lover and a poet rather than a fighter:

Alas poor Romeo! he is already dead; stabbed with awhite wench’s black eye; shot through the ear with a love-song; the very pin of his heart cleft with the blind bow-boy’s butt-shaft: and is he a man to encounter Tybalt?

Look at the way the Nurse urges him to ‘man up’: ‘Stand up, stand up; stand, an you be a man’. Even Friar Lawrence shows his contempt for his unmanly attitude:

Art thou a man? thy form cries out thou art.Thy tears are womanish; thy wild acts denoteThe unreasonable fury of a beast.Unseemly woman in a seeming man!O ill-beseeming beast in seeming both!

Romeo, as Montague’s heir, is expected to perpetuate these senseless masculine ideals. Benvolio is certain that Romeo will fight Tybalt (‘Romeo will answer it’), and so does Mercutio (‘Marry, go before to field, he’ll be your follower’). He does not, cannot comprehend why Romeo didn’t accept Tybalt’s challenge, why he stated that he loved the Capuet surname ‘as dearly as mine own’, why he literally said he loved Tybalt (‘O calm, dishonorable, vile submission’). To Mercutio, Romeo is only truly Romeo when he is jesting in his male circle: ‘Is not this better now than groaning for love? Now art thou sociable; now art thou Romeo. Now art thou what thou art by art as well as by nature’. (Little does he know that the reason Romeo is in such a good mood in this scene is that he spent the previous night talking to Capulet’s daughter about the insignificance of names and social labels.)

This is brutal. This is terrible. This is the abusive impact that patriarchy and toxic masculinity and social oppression have on a boy who just wants to go on talking about blushing pilgrims and love’s light wings. Unlike the other boys in Verona, Romeo does not care about his social identity. He simply chooses to ignore it. Think of his reaction to the fight in the first scene: ‘O me! What fray was here? / Yet tell me not, for I’ve heard it all.’ There is weariness in his words. He is tired of the feud. He immediately starts rambling about love instead: ‘Here’s much to do with hate, but more with love. / Why then, O brawling love, O loving hate…’ But it’s not as simple; he just cannot forget about it so easily. In act III, his identity as Montague’s heir brings him so much anxiety and distress that he attempts to take his own life, hoping that this will allow him to extirpate his own name from himself:

O, tell me, friar, tell me,In what vile part of this anatomyDoth my name lodge? tell me, that I may sackThe hateful mansion.Drawing his sword.

These lines are heartbreaking. He is so tired. He is ‘world-wearied flesh’. I don’t think it’s fair to dismiss his emotions and say that he’s just an idiot going through an emo phase. No. Romeo is desperate. Romeo needs affection to survive, and I don’t think that’s a joke if we take into account the brutality of his society. He needs to believe that there is something that’s more powerful than hate in life.

For instance, I can never get enough of the juxtaposition in the first scene. The chaos of the fight, the phallic violence, the toxic pride of Sampson and Gregory—all of this contrasts beautifully with Romeo’s first entrance. From the moment Lady Montague asks, ‘O where is Romeo?’, the characters shift toward a more lyrical, dreamlike speech. They mention Aurora’s bed, the worshipped sun, an artificial night, etc. The force of poetry accompanies Romeo’s character even before he comes on the stage. The language of the scene invites us to conceive Romeo as a different boy, one that isolates himself, one that cries under sycamores, ‘with tears augmenting the fresh morning dew, / Adding to clouds more clouds with his deep sighs’, while the other men shed blood over a thumb-biting gesture. Romeo is lyrical, he is poetry itself, an ardent defensor of the power of dreaming. And yet, in the first act, his poetry is poor and his understanding of love limited, stereotyped, void. It’s artificial and forced. As Friar Lawrence remarks, ‘thy love did read by rote, that could not spell’. Romeo’s 'love’ for Rosaline exposes again the banality of his society. 

It’s not until he meets Juliet that he transcends the limited customs of his society and begins to explore his real self. With Juliet he finds a new kind of love, one that’s personal, real, daring, full of meaning. During his first conversation with Juliet, they both triumph at composing a perfect Shakespearean sonnet together. The poetry is finally mutual, real, alive. From that moment on, though, they will generally speak in blank verse together; Romeo finds a new voice, a different sort of dream, in Juliet’s company. He changes his nonsense, excessively elaborated speech for a much more honest, spontaneous language. He can do so much better than his society—he can be a far better poet than he thinks. Juliet, who shows a greater command of her language, demonstrates this to him.

Something I love about him is that even if he is the romantic lead of the story, he is far from being the perfect prince: he is a helpless, scared child. Juliet is certainly more determined than him, far more careful and resourceful. When she is threatened by her father to marry a man she dislikes, she immediately asks the Nurse for help (‘O Nurse! How shall this be prevented?’). When the Nurse betrays her, she immediately turns to the friar (‘I’ll to the friar to know his remedy’). After Romeo’s banishment, on the contrary, he just lies on the floor 'with his own tears made drunk’, refuses to listen to the friar’s advices, and even attempts to kill himself. But I don’t think we should despise Romeo for this; Romeo needs help and protection and that is not a joke. Romeo goes through a lot of anxiety because he is forced to become someone he doesn’t want to be and that’s just not his fault.

Even if both of them are very protective of each other, it is Juliet who most mentions her need to protect 'my Romeo’. Despite all her fears, this is what finally makes her drink the friar’s potion:

O look! Methinks I see my cousin’s ghost,Seeking out Romeo that did spit his bodyUpon a rapier’s point: Stay, Tybalt, stay!Romeo, I come. This do I drink to thee.

Juliet fears that Tybalt, one of the major exponents of toxic masculinity in the play, will destroy her Romeo if she doesn’t defend him. It is as if there were two Romeos: his imposed identity as Romeo Montague, based on honor and violence; and then the identity he chose himself as her Romeo, based on love and tenderness. He attempts to break the patriarchal norms by rejecting his household in the balcony scene ('Had I [my name] written, I would tear the word’); however, he doesn’t ask the same from her. Ultimately, his death in Capulet’s vault destroys his obedience to the feud (and he uses poison, often attributed to women and weakness, as opposed to Juliet’s dagger).

Juliet revitalizes him in every possible way. She introduces him to a brighter, kinder world. Picking up again the saint/pilgrim motif, he asks her to 'call me but love and I’ll be new baptized’. He finally finds someone who doesn’t believe in the coercive customs of their society—someone who fearlessly states that he would still be as valuable even if he were not a Montague. While their households continue to fight over the importance of names and honor, Juliet is so skeptical that she even wonders, 'What’s Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot, / Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part / Belonging to a man.’ She’ll fight anyone over her Romeo. She is ready to do anything in order to take care of him (more on this here). And Romeo himself rejoices in her protectiveness. He knows she’s stronger than all the swords in Verona ('Look thou but sweet and I am proof against their enemy’). To him, she is a light forcing her way through the physical restrictions of their world, freely expanding her light across the whole sky and shaming 'those stars / As daylight doth a lamp’. She is his sun. There is so much life in her that he believes she could revive him with her kisses as if he were a Disney princess (‘… And breathed such life with kisses in my lips / That I revived and was an emperor’). He is in love with her mind, with her light, and not only with her body (FIGHT ME): 'How is’t, my soul? Let’s talk, it is not day.’

In short, Juliet builds a new identity for him, one that’s free from Verona’s rules and the feud, one that’s tender and blissful and full of light, as they always say. This brings him hope—Juliet’s brave, restless energy turns his dreams into reality. Look at his intrepid words:

With love’s light wings did I o'er-perch these walls,For stony limits cannot hold love out, And what love can do, that dares love attempt.Therefore thy kinsmen are no stop to me.

Love is his strength. Romeo’s courage is of a different kind than that of the other men. It is not based on violence and rage—he dislikes those. Romeo’s bravery lies in his tears, his softness, his emotions, his dreams. His inability to live without Juliet denotes his inability to live without freedom, subjugated to the toxicity of the feud and masculinity. In the balcony scene he tells Juliet 'I would I were thy bird’; he tells her he wishes to say there 'forgetting any other home but this’. And indeed, he chooses Juliet’s breast as his final resting place. Productions don’t generally make him die on her breast, but that’s what Friar Lawrence describes: 'Thy husband in thy bosom there lies dead.’ It tragically echoes his words in the balcony scene: 'Sleep dwell upon thine eyes, peace in thy breast, / Would I were sleep and peace so sweet to rest!’

They are a team. They love, help, save, trust each other. The intimacy they achieve by the end of act III is remarkable. Look at the Nurse’s words when she finds Romeo crying in the friar’s cell:

O, he is even in my mistress’ case,Just in her case! O woeful sympathy!Piteous predicament! Even so lies she,Blubbering and weeping, weeping and blubbering.

He shows as much despair as her. They are not the typical straight couple—a perfectly disciplined man, an oversensitive woman—Romeo and Juliet share their pain. For instance, I’m in love with this passage from the farewell scene:

JULIETO god! I have an ill-divining soul!Methinks I see thee there, thou art so low,As one dead in the bottom of a tomb.Either my eyesight fails or thou lookst pale.ROMEOAnd trust me, love, in my eye so do you.Dry sorrow drinks our love. Adieu, adieu!

This could be paraphrased as ‘I’m scared.’ ‘I’m scared, too.’ This is beautiful and not so easy to find in literature. This is a man who doesn’t pretend he is too strong to show weakness. Romeo imagines his blood being sucked by sorrow, and he doesn’t mind telling Juliet. Indeed, he always stands up for his own emotions and his right to feel. I’ve always been in love with his response to the friar’s words in 3.3:

Thou canst not speak of that thou dost not feel:Wert thou as young as I, Juliet thy love,An hour but married, Tybalt murdered,Doting like me and like me banished,Then mightst thou speak, then mightst thou tear thy hair,And fall upon the ground, as I do now,Taking the measure of an unmade grave.

Romeo is unable to cope; he is weak, sensitive, and spends too much time dreaming. He is the kind of person who needs people by his side. He simply needs affection and that’s precisely what his society prohibits him from having. But instead of mocking him for this, I believe it would be fairer to judge those that instill such anxiety and despair in this poor child who just wants to spend his life poetizing the power of love but who is tragically forced to kill and hate. He is such an idealistic young boy, isn’t he?—completely governed by his dreams, madly in love with his own fantasies. I can never get enough of this funny exchange between Mercutio and Romeo:

ROMEOI dreamt a dream tonight.MERCUTIOAnd so did I.ROMEOWell, what was yours?MERCUTIOThat dreamers often lie.ROMEOIn bed asleep while they do dream things true.

This is not only a man showing his emotions and clinging to his dreams, this is a man who was raised to promote toxic masculinity, rage, and violence, and who does what he can to distance himself from that. We should never forget that. Let’s not decontextualize Romeo and Juliet’s actions from the feud. They are not ‘normal’ kids living in a ‘normal’ world. I think that’s people’s problem with this play—they forget the patriarchal, abusive society Romeo and Juliet were raised in. Two idiots getting themselves killed? That’s dumb indeed. But that’s not what happens in Romeo and Juliet. Romeo and Juliet cling to each other because they accept each other for what they truly are. It’s the fact that they are left alone, that nobody else is willing to accept them, that their society feeds itself with blood and hate and prejudice—this is what kills Romeo and Juliet. To me, it’s the story of two young people who rebel against all the chaos they are to inherit from their parents. And Romeo’s rebellion lies in his emotions. This is the 21st century, for God’s sake. Are we going to mock a boy who is just too tired of all the unhealthy ideals being forced on him? Romeo is quite a unique character—how many men living in a society that encourages them to show off their masculinity would refuse to perpetuate it? Let Romeo cry. Let him fall on the ground in tears. Let him sigh and talk about how his 'heartsick groans, mist-like,’ will 'infold me from the search of eyes’. The fact that he is vulnerable is proof that he doesn’t want to be dehumanized by social constructs. It’s the bravest, most revolutionary thing he could have done in his world. The problem is not Romeo, but Romeo’s society.

[ooshka-babooshka]

Ok, so I am going to start off and try to put some of my thoughts about the finale  of The Handmaid’s Tale down. Fair warning - I wrote parts of this during gymnastics classes and swimming lessons when I was sitting on the sidelines ‘watching’, so it’s probably a bit long and rambling and I’m not sure I ever really get to my point?  Which is about standard for me I think!

Serena’s desperation with her situation just bled through in the first part of this.  June becomes her punching bag in punishment for her husband’s infidelity (and of course under such a patriarchal system it would be June who gets the blame - “you could have left me something” -, just as Janine was made to sit in the Red Centre and have ‘her fault’ chanted at her).  I was glad to see that Serena did confront her husband, even though she's ultimately powerless to punish him and has to resort to throwing the Scrabble set on the floor.

And that theme of power and punishment really played out in this episode.   June plays the only card she can when a pregnancy is confirmed and tells Serena she hasn't prayed for it, implying she doesn't want it. Serena then manages to out-manoeuvre her with the agonising trip to see Hannah who she parades in front of a helpless June in the most heartbreaking scene of the episode.

Elsewhere the council is deciding how to punish Putnam for his infidelity with Janine.  I thought it was interesting that Waterford wanted to brush it away with a slap on the wrist - I'm not sure if this is a reaction to the fact he's just as guilty, or evidence that he's not as hard-line as the others. Book spoiler - the epilogue mentions Waterford (who is not confirmed as Offred’s Commander but one of a few possibilities) was ousted in one of the first purges.  Given the conversation in the car in a previous episode suggested Waterford is their PR person, you can see how easily that would happen. It's the kind of position that sets you up to be the scapegoat when times get tough.

Two things struck me out of the whole Putnam trial and punishment - one was that like in many authoritarian regimes people are learning to work that repression to further their own goals.  Mrs Putnam, now Angela's mother, can use the council and her own claim to piety to ensure her husband’s punishment is harsher than Waterford (and perhaps some of the others) would have suggested.

The other was that taking his hand was something that we've only seen done to handmaids before now and it's truly an emasculating punishment as a result. He's produced a child for Gilead and is therefore somewhat disposable now, but also his weakness is seen as womanly. This is the patriarchy controlling its own - although the true message is probably not don't sin but rather don't get outed.  That's going to have a nasty trickle down effect on the handmaids who are the commanders’ objects of lust and therefore the ones most likely to out them (as Janine did).

And there's something I realised about Gilead when Serena was having her chat with Hannah in front of a trapped June, and that's that the real currency of Gilead is children.  After all , that's what they were so eager to show the diplomats from Mexico, the handmaids were just a means to produce the wealth of Gilead.  It's a society where ultimately your fortunes rise and fall depending on whether you have produced a child or potentially could, and this is somewhat true for everyone. But ownership of a child is the ultimate prize, and it's what Serena wants so badly and prompts that weird display of Hannah. And, really, while I understand June's pain and rage in that moment logically you have to wonder what Serena could actually do - Hannah is almost worth more in that world than Serena and June combined.

Given we know the punishment for just endangering a child is pretty severe (see what happens to Janine), really, what can Serena do to Hannah?  The absolute worst thing would be to just leave her alone, have her live out her life in her new family, brought up as a child of Gilead prepared to do her duty when the time comes.  In the book Offred watches some very young teenage girls get married off to returning soldiers and thinks about Hannah’s fate and, honestly, that seems scarier to me than anything Serena might threaten.

As an aside, Serena strikes me as a gambler, which makes her dangerous and unpredictable She's betting that June won't call her bluff just like she was prepared to bet her own previous privileges on the success of the Gileadean way of life with the jackpot of a baby up for grabs and while I condemn her choices and her actions I am drawn to her character slightly more than I am the weak willed Waterford who seems to have been pulled along and now uses his power and privilege to be the sleaze he couldn't be in his old life.

I liked that we saw Moira’s fate and the refugee process, although I have questions about how she got through check points in the car. But Luke's claiming of her as family was a middle finger to the Gilead regime who are trying to force new family structures on its society without much success.

And I liked that the episode ended in the same place as the book - June/Offred’s fate unknown and Nick still unconfirmed as true friend or foe.  It really sets up season 2 to move forward with the story.

But I do have some reservations about what they seem to setting up as the beginning of the handmaid’s rebellion. The letters June was smuggling were awful and reinforced the devastation this regime has wrought on the lives of so many women and children, but where were those letters going? What good do they serve Mayday as an organisation of resistance? To me they were a little heavy handed - we'd already seen enough of Gilead to know that June's situation was not unique.

And the whole salvaging scene with the handmaids following June into throwing down their stones seems to suggest a sisterhood is rising despite the regime’s best efforts to keep its citizens wary and fearful (see Putnam’s wife begging for a harsh punishment as evidence of how quickly someone's words can harm you when everyone is always under suspicion by the state).  I’m still trying to work out how I feel about that.

The handmaids refusing to do Aunt Lydia's bidding fits right into the whole power and punishment theme - perhaps they are taking Aunt Lydia's assertions about their own specialness to heart. And I really liked that it was the idea of stoning Janine that tipped Ofglen 2 over the edge.  She was happy to trade her body for food and shelter but murder was beyond the pale.

But here is where I really noticed a difference to the books, and not just in the way the June is a less passive character than the novel’s Offred was, and that's in the way that the handmaids have been allowed to exist as a community outside their households.

In the book they shop in pairs still, but fear and suspicion keep the interactions muted. Salvagings are conducted not just for the handmaids to witness but for all of Gileadean society to view - it's part of keeping them fearful and obedient. While the handmaids are grouped front and centre, their place at the heart of this society confirmed, the wives and the marthas are also there, seeing everything.

In that world there'd be no revolt against Aunt Lydia without the risk of punishment at home, in private, in the domestic sphere where wives still hold the power.  You want to show her up in public, fine, but you’ll pay later.  

In the show the handmaids seem to have a slightly greater degree of autonomy, they have one foot in the household, but also one foot in this sisterhood that June has observed developing, at least in the way they no longer look at each other in terror.  I thought that the fact they called on June to talk Janine off the ledge was telling in that even the people in power, while still basically using a handmaid to further their aims of having a child (albeit in a different way to using her to breed with), showed there was some recognition that handmaids are a group of people with friendships and a shared history.  It may have been utter desperation that made them send for June, but it’s still a recognition that she is a person who is connected to Janine in a way the rest of them will never be - for once they were offering a carrot, not a stick.

Whether that connection between the handmaids ultimately gives them power though, remains to be seen.

Part of the aim of the book was to examine the way that domestic history is lost, that those most affected by change don't get to tell their story and that the lives of women most often fall into this category.  Offred’s tale - incomplete and recorded in secret as she is banned from writing - is at its core the story of the household.  Waterford, or whoever her commander actually is, is a blank and could be any of the men they speculate about in the epilogue.  In the end it doesn’t matter because this isn’t his tale.

But the changes in the show - June’s growing awareness of the situation and, most importantly, her willingness to effect change to the whole system - stops this being just a story about a woman doing her best in a society that doesn’t value her, and therefore having her stand in for all women who’ve been forgotten by history.  

And, actually, thinking about how the story was recorded, not written, in the original novel does make me wonder about all those letters June had.  While you could see the paper they’d used was basically anything they could get their hands on - what were they using to write with?  In households where the majority of the members are forbidden by law from writing, that’s an awful lot of pens and pencils they’ve managed to get their hands on.  Or are they finding alternatives - in the book Offred is a little obsessed with the butter pats she’s using as moisturiser.  I missed that in the show - but was this meant to be substitute for showing women making do, and one that has less personal vanity attached to it?

So I am still excited for season 2, still interested in what happens next, but perhaps a little wary of them turning this story into one where the people prevail over evil - even though I couldn’t imagine the story just remaining a long list of ways in which the women could be tortured (and I have stopped watching shows where the characters never get a break because it’s too much).  I just hope they keep the balance they found in season 1.  Oh, and that the Econowives in their stripy dresses from the book make an appearance - I miss them!

So yeah.  @kliomuse, @natascha-remi-ronin @sambethe that’s really where I am at the moment.  Hopeful, definitely, but I have probably spent waaay too much time thinking about the whole thing now!

[loudlytransparenttrash]

As an anti-feminist, what is your opinion on male feminists? I've read about how feminists recruit young women to join their side, but what about men?

Feminism teaches young women to be helpless, hopeless victims of men, that’s an obvious fact. Another obvious fact is where there’s a damsel in distress, there’s always going to be a white knight to save her. The problem we have here though is these damsels aren’t really in distress and they don’t really want to be saved by the enemy. 

The enemy of feminism is the patriarchy (men), male privilege (men), toxic masculinity (men), rape culture (men), mansplaining (men), the male gaze, (men) - so in order to be an “ally” or to simply be seen as a decent human being in the eyes of a feminist, the man must confess his guilt for being born with a dick, his deep shame for having testosterone and turn his nose up with repulsion at his once fellow men as he waves goodbye to his old life and enters the world of feminism. 

But why would a man go through all of this nonsense and throw himself into the pack of wolves? Well, he knows that by calling himself a feminist, 1) he can be seen as a more enlightened individual and gain social acceptance in the “cool club” and 2) he thinks it gives him a better chance of getting laid. Sadly, not many women want feminist boyfriends and the ones who do, well they just love showing their “re-educated” pet off to everyone. 

It reminds me of a post I made last year:

7 Reasons Why Feminists Dating Feminist Men Is A Bad Idea

1. The sex will suck.

He will embrace the Yes Means Yes standard of sexual consent and any hopes you have of coming home after a long shitty day at work to be swept off your feet by a man overcome with his lust for you can be dumped in the circular file right now. He will greet you at the door, notice you are not in the best of moods (a good start, I admit) and then launch into enthusiastic consent. “May I place my arms around you and give you a consoling embrace? Are you comfortable with me kissing your cheek? May I assist you in removing your coat? This may involve some contact with the upper portion of my body. Do you feel at ease with that?” By the time he has your coat off, you will want to punch him in the face, but because you believe in true equality, you will understand that violence against everyone is wrong and you will refrain from doing so. The rest of the evening won’t get better. By the time he requests permission to remove your panties, you will be choking on disgust and you will go to sleep on the couch.

2. Your confidence will plummet as he encourages you to wallow in your victimhood and blame everyone but yourself for your failures.

When you start to talk about why your day was so shitty he will nod sympathetically and (after obtaining consent) pat you on the back tenderly and make soothing affirmative noises as you search for someone to blame. He will agree that it was the baristas fault you spilled latte all over that Women’s Studies report you had to hand in because she made the coffee too hot. He will agree that the bitch in the next cubicle is vindictive and steals your ideas all the time. He will agree that nothing is ever your fault and in doing so, he will basically be saying that you are a child and your actions are futile and you might as well just give up now because there is no way you are strong enough and smart enough to navigate the world of grown-ups.

3. He will empower you by never letting you fall flat on your ass and you will never learn a goddamn thing.

Your feminist boyfriend will be your constant crutch. He will be there to support you no matter how stupid or irrational or just plain idiotic your actions. He will never hold you accountable and will always make excuses for you. He will demand that everyone make allowances for you and your bad habits will become so in-grained they will become second nature. He will accept you sulking and endlessly repeating the same stupid mistake, assuring you that everyone else is wrong and you are right. He will be supportive, loyal and make sure you never grow or evolve as a person.

4. You will look like hell as he encourages you to “reject patriarchal beauty standards.”

Your feminist boyfriend will encourage you to spend the 20 minutes you usually waste combing your hair and applying the bare minimum amount of make-up you need to look professionally groomed and polished in bed. He will go ahead and shave and keep his hair and neckbeard trimmed and neat but that’s just part of male privilege and it is always and only misogyny to suggest that women need to meet similar standards. He will reassure you that hair and skin oils are perfectly natural and feminine odors are always pleasing, except to those that genuinely hate women. Only insecure men are uncomfortable with a natural woman.

5. Your feminist boyfriend will want to share everything with you. No seriously, everything. He’ll even have sympathy menstrual cramps.

Your feminist boyfriend will reject traditional masculine pursuits such as any sports or entertainment that involves the glorification of violence or unrealistic body standards or the depiction of traditional gender roles. He will reject most movies and television shows as perpetuating harmful gender roles and promoting rape culture and you will have to hide your erotic romance book under the mattress.

6. He’ll actually cut your sentences off and tell other people what your opinion is for you more often than an old-fashioned macho man will.

Your feminist boyfriend will know all the talking points and will insert himself into any conversation with catch-phrases like “wage gap” and “heteronormativity” and “cis-gendered” and “privilege” and when you fail to make mention of these important issues yourself, he will finish sentences for you, because he knows exactly how you feel on every subject and wants to show his support and admiration for you. You will really want to punch him now and you might question whether some people really are “asking for it”.

7. You will be a sad, lonely, cranky, selfish, teetering on the edge of insanity basket case when he leaves you for that hot chick in tight yoga pants who knows how to cook.

Eventually, your feminist boyfriend will decide adults are way more fun to hang around with than giant toddlers who have tantrums and blame everybody else for their own problems. Adults who understand how human sexuality work and who respect the differences between men and women are also a lot more fun to be with. You’ll watch him throw his arm around her (without asking first!), steer her down the street towards the cinemas playing the latest film of the patriarchy and furiously seethe while you tell yourself that he’s proof that all cis straight males are scum. But maybe, just maybe, one day you’ll realize the good men haven’t gone anywhere. They just don’t want anything to do with you.

[ginnyzero]

The Princess/Nerd Syndrome

There is a trope that I see a lot in reading urban fantasy books. A trope that is supposed to be a female empowerment fantasy. When in reality, it is anything but. These female characters are supposed to be independent, tough and with their own agency. When in reality, they aren’t. I like to call this trend for female protagonists the princess/nerd syndrome.

On the outside our female protagonist is a nerd and no one wants to date her, but on the inside, she really is a princess waiting for the right man to come along to see her for who she really is. There are often other reasons given for why the main character can’t get a date. She’s socially awkward. She has a power that makes her a pariah to the community. She’s rather passive and ‘helpless.’ She doesn’t fit the standard definition of beauty. (She’s not a super model.) And over the course of the story it isn’t just one right man that comes along. Lucky for her it is four or five “right men” who come along all at the same time and now she has the horrible dilemma of choosing. So much for no one wanting to date our helpless, socially awkward, powers pariah, nerdy female.

This is a female empowerment fantasy. And usually it is solved through something that’s not under the female character’s control. She has a makeover and her true looks are revealed. She is the ‘only one’ of her kind so all of her kind want her. Someone doesn’t really mind her different power and thinks it’s great. Her power allows her to do great things really. She can bear someone’s children when other women can’t. Her blood might be magical in taste, smell or just she comes from really special fairy bloodlines. Maybe, she’s the “Chosen one” of a great prophecy. In the female empowerment fantasy, without doing anything, one day a woman will get her true love “prince.” This is passive. They are the object of the action rather than causing the action themselves.

The female empowerment fantasy is just as passive as the male empowerment fantasy is active. The man takes control of a situation. He fights a good fight. He does something and because of doing this something, he gets a girl. The female is the reward in the male empowerment fantasy. Where she is once again a passive part of the narrative, the love interest, the kidnapped victim, very rarely is she the soldier that fights by his side.

A lot of times in these princess/nerd syndrome books, I can’t even tell why the males like the main female character. Part of it, I’m sure, is because what they are attracted to isn’t the woman herself, but a passive part of her that she has no control over which includes her looks, powers, tasty blood or prophesied one status. And a lot of times, these love triangles/rectangles/pentagrams are narrowed down to the fact that there are several males who are “safe” choices and there are several males who are “bad” choices and it’s so unfortunate that the female is more attracted to a “bad” choice rather than a “safe” choice and it’s never shown if either of these choices really actually respect her as a person, are interested in her personally and really care about her life and life course. Most of the time, the males really only care about themselves and what they think is best for the main female character without taking into account what the female character actually wants. (And then on the other hand to some extent they want the main female character to take care of them as well, as if she’s their mother and not their girlfriend.)

And these princess/nerd heroines are the types of books that get recced on every “kick ass” urban fantasy book list. These are romance novel tropes. They aren’t feminist. They aren’t empowering. They’re just another form of the patriarchy hurting both men and women by making them objects and not important.

Yes, women want to be special. They want to have many men chasing after them. Well, some women do. I’d rather have one man courting me that truly respects me than half a dozen who have their own agendas that have nothing to do with me. I get the whole aspect of wanting the female protagonist be special. My God, at least make her special over something she has control over.

The sad thing is, that most of these females (written by female writers no less) who profess not to feel beautiful never have an inner journey where they conquer their insecurities one way or the other (either by confidence that the outside doesn’t matter or a bedrock belief that they are beautiful inside and out no matter what) and rely consistently on an outside judge, usually a male, to determine whether or not they’re beautiful. Female insecurity about our looks is a real thing. We are hounded everyday with images in media and ads about how a female is “supposed” to look like. (That only dates back to Twiggy in the 60s.) Men are beginning to feel the bite of this particular beast too. This journey is real. It’s acceptable. I get it. But only if it is shown to us in the story.

I have nothing against female empowerment fantasy. I just want it to be active. A female character that doesn’t wait around and isn’t super special and goes after what she wants. A female character with vision and drive and a man doesn’t have to be part of that and just ends up happening.

I would rather see a story where the woman realizes that men are nice but she sure as hell doesn’t need them. It is detrimental to everyone is the genders are co-dependent on each other for validation. I’d rather see a story where there is one consistent love interest that isn’t after the woman because of her looks or her tasty blood or because she’s got fairy charisma or can survive having his children. I’d rather see them building a relationship of mutual trust and respect and over shared interests with yes, mutual attraction and eventual sexy good times. I want to see more books where the woman takes an active role in her own love life and is loved because of what she does, not because of something she has no control over.

And this seems to be a tough thing for writers to do. I understand why it is tough. It goes against conventional patriarchal thinking and gender norms. Things can’t change without challenging the status quo, which a lot of books I’ve read just aren’t willing to do, even if their main female character is supposed to be some sort of feminist.

So, it’s a damn good thing I can write my own books.

[fuchsiaseed]

Feminism and Asymmetries equality

The expansion of feminist movements in recent decades has shown remarkable progress. But to this day, feminism still provokes the relentless prejudice of some social movement retainers. Feminism is considered contradictory because it carries the ‘idea of gender equality’, which only defends oppression on one people only: women. Some of these prejudices arise because of the fact that the persecution has never known gender. But some of us are still vague about the fact that women are the most helpless in facing all the oppression (oppression, red) created by today’s patriarchal society. Why? Before we answer that question, it would be good to understand first what patriarchism is, which is the feminist’s main enemy, and matriarchism as a thesis always confronted with patriarchy. Patriarchism is a social system that places men as a central authority figure in many social organizations. Patriarchy is a form of crystallization of patrilineal culture. in other hand there is a matriarchism, which is also a derivative form of matrilineal culture. Then where did this conflict begin? Engels gave an explanation of the conflict that began when femininity became subordinate and considered second class in society. In the past, the same masculine and feminine tasks in the family have now shifted. The tasks performed by a mother are second-rate and are considered no greater than the duties of a father. There is never a problem when women’s duties in the domestic sphere are rewarded equal to men’s duties. But conflicts begin when women are subordinated and considered to be no more important than men. Besides that, there is Bachofen, a contemporary and like-minded philosopher with Marx, has managed to explain the development and shifting matriarchy to patriarchy in his work entitled Myth Religion and Mother Right. Here Bachofen explains matriarchism originating from matrilineal where from a mother, the concept of altruism, and universal equality is passed on to the child. A mother loves her children without choosing a child also learns to love from her mother. This self-concept that builds the character and principles of freedom, equality, happiness and the unconditional recognition of life. Changed by the matrilineal principle, patrilineal speaks of law, order, truth, and hierarchy. Even Bachofen explain that balanced fraternity and awakened from the hands of the mother, now turned into a competition and hierarchical domination in the hands of the father. Even more, Fromm says that this patriarchal principle of upholding the competition is the ultimate form of evolution. But this does not necessarily make matriarchism a fragile and obsolete concept. Furthermore, Erich Fromm examines the flaws and advantages of these two concepts. Matriarchism has advantages in the idea of equality, universality, and unconditional soul recognition. While this idea is weak because it is in blood and ground bonds. Weak in terms of progress. On the other hand, patriarchism excels in the principle of truth, law, the progress of the science of civilization and the development of spirituality. But the concept of patriarchism becomes flawed because it is thick with elements of hierarchy, oppression, inequality and inhumanity. In this case, patriarchy is impossible to establish a balanced and classless society. Gradually, the matriarchism manifested in subsistence life was displaced by patriarchism that promised a progress and a civilization. The principles of competition built by patriarchism now give rise to new enemies for the feminist as equally powerful and dangerous from his own father: Capitalism. Capitalism is a consequence of the principle of endless competition built by patriarchal society. In this case, it is not capitalism that preserves patriarchal culture, but patriarchal cultures give space and opportunity for capitalism to thrive and be invincible. Gender Conflict : Reality or imagination? From the historical concept that the author tried to point out above still get a rebuttal because it seems imposed. But Bachofen’s thought is not an image. Several decades later there have been many researches on communication patterns and the psychological dimensions between the genders. One of today’s linguistic linguists is Deborah Tannen. The results of his research prove the existence of differences in basic communication patterns in men and women. Men tend to promote Ethics of Right, they build a communication to achieve status, male communication patterns are filled with something called Nietczhe as desire for power and hierarchy. While women prioritize Ethics of Care and tend to communicate to build a relationship, in this case women emphasize the principle of equality, women will always fight with the dominance of any kind due to his desire for the equivalent, when men clashed with all kinds of Domination due to the unwillingness to lose and oppressed. This description is not an attempt to be sexist, this is a prove by a professor of linguistics from Georgetown University. In the eyes of women, equality is an antecedent. While some men pursue equality as a consequence. This asymmetry becomes a vital source of conflict. Indeed, we no longer need to ask where the conflict between the gender. The fight between two men will be strong as they build the same competition principle. But the feud between men and women becomes an unequal and never-ending feud. Caused for women conflict will stop when equality has been reached, but in male communication, the conflict will stop when there has been found a winner. Feminism: A Continuous Catharsis From these conflicts, Feminism, which became popular with the Suffragettes movement in UK, came as a catharsis. These marginalized conflicts did seem latent before that time, a breakthrough of the resistance movement that opened the eyes of the whole world that women workers were deeply wounded by their helplessness in the face of oppression in the era of industrial revolution. This oppression continues to this day, women are now no longer an object and have even become a tool of oppression itself. The era of Capitalism is now dragging women into diving in the flow of competition. Until the reveal of many Post-Feminist movement are no longer asking for equality, but are further dragged into the pattern of patriarchal communication that requires women to give birth to a position exchange movement to dominate. Oppression, patriarchism, and capitalism are not gender-sensitive. But they are born out of balance of gender communication. According to Tannen, when men sit with other men, it is more likely to create rules that require competition and hierarchy than when men sit with women. Feminist dreams are not interrupted by 30% in parliament. It was a superficial and hasty conclusion. The voice in parliament does not have the slightest of the Feminist ideals. Feminism dreams of a just and equitable society order, feminism tries to provide a balanced space, where masculinity and femininity combine into a harmony. Feminism directly against the concept of patriarchy and its derivatives, of which are Capitalism and Market Principles. In achieving this, the Feminist movement prepared many missions to fight for. One way is to enter parliament in the hope that new constitutions will be more sensitive to gender differences. As noted by Rocky Gerung, “Feminists are tired of boasting the reason for the high mortality of mothers and children, because of bacterial in the hospital.” Feminists understand this simply because of gender notions in the state budget. There are many more feminist political endeavors in fighting for their ethical feminists, not just with the movement of consciousness towards fellow women. In addition, the feminist movement also tries to free human beings from stereotypes by engaging them in the struggle for equality. Then what kind of equality does feminists aspire to? Feminism envisioned a harmonious equality in an asymmetrical order. The point is that feminism yearns for an equality that allows the unconditional and unimpressed right of life for all classes, even for men. Feminism yearns for an acceptance of the psychological and linguistic asymmetry that becomes the basic instinct of men and women. Feminism dreams of an equal, just, free society of oppression but still progressing. But this new feminist movement is still fragmented due to too many patriarchal products to be resisted. They are still wondering about who is the specific enemy of feminism, and why bringing the concept of one gender in the struggle for equality. Feminism takes aim at the same enemies as other resistance movements, but an epistemic process that brings different philosophical assumptions that make feminism marginalized and perceived as an egocentric movement to this day If we try to understand the feminist ethic more deeply, we will find the fact that feminism offers a more complex and have intersectionality form. Equality that enables everyone to feel safe and comfortable under its auspices, where this equality provides a place for all concepts of thought, even those of a competitive principle. A hope that is still very long to arrive at this feminist ideals, we cant make it alone. We still provide empty seats for men to join and fight together, toward the Future of Feminists.