#peak top bottom discourse | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

epitome-of-an-openbook · 2 years ago

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The prevalence of male character feminization is really high in the ST fandom and I’m not sure how to feel about it. It can’t just be the hanky thing (that costume designer has no idea what they’ve unleashed!) and I understand that it’s a kink and I’m not going to shame that. But as you say, it seeps into lots of fics where it’s like people think that’s how a bottom acts.

I wondered if it was the huge influx of tik tok teens that came with S4, who might (MIGHT) be eager to just run with their own thoughts rather than following canon? I mean, a small but significant proportion of Steddie fans readily admit haven’t even watched previous seasons. A couple of authors have even said they hadn’t watched the show at all, and only know it from tik tok. Now, they’re allowed to be in the fandom. All are welcome. It’s just an interesting phenomenon. It would explain some of the poor grammar in some fics. I’m not talking all fics/all young authors, some of them are brilliant. But with dialogue, some seem to think you put a period wherever a comma would normally go, and that’s something I’ve never seen in any other fandom. And then there’s your/your, the past tense of to lie/to lay, peek/peak/pique, queue/cue, bear/bare…I could go on for ages.

But that’s beside the point. Back to feminization: another consideration is the fact that many authors write their favorite characters as a self insert of sorts. Not just fanfic authors, either: Stephen King does it all the time, and other authors too. So that means some (again, not all) female authors will write Steve (it’s usually Steve, let’s be honest here) that way because they want him to be loved the way they want to be loved, whether that involves kink or not.

I’m not a fan of it, personally. I like Steve how he is in canon, and a lot of traditionally ‘feminine’ tropes don’t fit him. When he’s written as a coy or coquettish, or someone who cries all the time, for example, it’s not to my taste. Kinda throws me out of the story, tbh. But it clearly is appealing to lots of other people.

That’s not to say that Steve doesn’t have some ‘female’ traits. I find the babygirl Steve meme as funny as anyone else, and of course he has been given the reluctant babysitter role. In S3 he was so prettily styled it was crazy, and he was the one receiving creepy facial caresses from the Russian general when any other show would have had that happen to Robin. But he can be written as he is in canon - that same pretty boy who’s also a jock, who can take a punch like a champ, is an adorable doofus and a recklessly courageous protector - and still be a bottom.

I also have no idea where it really comes from. However, the feminization for the purpose of making one character in a mlm gay relationship 'the man' of the relationship and the other 'the woman' of the relationship is a widespread issue across most fandom spaces tbh, and I know that everytime it comes up its just cycled discourse that's been talked to death - but the fact of the matter is that gay men in fandom spaces have repeatedly told us that it's harmful. There is a tasteful way to have Steve (or Eddie or whoever) explore a more feme gender expression, but it becomes very clear in fic when the feminization is being used as a way to fit a gay relationship into heteronormative gender-roles and/or fetishize the pairing. It is all very "so who wears the pants in this relationship?" imo - which really sucks. A metalhead nerd and a prom king jock can be in a relationship with each other without having to sacrifice the masculine aspects of their personalities. It is so rare in gay relationships for one person to always be the bottom or always be the top and sometimes the top is the tiny femme one and the bottom is the big masculine one. And sometimes neither has any particularly femme qualities and sometimes neither have any particularly masc qualities.

Also, on another barely related note - what is with people exaggerating their heights to fit this idea, one of the first indicators I have for "this fic might not be for me" is if one of them is suddenly towering over the other despite the fact that Joe Keery/Steve is just barely an inch taller than Joe Quinn/Eddie?? Idk if that's just a personal preference thing, and I don't always hate it but it's another thing that I feel sometimes gets used to enforce het-gender roles.

IDK if my points came across all that clearly, but the issue isn't necessarily "Stop Babygirl-ifying Steve" so much as it is "Stop Babygirl-ifying Steve in a way that's fetishizing gay men" and that can get kind of lost in the discourse I think - imo it's pretty easy to pick out when it's done well and when it's done harmfully and everyone can read what they want to but I personally am going to try and stay away from the latter.

#stranger things #steve harrington #eddie munson #steddie #asks #the babygirlification of steve harrington

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undercat-overdog · 1 year ago

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2, 23, 25?

Thank you for the ask! <3 For the violence meme, which is going around.

2. a compelling argument for why your fave would never top or bottom

I don't have a funny answer, so this is compelling only to me, but Celebrimbor is my favoritest favorite who I like bestest and I am basic so he bottoms. No deep character reason other than that I prefer it and I think it's fun to write him as a bit of a bratty pillow princess (to an extent and only at times).

23. ship you've unwillingly come around to

I... am not sure I have an answer to this? I think all my ships I have come to willingly. Hmm... I was bemoaning once about not having enough incest ships (even discourse won't make me ship certain characters), and Aredhel/Turgon popped into mind as something I'd love to see. Not an unwilling ship acquisition, but unexpected.

25. common fandom complaint that you're sick of hearing

"I can't believe X doesn't exist" or "why won't someone write X" when X is very much a thing that exists and is not difficult to find. I think the worst example I've seen was "someone should write Frodo interacting with First Age characters": I mean, that's only some of the most popular fic in the entire fandom, so I guess someone did write it. Take a peak at ao3 first.

#ask #swanmaids #i don't think these were that violent?

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johannas-motivational-insults · 4 years ago

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I love the dialogue you use so I got to know number 2

2. What is your favorite snippet of dialogue?

Hmm well I dunno that I can pick a greatest of all time but in terms of recent stuff I can remember easily I really like this snippet from Hail Mary chapter 8. It came to mind partly because I’m working on another scene of Catra and Lonnie bickering lol. But this piece of dialogue wasn’t planned and kinda came out of nowhere as I was writing... I find a lot of my best exchanges are ones that happen organically because the characters have plans of their own, forcing me to take a detour.

I love this whole bit, but especially the beat at the end where the argument kinda has a fakeout ending before Lonnie says her next line. The comedic timing is strong on this one. And I like Adora’s little bit of narration after that, partly because I agree with her but mostly because it’s honest and earnest and just so very Adora.

Anyways, enjoy:

Catra hesitates, indecision clear on her face. Finally she shakes her head and mutters, “Ugh, okay, fine. Five more minutes.”

“As if you don’t like it,” Adora teases her as she turns back around.

“I’m seriously gonna puke, you two,” Lonnie remarks over her shoulder, and Adora catches a quick glimpse of her muscled back before remembering to look away, her cheeks dusting red once again.

“If you don’t like it, the couch is always an option,” Catra snipes across the room.

“Yeah, you’d like that, wouldn’t you? Room all to yourselves.”

“It would be great,” Catra says flatly. “No more loudmouth getting up in my grill.”

Lonnie snickers, turning around as she finishes pulling her shirt on. “You liked it when I was up in-”

“NOPE NOPE NOPE!” shouts Adora, hands slapping over her ears. “I CAN’T HEAR YOU.”

Unfortunately they don’t take the hint and Adora’s hands aren’t enough to block out the frankly disturbing argument.

“So did you, Lonnie,” retorts Catra. “Don’t go pretending you’re some stone top.” Rolling her eyes back in her head, she moans, “‘Oh, harder Catra!’”

Lonnie steps closer, fists clenching at her sides. “You wanna fuckin’ die?”

“Try me, pillow princess.”

“Oh my god, stop!” shouts Adora, one arm looping around Catra’s chest to hold her back. Taking a turn to glare at each of them, she demands, “Does everything have to be a pissing contest with you two?”

“Yes!” they answer in unison before turning to glare at each other once again.

“Okay, well I’m officially calling this a draw,” declares Adora. “Sit down and shut up, both of you.”

Maybe in normal circumstances Catra would snap back at her, tell her not to boss her around, but she seems to understand she’s crossed a line. They both do. The tension slowly leaves Lonnie’s jaw and she eventually shuffles back to her side of the room, clearly embarrassed. Adora meanwhile resumes massaging Catra’s neck, harder than she needs to or could possibly be comfortable. Catra grimaces but doesn’t complain, accepting the punishment with dignity.

Turning around mid-retreat, Lonnie adds, “For the record, I’m not a pillow princess.”

That just makes Adora roll her eyes. This obsession with labels that don’t even make sense for cis-women is beyond her. What even is a top? Don’t girls usually both touch each other? It makes sense that you would. Adora doesn’t think it would be much fun to only do one or the other. In fact, she very much harbors a fantasy of both at once, lying next to Catra with sweaty foreheads pressed together, gasping into each other’s mouths…

Uh, anyway, Adora thinks it would be a shame not to do something fun because people care so much about some dumb labels that make no sense. She hopes Catra would let her touch her and not be weird and defensive about it. Not that she’s ever going to touch Catra but like, if she did. If they did.

A frustrated sigh expels itself from her lungs as she drags a hand down her face. “Thank you for that incredibly useful clarification, Lonnie,” she says flatly. “I really needed to know that.”

Fanfic Day Meme

#asks #ecrooked24 #ask games #writing asks #fanfic #writing #hail mary #catradora #catralonnie #spop #top/bottom discourse #peak comedy

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itshillaryrodamn · 7 years ago

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don’t you think hillary would prefer being on the bottom? i mean she always has to be the dominant one in public and has to be controlled in public eye. wouldn’t you think she’d like to enjoys giving up that control for a little while like that? and to me bill seems very dominant, especially in bed.. with those big hands

mm well there is that too, that’s why I said about preferring either depending on her mood….they’re both similar in that way though and both have held powerful public positions so I reckon they could both shift back and forth between being the dominant one in bed

#this is peak tumblr discourse honestly #but yeah I reckon you’re right about his big hands #anonymous #top vs bottom debate

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vrishchikawrites · 3 years ago

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Since pwp month is starting, I wonder how you feel about all the top/bottom discourse that happens in this fandom?

Ok, so thus far, I have missed most of the top/bottom discource so I asked my friends about some of the talking points. Here's my take on it:

1. Having a discourse on it is ridiculous. Wangxian aren't stereotypical. Stereotypical bottoms are shy, protected, and hesitant to initiate, delicate little flowers. Stereotypical tops are bold, brash, get-your-hands-dirty kind, and always initiate sexual encounters.

WWX is thoroughly independent, fully in control, likes to be handled roughly, and initates a lot of their sexual encounters. LWJ is an absolute delicate princess sometimes and WWX will absolutely protect him from dirt and grime. Their dynamic isn't stereotypical top/bottom at all. (This is me just being succinct because there are MANY characteristics that aren't stereotypical at all)

2. Apparently, people thing many gay people switch. Which is true but it is also true that there are many gay people who absolutely hate switching. I know a few bottoms who refuse to top. They just don't want it. I know a few tops who will absolutely not take it. It is a preference, not something you need to take seriously.

I PERSONALLY know a bottom who is unquestionably the dominant personality (not a dom) in the relationship but is someone who exclusively bottoms and will never switch. That is how real relationships work out, folks.

3. LWJ should be bottom - personally, I don't mind it but I don't see it. Because LWJ shows very strong preference to being a top. That is his made clear in the book. It is a preference tho not his entire personality. For me, when someone expresses a strong preference towards something - LWJ being top, WWX being bottom, both of them loving CNC, WWX hating impact play, LWJ liking bondage - all of these become a part of their characterization.

So bottom!LWJ is valid but also out of character for me personally. People can write what they want to. Similarly, I can't see WWX as a top even when he is radiating peak YLLZ energy because he shows a strong preference for bottoming. He consistently provokes LWJ into taking him. That is peak bottom energy.

Bottomji isn't gonna harm anyone but they're not being some interesting woke person by doing it.

So, imo, the discourse is ridiculous. But it is also present is most fandoms and somehow it has become connected to 'wokeness'.

It isn't woke to force switching on people with strong preferences towards a particular dynamic. It also isn't woke to go on fics that are clearly tagged with bottomLWJ and rant about deviating from canon, because again, when it is fictional characters vs. real authors, I would rather people mess the characterization than hurt the real person. Similarly, I would rather switch Wangxian people to create their switch content rather can accuse real people of being fetishizers.

Also dom =/= top and sub =/= bottom.

As simple as that, honestly.

#reader asks #re: fandom

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ruthlesslistener · 3 years ago

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Mika? :)

wow holy fuck thank you for blasting me back to being 16 holy shit

First impression: Oh he's so pretty?? And he's got slit pupils??? Damn I might get over my hatred of vampires that the twilight phase inspired in me long enough to actually watch this bc he's hot. Also I heard this anime was gay

Impression now: YOU WERE DONE SO DIRTY MY SWEET BOY HOLY FUCKING S H I T

Favorite moment: Hands down when he fights an entire elite corp of vampire hunters to get Yuu back. The bite scene comes close, but I feel like him throwing himself into the fray simply to get Yuu back speaks volumes about his love for him. Plus I fucking love fight scenes skdjfhgb

Idea for a story: Idk, probs just finishing off Follow Your Instincts. I have no juice for that rn tho because that a.) requires me to rewrite the entirety of ons to my qualifications in an au i havent touched in years, b.) for me to confront 16 year old me's writing, and c.) to interact with the toxic nightmare that is the ons fandom

Unpopular opinion: the ons fandom at its peak was full of homophobic nightmare discourse where if you didn't get cussed out by some cishet dude, you'd get straight-up death threats for claiming that one out of two sixteen year olds in a relationship was either a top or a bottom, because nobody in that goddamn hellscape could understand that taking a dick up your ass doesn't make you some blushing feminine innocent shota boy, or shoving your dick up a guy's asshole didn't make you a smirking pseudo-rapist with rippling abs. I don't think there's anything I could say that hasn't already gotten me yelled at or told to kill myself already tbh.

Favorite relationship: Mikayuu, obviously. Though Mika and Shinoa having an odd friendship where he helped her understand that her desire for Yuu was due to compulsory heterosexuality after she very literally chased him down and forced him to take care of himself was also very fun

Favorite headcanon: Mika is trans, extremely underweight for a vampire, purrs, and has retractable claws. Tbh I have a lot of really good headcanons that I like a lot buried somewhere on my blog, it's just that those are the ones that I recall being particularly fond of. I love this guy so fucking much and met a lot of really good people in the fandom, it's kinda really sad that I can't think of ons anymore without also remembering all the homophobia and transphobia I had to deal with

#also if you dared to not ship mikayuu then you'd be treated even worse #which like #i shipped mikayuu but not in the 'right' way so i got a lot of it too lmfaooo #anon #reply #ons #owari no seraph #mikaela hyakuya #[looks directly into the current ons fandom's eyes] try me bitch

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neo-crimson-palace · 3 years ago

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Crimson Palace Headcanons

I’m not sure if I placed a post on this before or not. But here are some personal headcanons/lore about my muses as well as the world itself to help give a better idea about them. Note: You don’t HAVE to follow them, it’s mostly out of Mun’s self-indulgence

-X-

-Makoto, Sayaka, and Chihiro are in a Polyamorous Three-way open relationship. Don’t misunderstand, despite how they act and who they fuck. They all care and love each other deeply at the end of the day.

-Chihiro is a big-dick Alpha Dom despite his shy and timid nature.

-Sayaka is a HUGE nympho behind closed doors. Always happy to tease and fuck with anyone.

-Out of all of the Male Muses: Geo Stelar(Mega Man Starforce) Sonic, Mega Man, and Broly, are the most leading Sexually active males on the blog:

--Broly Because, well. . . *Just shows you how he is throughout the Supers Movie*

--Sonic, thanks to his long 20 plus years of being a long-distance Hyper-speed running. The Hedgehog has accumulated the highest known stamina out of all the guys. Easily capable of going at it for a long time and not feeling remotely tired.

--His Werehog form also has been surprisingly desirable to the ladies. While his speed has dropped quite a bit. His sheer size and skillful power thrusts have more than made up for it. Making him loved. Especially by a certain Umbran Witch, and Mother/Daughter pair of rabbits.

--Rock, thanks to being a robot; doesn’t get tired at all. While

--On top of which, having a massive cock that change being interchangeable to fit whatever girl. And as well as authentic synthetic cum that’s much like the real thing.

--Geo is more or less the same, much like his Classic Counterpart. Due to his body being fused with EM waves. Giving him natural enhancement far above the athletic peaked adult male.

-Phoenix Wright and Kimihito Kurusu are natural-born Doms and DILFs.

-The former, coming to them after dealing with all of the crap done to them in their lives and their bodies going through a lot of abuse.

-That said: Kimihito can easily Dominate any supernatural/monster girl with no problem.

-Phoenix has a relationship with Athena Cykes and Franziska Von Karma.

-The Whip-Wielding prosecutor having a secret kink of being tied up or whipped with her own whip.

-Athena has a love for being fucked outside in public. Having a rush at the thought of being caught.

-Jessica Rabbit is in an open relationship with her husband. Something the two of them agreed to, to help spice up their marriage life. That said, she does not like the implication that she’s cheating on Roger since she loves her darling husband very much.

-Within the RWBY World; Out of all of the girls. Ruby is the #1 Dominant woman out there. Due to her unassuming and cute bubbly nature. She’s almost the biggest hung futa of her world.

--Coming second and right under her, is her most loyal servant: Salem.

--When she’s not subbing for Ruby. Salem is the most dominant woman aside from her.

--This is emphasized by the huge twin cocks that she has underneath her dress. Thanks to Grimm Magic.

--Weiss is a complete and utter submissive bottom.

--All of the Women Faunus, especially Blake, have a secret love for Kinky Pet Play.

--Yang’s in an incestuous relationship with her younger baby brother and sister, Garnet and Ruby.

-Ragna has a bit of a Harem within the Persona 5 girls. Especially Makoto Niijima, who loves being fucked roughly by the criminal.

-Rias Gremory has a Slave Contract with Geo and LOVES it.

-Akeno Himejima, is a submissive slave/pet for Phoenix Wright.

-Mega Man/Samus, Ash/Cynthia, Corrin/Camilla are in a relationship.

-Camilla is the Head Mistress within Corrin’s Harem. When she’s not pleasing him, she often grabs a spellbook and dons a futa cock, playing with the other girls.

-Save for a Sonic, Mega Man, and a few guys who she knows can fuck her mindless. Palutena, due to her Godly-Nature, is the ultimate Dom. Especially for women who she fucks senseless with her Divine Futa-Cock.

-Kasumi Yoshizawa has a deep love for Saiyan Dick. So she’s a willing slave to being fucked by the likes of Broly, Goku, Gogeta/Vegito.

-All the Female Anthro Pokemon are constantly in heat and easily aroused.

--When fucking the same male/trainer. They will turn it into an intense sexual battle.

-Haruyuki Arita’s body is soft like a teddy bear. Even when pounding into other girls. So it gives them something to snuggle/cuddle into when they’re screaming their lungs out.

-Goblin Slayer ACTUALLY cares about the women he fucks outside of wanting to slay Goblins.

--That said, his Harem loves it when he fucks them roughly.

-Rimuru’s harem has a deep love for Tentacles that he’s able to do. Both as a Slime and Human form.

As for the World itself:

-Unlike most Multi-Verse Blog. I like to consider this a world-built type of place.

-Something Similar to the Wreck-It Ralph series. Outside of all the worlds, all of my muses normally stay in. They all live together inside one giant hub world. And for the most part, get along rather well.

-There’s no type of hate at all within the Hub World. Former enemies and hated rivals are actually friends outside of the asks I receive.

-Any and all discourse is settled via a sex battle.

-Interspecies/Interracial/LGBT/Incest etc are all accepted with no issue. Honestly, the entire hub world may as well be dating each other.

And that’s it for now. Bear note: This is likely to be updated in the future too. So look forward to that.

#Mun Talks #Headcanons #Lore

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pochapal · 4 years ago

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rank every year of the 2010s from best to worst i want some pochapal lore

[warning for discussion of my fucked up mental health and my myriad traumas. we’re really opening the pandora’s box here gang]

ok time for me to overshare on the internet again! super long post because i can’t shut up and you asked for it. anyway, by objective ranking:

#1: 2012 - halcyon era, my personal peak. spent the whole year writing hunger games oc fics with my deviantart fanfiction besties whom i still think about all the time and always hope are having the best possible day. if you were here for this era understand i still hold you so closely and dearly in my heart <3.

#2: 2013 - god i was such a good example of a human being back then. was the year my writing like actually took off and i had a healthy balance between creative stuff and a social life (said social life consisting of spending lunchtimes at school breaking into classrooms and discussing fandom shit with five other people. reading homestuck updates in the music room on one person’s really shaky mobile data...legendary). highlight of the year and maybe my life was in the april of 2013 when i got out of failing to submit a hard deadline essay by telling my english teacher i wrote a whole novel over the two week break and then producing said novel. god i wish i had that level of like. fucking confidence back me back then knew what i wanted and how to get it.

#3: 2010 - the last year of childhood. i was 12 and played pokemon all the time with my friends and went places and had a moderately successful youtube channel and it didn’t matter that i was bullied so badly at school because i was basically high off life. summer of 2010 was so good specifically. i’d used to get the bus with a friend and go see movies and break into historical sites and get into normal childhood mayhem and maxed out my pokewalkers twice a month and i was buzzed because i had two (2) whole friendship groups to choose from and that was such a huge deal to me the terminal social outcast. it was so simple and carefree and even though everything and everyone involved in this era grew up to suck except for one specific person i kinda really miss it.

#4: 2018 - this was the first year i wasn’t depressed to the point of nonfunctioning. it was 20gayteen, i was on antidepressants, i was as close to thriving as i got at uni (going into town with people once a week, attending art and culture events, getting good grades across the board), i started to write for fun again, i got my cat whom i love dearly, i was exhibited in my uni’s city’s literature festival, GOD i actually nearly attended a pride event that year can you imagine. this year was basically my life’s second peak. miss getting the 8am train and daintily sipping on a cherry coke to keep me from passing out. wish this time could have lasted longer.

#5: 2019 - kinda absolute middle of the road year not for lack of anything happening but because the overwhelming amount of good and bad things cancelled each other out. so like there’s the fact that i was at the top of my uni game this year, was basically making the first steps into a professional writing career (covid i will never forgive you for killing all that dead </3), finally saved up enough to buy myself a gaming pc, and the summer after the homestuck epilogues, but equally 2019 was the start of the Pochapal Gender Fiasco which is by far the most horrible thing i am still currently undergoing and i burnt myself out mentally about halfway through the year (being stuck overnight in a hospital for a panic attack absolutely horrible horrible irredeemable) and then got like super death plague flu that i was sick with for three months (literally recovered less than a month before rona hit. god’s cruel karma.). so like...it kind of averaged out? the good shit was good but not as great as other years and the bad shit was awful but nowhere near as terrible as it could have been. gotta give a shoutout to 90% of my current mutual cohort for following me in 2019...omelette route gang make some noise !!

#6: 2014 - oof. this year essentially marked the start of a four year long downward mental health spiral because everything fell into awful alignment. i’d just turned 16, finished secondary school, had all my friends up and ditch me at once, was home alone for a whole summer, and was hit with Sudden Intense Body Image Issues that i couldn’t explain until uh. after very recent developments lmao. this one goes out to the me of july 2014 who did nothing but lay in bed and listen to the same two marina albums on a loop because fuck i’m attracted to men and also my facial and body hair are really starting to come in and if i think about this for too long i will literally kill myself because oh god i can’t handle getting older which is clearly and definitely the issue going on here. my brain fucking broke super hardcore and it’s a miracle that an overeating disorder was like the worst thing i walked away with.

#7: 2015 - downward spiral year two!! i was so volatile this year it was such a mess. i was totally socially isolated after a brief stint of falling in with a group of people at the start of my first year of sixth form until january where in quick succession a) it turned out every single one of these people was friends with the person who sexually assaulted me whom i obviously had a lot of complicated feelings towards and b) baby’s first crush came out as bisexual but in the “women and also trans women” kind of way which tore me up so terribly in ways i couldn’t begin to understand. no words for the experience of seeing a girl kiss a boy and crying so hard at night you threw up because you could never be her no matter how much you wanted it. actually kinda get the sense what was going on there was bigger than just some crush lmao. then after that i was so mentally ill i basically attended school less than half the time and it was the only year in my life i failed my exams. i ended up having to resit my entire set of first year a level exams because jesus christ was i in such a bad way it was a miracle i even showed up to them. all i did was either have anxiety attacks or enter bedbound depressive slumps for weeks at a time. but it’s okay because it gets worse.

#8: 2016 - downward spiral act iii: the spiralling. prefacing this by saying that i actually had two whole good months (april - may) in that i was functioning enough to do my exams and finish school with decent grades. the rest was super extra mega terrible. my school attendance for year 13 dipped below 65% and literally the only thing that kept me from being kicked out was the fact that i was naturally smart at the subjects i took and also because the school would have a lot to answer for after letting me get to that state despite having a hefty file on how damaged i was. keep in mind every single part of this was fully untreated btw - i was just floundering around and letting it all fester. i spent three solid weeks going to school but locking myself in the bathroom all day every day and having mental health episodes then going home like nothing else happened only to continue the breakdown that night. then things got kicked into fucked up overdrive when i moved out to uni and was cut off from what little support structures i did have. it was so bad all i did was cry all the time and never went anywhere to the point where three separate sources recommended me to the wellbeing and crisis counselling service that i stopped going to after two sessions because i was fucked up in ways cbt techniques could not even touch. at least i tried to make an effort for the first two months of uni which like. good for me?

#9: 2017 - what lieth at the base of the spiral. helltrench year. i was at literal rock bottom. i stopped going to class, i didn’t hand in a single piece of work. i lied to my parents and would book trains each day only to go back to my student flat and sit there and contemplate suicide. like i would just slump on the floor in a catatonic state and vividly contemplate one of four or so ways i could end my own life. i only didn’t because i wanted to wait until the summer to collect my last student loan and transfer it to my parents as an apology for my death which obviously didn’t end up happening. honestly i can’t remember much of the first half of 2017 that’s how bad it was. i remember taking a gender studies class and the teacher made it Weird that i was the Only Male Student in the room and then she sent me a scolding email after i walked out halfway through a class and never returned. apparently i got into a lot of online discourse in this year but i don’t remember anything other than being put on a blocklist by the milkfic author over ace discourse which is funny if you have the context. mostly i just baited terfs and weirdo freaks to get them to say horrible things to me as what i guess amounts to some kind of digital self harm. anyway breaking point came in late august when i got kicked out of university and then nobody could ignore it any more so there was no choice left but for me to seek out help and recover enough to function which luckily i did. i really Do Not remember 2017. you could tell me anything about that year and i’d probably believe you.

#10: 2011 - extra circle of hell for this little fucked up gem of a year. on the surface it wasn’t actually that terrible, until the Summer 2011 Domino Effect Of Bad Shit. up until like may/june it was a pretty all right year! i was 13 and had a surprisingly successful youtube channel uploading pokemon soundfont remixes to an audience of i think ~350-400 subscribers at my peak? anyway then i got hit with the early summer triple combo of childhood friends moving away, cute and quirky sexual assault at the hands of a person in my friend group, and then having some Really Great and Super Appropriate interactions with adults on deviantart. like obviously there’s the actual ptsd-inducing event which totally disrupted and killed the person i was right up until that moment and reshaped every facet of my life for better or worse (there’s an alternate timeline where that didn’t happen and i got into electronic music and/or coding instead) but really it’s the events that followed in its wake which were kind of more fucked up. so like all of a sudden i was super aware of my body and me growing my hair out and being mistaken for a girl in class suddenly became this Less Innocent thing and i ended up spending hours overnight going to transgender questioning forums and looking up hrt timeline videos and having the wikipedia article on tracheal shaving saved because it was a life raft to me whose voice was imminently gonna deepen and i was simultaneously reeling with constant trauma flashbacks and the whole thing was so so fucked up. then i was on deviantart and i don’t remember exactly how but a small group of furry guys ten to fifteen years older than me started messaging me and encouraging and requesting me to produce nonsexual fetish stuff for them and talking to me about stuff like if i’d ever thought about growing up to be gay and i didn’t think anything of it for a long while because they called me a very talented writer and it felt so good to have someone be nice to me after being so alone and isolated for months on end. anyway the only reason i got out of that before it got bad was because they invited me to one of the big furry sites and i was weirded out because i thought it was a porn site and thinking about sexual stuff was a huge trauma trigger so i just ended up blocking them all and pretending like it didn’t happen. at the time half this shit didn’t bother me but in retrospect holy fuck 2011 was such a damaging year. to think if like three events didn’t happen i wouldn’t be the fucked up mess you see before you today.

god fuck this turned out super long but i’m not apologising because this was a therapeutic exercise for me and also constitutes as one of the biggest pochapal lore dumps of all time. come get your food or whatever.

#Anonymous #long post #read all of this if you have vested interest in knowing intimate details about my life or whatever

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flower-of-the-desert · 5 years ago

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Thoughts on My Engineer ep9

last time Bohn was getting the crap beat out of him, guess it’s time to find out if he’s dead already!

but seriously though, why the hell is Duen mad at him? He should be pissed at his dumbass friends who made Bohn go through all this trouble, not to mention tied Duen to a tree hello???

also someone explain to me how he got out of that?

OMG, these RamKing scenes are just *squeals*

how precious is it that King was so worried about Ram being mad at him that he went and got him the plant he liked and went through all the trouble of growing it and then how HAPPY he was that Ram talked to him more than ever before

and the way they are teasing each other ahhh, precious they are so damn precious

one day Ram IS going to say out loud I like King/King is cute and King is going to just die on the spot

Duen taking care of Bohn is cute though, I’m a sucker for scenes like that

oh god, they’re reading fanfic now and getting into the whole top/bottom Discourse(TM)

I know a lot of people have already talked about this much better than I could so I’m not gonna really comment on it beyond saying that I would have been hella more annoyed at this plot point if it werent for the Mek scene at the end where he blows all this nonsense out of the water which was just A fucking +++

and I hope this actually goes somewhere worthwhile next episode like Bohn and Duen having a conversation about their reservations about bottoming and why they’re both so desperate to be the top

it’s such a shame seeing Duen trying to change himself to fit into this idea of what a “husband” should be according to his... ahem, friends

hey, remember the days when I actually liked Duen’s friends? those were good times

ok, so again something that I mentioned in another post but this ep made me seriously considered whether Boss is actually as oblivious to Mek’s feelings as I thought up to this point

the entire plot point with him wanting to learn guitar and then the look he gave sleeping Mek and everything... something feels off? either Boss knows about Mek’s feelings but doesnt want to say anything in fear of losing what they have (in which case his continuous over-reliance on Mek and making demands of him like you would to your partner and constantly playing into the husband/wife joke takes on a rather... upsetting context?) or he has feelings for Mek himself but thinks it’s one-sided and doesnt want to say anything for the same reason Mek keeps quiet

in that case his constant need to find someone to date and desperation to get a girlfriend can be seen as him trying to direct his feelings onto someone else so he can get over Mek and move on

guess which option I want

come on guess? did you guess option 2? cause it’s option 2

you can see Mek’s soul leaving his body when Boss said he’s gonna live with him for a week, poor bastard

King has Ram-is-not-happy senses and when they tingle he magically appears wherever Ram happens to be

they’re really trying to kill me this episode with their cuteness

King making a new pencil for Ram and blessing it like his mom would just so Ram isnt upset anymore and then Ram choosing to use it even though he got his old pencil back is just peak boyfriend behaviour I dont make the rules

playing the guitar/teaching someone to play is gay culture at this point

poor Mek’s really going through it with Boss’s dumbassery

Boss’s I love you, you’re my best friend hits like Mil’s I like you as a brother

they’re just gonna do me like this twice in a row huh?

ok but Boss crying while listening to Mek sing to him??? I NEED SOME ANSWERS ASAP

again, I know a lot of other people have said this already but the red herring about Duen and Bohn having sex while Bohn was drunk and Duen basically taking adavantage of him is probably just that - a misdirection; I’m almost completely sure nothing happened so let’s see what they do next ep

#bl drama #my engineer the series

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aion-rsa · 4 years ago

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13 Best Blumhouse Horror Movies Ranked

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Has any single person had a greater impact on horror this century than Jason Blum? The one-time Miramax executive struck out on his own in the 2000s when he founded Blumhouse Productions, a company where he remains the CEO. And in the ensuing years, Blum’s production label would define, and redefine again, the trends of horror movies and thrillers.

Operating on the philosophy that a horror film with a micro-budget will almost always turn a profit, Blum frequently allows directors broad freedom to make what they want within the genre, and in the process has kept multiplexes perpetually spooky. In 2009 Blumhouse helped reinvent the found footage horror aesthetic, and in the 2010s, the modern phenomenon of talent-focused horror gems began with Blumhouse’s gambles.

Working with filmmakers like James Wan, Scott Derrickson, Ethan Hawke, and Jordan Peele, Blumhouse Productions’ title card is now a promise of something different, if still eminently commercial and entertaining. It even paved the way for the controversial modern discourse around “elevated” horror, with Peele’s Get Out being the first chiller to win an Oscar for screenwriting since The Silence of the Lambs.

So with a new Blumhouse horror movie in theaters this Friday the 13th, we thought it a good time to count down the 13 best Blumhouse efforts that paid off with a bloody good time.

13. Hush

At the bottom of our top 13 is this taut thriller from Mike Flanagan, director The Haunting of series and Doctor Sleep fame. Flanagan and his co-writer and star (and also wife), Kate Siegel, wanted to make a horror movie with little to no dialogue. So they came up with this concept of a deaf-mute woman (Siegel) in a remote house, who is stalked by a killer with a crossbow. Hush is at its peak in the first 20 minutes as the masked man (10 Cloverfield Lane’s John Gallagher Jr.) realizes his quarry can’t actually hear him and begins to play games.

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The pair’s relationship with sound makes an interesting dynamic in this tense home invasion movie, though the cat and mouse chase does grow somewhat repetitive and generic as the film progresses. Still, a fine performance from Siegel and an indication of what Flanagan could do on a small budget make this very much worth checking out. – Rosie Fletcher

12. Happy Death Day

The Groundhog Day formula where an odious person is doomed to relive the same day countless times has proven remarkably flexible. And Happy Death Day is no exception with its horror-comedy blend of Punxsutawney hijinks and ‘80s slasher movie clichés. Starring a ridiculously game Jessica Rothe as Tree, the sorority girl who is constantly waking up with the hangover from hell, Happy Death Day follows the typical “Queen Bee” slasher archetype, and forces her to relive the same horror movie again and again. Until she can figure out who her masked killer is, and maybe how to be a better person, she’s condemned to die in increasingly preposterous ways. Worse still, she must also wake up in a dormitory afterward.

It’s derivative in a million different ways, but delightful in many more thanks to a cheeky atmosphere from director Christopher Landon and a very savvy, self-aware script by Scott Lobdell. Most of all though, it benefits from Rothe’s comedic talents on full display, as she backflips between initial verbal bitchiness and constant physical comedy. She even manages to find a little pathos, one stab wound at a time. – David Crow

11. The Visit

The Sixth Sense may remain M. Night Shyamalan’s masterpiece, but it was an oft-referenced moment from a different film that became key to Blumhouse pulling him back from the brink of irrelevance.

Having made four objectively terrible movies in a row, including the notoriously bad wind-smeller The Happening, Shyamalan seemingly decided to use what he’d learned from a very effective part of 2002’s Signs, where Joaquin Phoenix reacts to a tense home movie of an alien sighting, and took the next logical step: What if the director put together 90 minutes of unsettling home movie moments just like that?

Your mileage may vary with the handheld, mockumentary style of The Visit, but it’s hard to argue that this brisk, low-budget tale of two young siblings staying with some very, very odd grandparents they’ve never met before could play out more wildly than it does here. And Shyamalan certainly doesn’t pull many punches when it comes to putting those poor kids in peril during the film’s climax. – Kirsten Howard

10. Creep

No, not the one set on the subway, this Creep, directed by Patrick Brice, written by Brice and Mark Duplass, and also starring them both in a tense two-hander, is an altogether more unsettling affair. Brice plays Aaron, a videographer who answers an ad posted by Josef (Duplass), the latter saying he’s dying and wants a video diary made to leave to his son. But Josef’s behavior is weird – exactly how weird is too weird is the challenge faced by Aaron.

At just 77 mins long, this is a compact, unusual, often funny movie which picks at male relationships in the modern day, and how far kindness and politeness can override instinct. Duplass and Brice are incredibly natural in a film that’s extremely unusual, steeped in unease but not really like a traditional horror, with laughter and tension relief keeping you on your toes throughout. There’s a sequel which is good too, though if you can watch the first without spoilers it delivers a particular kind of dread that’s hard to replicate. – RF

9. Upgrade

A couple of decades ago, there were plenty of films around like Upgrade. You didn’t even have to move for fun sci-fi action movies, really! But the glory days of never having to wait for the next Equilibrium, Gattaca, Cypher, or even Jet Li’s The One are long behind us. It’s pretty tough to get a slick little concept movie made when you’re expected to compete with huge action tentpoles at the box office—unless you’re Leigh Whannell, one of Blumhouse’s integral puzzle pieces.

Whannell paid his dues at the production house for 15 years as both a writer and helmer before unleashing his sophomore directorial effort, Upgrade. The film, which follows ludicrously named technophobe Grey Trace after he loses his beloved wife in a violent mugging, sees a paralyzed hero get implanted with a chatty chip that allows him to regain the use of his whole body. Soon Trace become virtually superhuman—imagine an internal K.I.T.T.—but all is not as it seems.

It shouldn’t be as delightful as it is. Admittedly, the whole thing isn’t too far removed from an elevated episode of The Outer Limits. But if you miss old school sci-fi nonsense and feel nostalgic for a time when smart sci-fi projects didn’t end up as eight drawn out episodes on a major streaming service instead, Upgrade really scratches an itch.

Of course now might be a bad time to mention that an Upgrade TV series is in the works… – KH

8. Halloween

In resurrecting one of horror’s most enduring—yet stubbornly uneven—franchises, director David Gordon Green (working with screenwriters Danny McBride and Jeff Fradley) made the smartest move he could: He stripped away the ridiculously convoluted and nonsensical mythology the franchise had built up over decades. Instead he simply made a direct sequel to Carpenter’s 1978 masterpiece.

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The result was easily the best Halloween movie since the original itself, bringing the characters and the story into the present while reverting Michael Myers back to the enigmatic, unstoppable, unknowable force that was so terrifying in the first film. Jamie Lee Curtis, Judy Greer, and Andi Matichak as three generations of Strode women bring healthy feminine empowerment to the proceedings while the intense violence and uneasy psychological underpinnings give this Halloween a resonance that has been lacking for so long. – Don Kaye

7. Split

As the movie that suggested M. Night Shyamalan’s renaissance was real, Split is still a surprising box office win for the eclectic filmmaker. With a grizzly premise about a man suffering from Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly known as split personality) kidnapping teen girls to hold in a zoo, this could be the stuff of ‘70s grindhouse sleaze. While there is a touch of that to Split, more critically the movie acts as a buoyant showcase for James McAvoy at his most unbound.

Playing a character with 24 different personalities, a shaved and beefy McAvoy is visibly giddy bouncing between multiple alters that include a deceptively sweet little boy, an OCD fashion designer, and a bestial final form. The commitment he shows to each also becomes its own special effect, causing you to swear his physical shape is changing with his expressions.

Similarly, scenes with theater legend Betty Buckley as his psychiatrist also rivet with the energy of a stage play, and suggest a sincere sympathy for mental illness. A rarity in horror. Nevertheless, the movie still comes down to his alters’ obsessions with their kidnapped prize (Anya Taylor-Joy), a young woman who hides demons of her own. When these true selves finally cross paths in a genuinely tense finale, Split is maniacally thrilling. – DC

6. Sinister

An unsettling entry in the horror subgenre of writers who destroy their families, Sinister marked director/co-writer Scott Derrickson’s (The Exorcism of Emily Rose) return to horror after he detoured with an ill-fated remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still. Thus Derrickson and co-writer C. Robert Cargill concocted a unique, if somewhat scattershot, mythology about a pagan deity that murders entire families in the ghastliest ways imaginable.

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True crime writer Ethan Hawke discovers the extent of those murders in a box of 8mm films left in the attic of his new home (where the last killings took place), and it’s the unspooling of those films—along with long sequences of Hawke moving through the shadows and silence of the house—that provide Sinister with its sickening core and palpable dread. Derrickson sustains the film’s foreboding mood for the entire running time, making the movie an authentically frightening experience. – DK

5. Oculus

The film that brought much of the world’s attention to Mike Flanagan, Oculus turned out to be a preview for the horror filmmaker’s interests. It also remains a truly unnerving ghost story. Not since the days of Dead of Night has a film so successfully made you scared of looking in a mirror.

Officially titled the Lasser Glass, the mirror in question is the apparent supernatural cause of hundreds of deaths, including the parents of Kaylie Russell (Karen Gillan) and her brother Tim (Brenton Thwaites). When they were children, their mother starved and mutilated herself before their father killed her. But now as an adult, Kaylie is convinced she can prove the antique glass is the true culprit, and she’ll document its evil power before destroying it. But the funny thing about evil mirrors is they have ways of protecting themselves, and wreaking havoc on a sense of time, place, and certainly self-image.

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With the movie’s near masterful blending of events occurring 11 years ago and in the present, Flanagan revealed a knack for dreamlike structure, and stories about the past damning the future. These are ideas he’s gone on to explore in richer detail with The Haunting of Hill House and Doctor Sleep, but Flanagan’s ability to juxtapose childhood trauma with a nightmarish present was never more potent, or tragic, than in Oculus’ refracted gaze. – DC

4. Paranormal Activity

It may take some mental gymnastics, but if you can take a step back and ignore all the sequels that followed in the wake of this surprise 2009 blockbuster, then you’d remember Paranormal Activity is a stone cold classic. It is also the movie that put Blumhouse on the map. Already mostly finished when Jason Blum saw a DVD screener of Oren Peli’s Paranormal Activity, this $15,000-budgeted terror is arguably the most evocative use of found footage in all of horror.

While Peli is obviously influenced by 1999’s The Blair Witch Project, that earlier movie is as famous for its shaky disorientation as it is its scares. By contrast what occurs in Paranormal Activity is excruciatingly clear. Seriously, the camera barely moves! Instead we’re asked to sit back and watch in near slow motion as an unwise couple (Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat) meddle with forces that were better off left undisturbed.

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It begins when Micah brings a home video camera into their house to track apparent ghosts in the dark; it ends in a demonic rush of violence. Everything in between is tracked by a disinterested lens, which usually sits statically in a corner or on a tripod, capturing the tedium of everyday life in its everyday natural lighting. Only occasionally does the horned shadow on the wall manifest. But then Paranormal Activity is chilling in its isolation. – DC

3. Insidious

As the fourth feature film directed by Australian filmmaker James Wan, Insidious follows a couple named Josh and Renai Lambert (Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne), whose son inexplicably falls into a coma and becomes a vessel for malevolent entities from a dimension called the Further. The family enlists a psychic named Elise Rainier (Lin Shaye) in a battle involving astral projection and demonic possession.

Following an era of horror films that were more torture porn or police procedural (including Wan’s own Saw), Insidious was a return to the kind of horror filmmaking that was dependent on atmosphere, suspense, and what you don’t see lurking in the shadows. And Wan seemed to imbue that creepiness around the edges of every shot. Using actual adult characters and developing them (as opposed to the hipster teens that infested nearly every horror movie for at least 10 years previously) also set the film apart as a serious attempt at a genre that had been too often exploited in a tossed-off fashion.

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The world-building of Insidious left the door open for sequels, of course, and while the three produced so far have had their moments, none has matched the sheer invention and terrifying fun of the original. – DK

2. The Invisible Man

Leigh Whannell’s reimagining of the classic Universal Monster, the Invisible Man, was as much of a surprise when it hit screens earlier this year as the titular villain himself. As a smart social commentary on domestic abuse and gaslighting, while also being enormously effective as a straight up horror, this was a highly fresh take on an old standard.

At the core was the terrific performance of Elisabeth Moss as Cecilia, a woman stuck with her controlling boyfriend Adrian (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) in their high-tech, high security fortress of a home. When Cece finally manages to escape and Adrian appears to take his own life, she hopes her ordeal can finally be over. But in fact it’s just beginning.

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Playing on the true horror of not being believed, Whannell’s Invisible Man is as harrowing at times as it is thrilling. Yes, there are some extraordinarily shocking set pieces – the restaurant scene of course stands out – but it’s the increasing desperation of Cece, whose world is falling apart at the manipulative hands of a man who won’t let her go, which stays with you.

The Invisible Man is a thrilling horror, for sure, with a feel good ending (if you want to read it that way…), but it’s something altogether more exciting than that too: a fresh, relevant take on a classic, expertly directed and boasting star power delivered on a moderate budget, which flexes exactly what horror can do. – RF

1. Get Out

More impressive than any awards it won, Jordan Peele’s Get Out encapsulates the essential draw of horror: through entertaining “scares,” it unmasks truths folks might find too horrifying or uncomfortable to acknowledge. In the case of Get Out, it is the despair of Blackness and Black bodies still being commodified by a predatory American culture.

Wearing influences like Rosemary’s Baby and Stepford Wives on his sleeve, Peele pulls from classic horror conventions for his directorial debut, but gives them a startling 21st century sheen. His movie’s insidious conspiracy is neither an obvious coven of witches or the openly racist heavies of a period piece. Rather Peele sets his story about a Black man (Daniel Kaluuya) coming to meet his white girlfriend’s parents in a liberal conclave of wealthy suburbia. Written during the final days of the Obama years, Peele casts these parents (Bradley Whitford and Catherine Keener) as genial and welcoming, shielding cries of racism behind fashionable political correctness.

Yet once Peele moves past that trendy veneer, he finds a potent allegory in which the ghosts of slavery are still alive and well, even in Upstate New York. Peele also packs anxieties about interracial relationships, culture clash, and childhood trauma into a film that is nevertheless gregariously funny. Ultimately though, its final effect is triggering in the best way. Get Out offers an opportunity to confront real dread, one uneasy laugh, and then sudden jump scare, at a time. – DC

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otdderamin · 6 years ago

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Analysis: Caduceus and Caleb build their relationship – CR C2 Ep47 2:40:07

REVISED: The original article was written before Talks Machina 2019-01-15 where Taliesin clarified that Caduceus' feeling for Caleb are platonic. This article was written on that assumption anyway. It's been lightly revised to include that certainty and include the Talks Machina Transcript.

The two flattering exchanges between Caduceus and Caleb caught my ear as much as anyone. There's clearly some stronger, closer relationship forming there. Maybe it will come to something else one day, but on review, I was not reading it as romantic overtures so much as two socially awkward people trying to communicate kindness, which Taliesin confirmed on Talks Machina 2019-01-15 (0:39:18). Taliesin: "I will say he doesn't feel that way [about Caleb], though, but yeah. Yeah, he don't- he doesn't have a thing going on in that direction, but he's definitely like, 'Yeah, you're cool.'" I really like the idea of an ace/aro Caduceus who basically doesn't understand the concept of flirting. He just thinks you should be kind and supportive to all living things and ease their insecurities, but other people reserve that for ulterior motives.

Caduceus' comment that Caleb smells nice (3:23:42) came directly after Jester was projecting all her insecurities & making Cad feel insecure himself before she tried to correct (3:22:56). Caduceus could see that the joke about Caleb being stinky was really bothering & hurting Caleb in the same way. So, Caduceus was partly trying to reassure Caleb that wasn't the case and passive-aggressively put an end to the joke with the others. And doing that with his disarmingly frank honesty and supportive personality. Taliesin said on Talks, "I think that it's more the teasing that he smells bad." (0:38:03)

Caduceus is flattering to plants and animals he wants to reassure and persuade to be kind to them in exactly the same tone. And Caleb was irritated enough to be withholding magic from them until they apologized (3:23:46), so there's a similar motive here.

Also, this is Taliesin. He tried to flatter sentient grass with Percy and it came off as flirting (CRC1 Ep060 2:21:56). He's expressed before (on Gather Your Party, I think) that he sees flirting as a way of making people feel good about themselves without necessarily expecting it to be reciprocated.

Caleb offering Caduceus the book I've a harder time reading, as did Caduceus. He's clearly stumbling his way through trying to build a positive relationship of some kind. Caleb's been socially isolating himself for such a long time that any attempt to peak out of his shell is a bit startling. Caleb saw Caduceus being very kind to him when his best friend was being an asshole, and he had something he could offer in return. He was trying to practice returning kindness that wasn't so transactional, which he is very, very rusty at and unsure about.

Caleb was also unsure what value it would have to Caduceus. Caduceus is as backwoods as you can get, and clearly not that bright. Caleb was probably unsure if books were something that would ever interest him or be of any use to him. Remember that Molly was barely literate, so I can see why he wouldn't want to make assumptions. Also, this is Caleb making himself even more vulnerable by trying to share his dearest passion with someone else he feared would reject it.

There's clearly some form of attraction there from both of them, but let's look at a multi-layered attraction model view of it. It could be romantic or sexual from Caleb, but those seem to be tied up in a lot of old baggage. Taliesin explicitly said Caduceus isn't sexually or romantically attracted to Caleb (0:39:18), and Caduceus has frankly never expressed having either attraction at all.

We're clearly seeing emotional attraction, the desire to get to know someone better as a result of their personality. Both Caleb & Caduceus have been isolated and struggle expressing this in general. Caleb by withdrawing and not getting close, Caduceus by being overly friendly.

Caleb seems to have been testing intellectual attraction by offering the book. Caduceus is wise in ways Caleb is not; Caleb is smart in ways Caduceus is not. They complement each other. Intellectual attraction is the desire to explore how someone thinks and know them that way.

Caduceus obviously shows high sensual attraction to everyone. The desire to tactilely interact with people in a non-sexual way like hugging and cuddling (frankly, this is also just Taliesin). Caleb shies away from a lot of physical contact with people.

The UNC-Chapel Hill LGBT Center has a great article on multilayered attraction called "Asexuality, Attraction, and Romantic Orientation." It's linked on the Critical Role Campaign 2 Index, but Tumblr punishes external links. It's something developed in ace/aro discourse that applies to everyone and everyone should be aware of to better understand themselves and others. People can be attracted to certain genders more than others in any of these ways, and they might not line up. Gay ace and aro people exist and are just as valid, even if there's strict limits on the sort of relationship or physicality they want.

In examining character interrelationships, I think it's important to examine the context they've already given for their preferences. I've written an analysis of Caduceus already. He not only expressed no interest (or experience) in sex, he's tried to firmly avoid the subject every time it comes up and seems completely mystified that anyone thinks he should engage that way. Even in this conversation with Jester, he's lost for how to respond when she asks, "So, like, if you think something dirty, [Melora] knows?" (3:22:56)

Given that he's been clear, be it celibacy or asexuality, it makes me extremely uncomfortable when other people decide he should want sex (even as a joke) because that's a microaggression against ace and celibate people that happens CONSTANTLY. It's rape culture and gross.

Caduceus has also not particularly expressed any romantic attraction to anyone past or present, and he doesn't feel that way for Caleb. He was perfectly content on his own. He seems to just want friends. He hasn't expressed being against the idea, so this is uncertain.

Caleb, I don't have a clear read on, but he shows many signs of feeling too damaged for relationships at the moment. He has his hands full with friendships he's still scared of. It's possible he doesn't know what he's feeling at this point.

So, this is not to step on anyone's ship, but there are other equally interesting motivations & desires that could be at play here, which frankly line up with more evidence, & which have MUCH less representation. It'd be nice to not see those possibilities drowned out, especially given that we have a canonical answer.

The character growth here is significant, whatever the subtext. Caduceus reached out to comfort Caleb when everyone else was giving him a hard time. Caleb reached out as the very first person to offer Caduceus help on the quest he left home for. No one else has cared.

Some stronger bond was formed here between them. Some greater trust. Caduceus is getting through like Beau has, and it's built on a base of greater comfort, healing, and respect for goals. However it plays out will be fascinating.

3:38:57 Caleb: "I'm glad you are traveling with us." Caduceus: "Me too, I'm... I've never felt so helpful." It's brief, but Caleb actually warmly smiles.

Transcripts

Scenes run:

1. CR C2 Ep47 Jester asks what Melora knows, Caleb smells nice: 3:22:50 to 3:24:16

2. CR C2 Ep47 Caleb gives Caduceus to book: 3:38:12 to 3:39:09

3. TM 2019-01-15 How Caleb smells to Caduceus and attraction: 0:38:09 to 0:39:57

1. CR C2 Ep47 Jester asks what Melora knows, Caleb smells nice

3:22:50 Jester to Caduceus: "Do you think the Wildmother can hear your thoughts?"

Caduceus: "Well, I know the Wildmother can- knows everything."

3:22:56 Jester: "So, like, if you think something dirty, she knows?"

GIF: Caduceus looks confused.

Jester: "What if, like, you're thinking like, 'Oh mom, I've really got to poop?'"

Caduceus: "That's- I don't- I mean… Sure?"

Jester: "What if you're thinking, 'Oh man, you know, I think I smell a little bit today,"

Caduceus: "I've never really thought that."

Jester: "but what-I've got a booger in my nose…"

Caduceus, more anxiously: "Now I'm thinking about that. Oh man, I've got a booger in my nose." He curls in to one side rubbing the side of his nose."

Jester: "What if you think like, 'Ah, does my breath smell bad?' Do you think she thinks-"

Caduceus, alarmed: "No, does it?"

Jester: "Do you think- No, your breath smells fine, but I'm just won-"

Caduceus: "You're sure?"

Jester: "No, you smell pretty good."

Caduceus: "Oh, that's nice." He rubs the bridge of his nose again. "Ah, think about this."

3:23:31 Nott: "Speaking of stinky, Caleb, what'd we get? What's our stuff?"

3:23:37 Caleb, incredulous and perplexed: "I have been in the ocean for days, and days, and days, and days."

Travis: "He's the most sterile he's ever been."

3:23:42 Caduceus: "I think he smells great."

Jester, excitedly: "What did we get; what did we get; what did we get!"

3:23:46 Caleb: "Well, first I want you to admit that I have been washed from top to bottom for a month."

3:23:51 Caduceus, firmly: "I think you smell fantastic."

Jester: "Yeah, if anything you smell briny now."

Caleb, pointedly to Caduceus: "Well you're- You are a nice fellow."

3:23:57 Caduceus: "Thank you. But no, really, I do actually think you smell very nice."

3:24:03 Caleb, satisfied: "You see?"

Jester: "Yeah. I didn't say you were stinky. Nott said you were stinky, Caleb. I think you smell like salt and fresh air."

Nott: "Like a douche."

Caleb: "Revved up."

3:24:16

2. CR C2 Ep47 Caleb gives Caduceus to book

3:38:12 Taliesin: "I'm going to gather some of my stuff and go to the crow's nest."

Matt: "Okay."

Taliesin: "Big everybody good-"

Caleb: "Oh, uh…"

Caduceus: "Yeah?"

Caleb: "You're going up?"

Caduceus: "Yeah."

3:38:21 Caleb: "Do you like a good book?"

3:38:23 Caduceus: "I- I'm not going to be reading up there, but…"

3:38:25 Caleb: "I don't mean for tonight, in general."

3:38:27 Caduceus: "I- I'll admit I'm not the best reader, but… I've read a couple books."

3:38:33 Caleb: "But you have? Um… One of the books that we found in that… ball-o-fun is about the corruption of plants."

3:38:45 Caduceus: "I would be curious."

3:38:47 Caleb: "I thought you might be."

3:38:49 Caduceus: "I'll… If you could leave it in my- my quarters, that would be most agreeable."

3:38:54 Caleb: "Surely."

3:38:56 Caduceus: "Thank you."

3:38:57 Caleb: "Mmhm. I'm glad you are traveling with us."

3:39:00 Caduceus: "Me too. I'm uh… I've uh… never felt so helpful." He gives a half bow.

3:39:09

3. TM 2019-01-15 How Caleb smells to Caduceus and attraction

0:38:09 Brian: "[@asahi_azumane] Caduceus has mentioned in a couple of episodes that he likes how Caleb smells, is this just to refute the teasing from the others or does he find something comforting in Caleb's smell like Nila […] with her smell bag?"

0:38:36 Taliesin: "I'll actually, I've often just assumed that Caleb smells a little bit like peat moss."

Brian: "Oh, really?"

Taliesin: "Or just peaty and dirty…"

Travis: "Oh! Not manure, or fertilizer but…"

Taliesin: "Not manure…"

Brian: "No no, Pete Moss, the tennis player."

Taliesin: "but like peat moss, earthy. Just from, from… Yeah, Pete Moss."

Travis: "Yean he has the soil in his hands, and…"

0:38:03 Taliesin: "Yeah, well, 'cause he's got a pocket full of weird things that he uses and they're all kind of like interest- I don't- I think that it's more the teasing that he smells bad, I don't think he actually does."

Travis: "It's not a sandalwood fragrance?"

0:39:03 Taliesin: "I wish. That would be amazing! But, like, I actually think it's legitimately from a, 'No, I think he smells pretty good. I dunno.'"

Travis: "Yeah, earthy fellow. Alright."

Dani: "I appreciate Liam hitting his breaking point with that last episode, and be like, 'You HAVE to admit that I smell fine now!'"

0:39:18 Taliesin: "Yeah, no and, like, I think Clay is always… And it's not like a sexy thing, like, 'Woo, hey!' But like, you know, 'No, you smell great.'"

Travis: "You can compliment I fellow on his…"

0:39:27 Taliesin, firmly: "I will say he doesn't feel that way, though, but yeah. Yeah, he don't- he doesn't have a thing going on in that direction, but he's definitely like, 'Yeah, you're cool.'"

Travis: "Try telling Tumblr that."

Taliesin: "Tumblr is welcome to their own opinion, and I'm not going to disagree with them."

Travis: "Boy, I tell you."

Taliesin: "I am not going to stop anybody from having a good time with their…"

Dani: "Everyone can ship whatever they want to ship."

Taliesin: "Yep. Nope."

Brian: "Except female presenting nipples."

Dani: "Yep. No, Tumblr has a really bad problem…"

Travis: "Or lithium batteries. Most couriers have a problem with."

Brian: "They cracked down on that."

0:39:57

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#critical role meta #critical role analysis #Caduceus Clay #Caleb Widogast #Talks Machina #critical role #Talks Machina Transcript #Critical Role Transcript #analysis

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lastsonlost · 6 years ago

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Masculinity Report, USA 2018

While we hear much discourse about the negative aspects of military service on men’s mental wellbeing – with suicide and PTSD never far from the headlines, especially after tragedies such as the recent Thousand Oaks mass shooting in California – the Harry’s Masculinity Report points to clear evidence that military service lifts men’s Positive Mindset Index. This fits perfectly with our broader findings that being part of something bigger that matters beyond the individual – “not self but country,” or “band of brothers” sentiment – is entirely in keeping with increased male positivity. It appears the residual pride, values, appearance, structure, self-worth, and patriotism reside long after active service ends. There seems to be evidence that the US forces can “build better men” – and perhaps this could be the basis of an armed forces recruitment/advertising campaign? Conversely, we know that former servicemen can often experience mental health difficulties associated with their lived experiences. This can later be exacerbated to a point where their sense of masculinity means they “bottle up” their feelings or self-medicate with alcohol or substance abuse. These are the men we need to reach out to, and say “it’s strong to talk, to take mastery and control over your destiny”. Here, other servicemen are the mental health role models they are most likely to listen to: strong men like them. All of that said, the findings regarding PMI and military service are intriguing and deserve further research in order to fully understand this phenomenon. Ethnicity & sexuality 2. Inner health is key A bespoke US study for Harry’s, in partnership with Dr. John Barry of University College London, exploring positive masculinity in 21st Century America.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

In September 2018, research led by Dr. John Barry, Honorary Lecturer at University College London and co-founder of the Male Psychology Section of the British Psychological Society, and ethically approved by University College London, was conducted.

The aim of this academic survey was to identify the values and priorities of American men and the factors which contribute to their emotional, physical and mental health and wellbeing. In a comprehensive, intimate survey of 5,000 male respondents aged 18-95 spread all across the United States, subjects were asked first to gauge their Positive Mindset Index (PMI) which was determined by asking men about their happiness, confidence, sense of being in control, emotional stability, motivation and optimism.

Respondents were then asked about how satisfied they were with key areas of their lives, such as careers, work/life balance, relationships, money, physicality and mental health. Finally, to ascertain what kind of men they aspired to be, we asked them which core values they truly held dear.

By cross-analyzing all of this rich data, we were able to construct a comprehensive picture of who the most positive American men were: what they did, how and where they lived their lives. On the whole, we discovered that modern American men are doing pretty well – and absolutely stand for something commendably selfless, as opposed to selfish.

Forget unattainable celebrity lifestyles or chasing physical perfection: regular, stand-up guys and team players are the happiest men of all. The values American men most aspired to are those of everyday heroes: fathers, father figures, respectful co-workers, mentors. These are hardworking, loving, friendly men with a social conscience, which is great news for the men, women and children of America.

The report mirrored The Harry’s Masculinity Report 2017 conducted in the UK on 2000 British men, but the American report went into even greater depth, asking questions on military service, gender identity, sexual orientation, political affiliation, employment status, educational level, and population density. As such, The Harry’s Masculinity Report 2018 stands as the most comprehensive, ethically-approved academic study of American masculinity on record.

Source

PART I: KEY FINDINGS

The modern American man is a moral man. When asked what characteristics he aspires to, he chooses values that put the needs of others over his own. At the top were – honesty, reliability, dependability, being respectful of others and loyalty. At the bottom was athleticism (having a perfect body), proving the route to genuine contentment is who you are on the inside – not how you look on the outside.

America’s most content men have good job satisfaction, value their health, have a good income, are over age 50 and are married.

American men are largely happy, with an above average Positive Mindset Index (PMI), and typically have a more positive outlook on life than men in the UK.

The strongest predictor of a positive mindset in men – by far – is satisfying employment. Hard work is the cornerstone of a contented man that all else is built upon.

Significantly, American men now place more importance on their mental health than their physical health, while appreciating the two are fundamentally intertwined. Older men, especially, are tuned into the needs of their minds, as well as their bodies and souls.

The third driver of positivity is income, and while it may be true you can’t buy happiness, the contentment of providing for others, especially one’s family, is a central pillar of American men’s sense of positive purpose.

Next is health, and across the board is driven by, in the following order, good grooming, eating well, living longer and exercise.

Men’s mental health is also related to connecting with others through sports, and connecting with friends by listening and giving advice. PART I: KEY FINDINGS

In terms of relationship status, forget the myth of the carefree bachelor. Across the board, married men are the happiest, with this especially being true in the South.

Things can only get better! As men mature, their positivity rises and they become more likely to have a healthy and positive outlook on life. The over-50s were the most content group.

In terms of sexual orientation, heterosexual and homosexual men (who made up 11% of the sample) scored very similar levels of PMI (3.7 v 3.6). Can we take this as a positive sign that gay men are feeling more self-contentment and pride than in the past generations? However, a note of concern. Some 14 respondents indentified as ‘non-binary’ and 10 as ‘female to male transgender.’ The mean PMI score of non-binary participants (3.02) and especially female-to-male transgender participants (2.63) spell out significantly lower levels of wellbeing compared to the other participants. These findings have important clinical implications for non-binary and transgender men. These are populations, who, although smaller in number, are more likely to need mental health support.

PART II: WHAT GIVES AMERICAN MEN THE GREATEST SENSE OF WELLBEING?

1. Men at work: the dignity of labor

Men at work are men at peace: everything else flows down from satisfying employment. Men who have high job satisfaction are more likely to feel optimistic, happy, motivated, emotionally stable, in control and confident.

Job Satisfaction is by far the strongest predictor of positivity, being around three times higher than the next strongest predictor in every region and across the US overall. And this isn’t primarily about money, rather making an impact on a company’s success was the main predictor of job satisfaction.

96.4% of those with the top job satisfaction rating had normal or better levels of mental positivity compared to only 49% who gave the lowest rating for their job satisfaction. It, therefore, stands to reason that getting men into gainful employment is the best route to improving their positive mindset. This is not “greed is good”. It is difficult to conceive of these findings as pathological expressions of greed, workaholism, shallow ambition.

2. Inner health is key

Health – both physical and mental – was the second highest predictor of positivity across the US (interestingly, in the UK, it was being in a stable relationship: the more committed the man, the happier he typically is).

Perhaps surprisingly, grooming – taking care of our appearance - was the strongest driver of positivity. A breakthrough moment that should afford great hope is the emphasis American men place on their mental health. Across every age group, American men placed greater importance on their mental health than even their physical health. Across all men, 52% said their mental health was “very important” compared to 43% who said the same of their physical health.

In the UK, the most open about mental health was the 18-29 group, but in the US it is the over 60s (55.6% deemed mental health very important). This shows great awareness around age-related mental health issues, such as dementia, and shows senior citizens have a commendable openness to mental health that sets a shining example for younger men.

3. Men mature like fine wines

Men get happier as they get older, with men in their 50s at “peak positivity”. We found a clear correlation between age and well-being. This should encourage younger men to relax and the rest of us not to dread old age. According to American men, the future does look rosy! Perhaps we can (and should aim to) help younger men plan for future happiness by learning from happier older men. This should give great comfort to younger men: the future isn’t something to be feared but relished

4. Men in stable relationships

Being married was the fifth highest determinant of positivity in American men, showing men who are married have greater well-being than others. Interestingly, in the UK it was the second most important factor in British men’s happiness. Married men are the most positive, closely followed by those who are going steady or cohabiting. Single men are the least happy, worse than divorcées or even widows.

5. Friendship: the importance of buddies

Men who value friendship, family and sports and leisure have greater wellbeing. Sports – especially team sports – provide key benefits including, in order, socializing, feeling healthy and competition. Among the factors which were relatively unimportant to men were: winning; developing an attractive physique or ‘being skillful.’ As the old cliché would have it, it really isn’t the winning, it’s the taking part that counts.

This isn’t just about feeling healthy and fit, but also competing, being a team player and being sociable. When asked for details, the men who talked of health and fitness in this context specified not only the benefits to their own physical health but also to their mental health, alongside the importance of staying fit and healthy for the sake of their children and families.

The social side of sports – playing in/for a team, the banter and perhaps even a cold beverage afterward – is three times more important to men than having a good body. Team players, not vain loners, are happiest.

6. Other noteworthy findings

Military Service

It’s official: the Harry’s Masculinity Report shows that being a member of the US’s armed forces – both past or present – is related to a higher Positive Mindset Index. Men currently on active duty have the highest PMI, and even those on active duty in past but not now have higher PMI than those with no service history. Our sample included men with various amounts of experience of military service. Some 22% of our respondents had previously served active duty (1,045 men); 2% (94 men) were currently on duty and 3.6% had undergone basic training. Some 3,863 had never served in the US or other Armed Forces. Overall, military service was the seventh highest predictor of PMI, proving military service is a significant determinant of positivity. It’s especially valued in the Midwest, where it ranks sixth as a predictor of PMI.

Political Leanings:

Republicans are more positive Belonging to any political tribe gives a PMI boost. Men who voted Republican were generally more positive than Democrats. Voting Republican was the 11th highest determinant of positivity – higher than education level. While you’d expect men supporting a reigning President to be more positive, might this indicate that Democrat men are feeling the blues of the Trump administration? Overall, Republican voters have highest PMI, followed by Democrats, then Independents. All have better PMI than those who say no party represents them. Presumably, the latter feel a bit disenfranchised, which cannot be good for PMI.

Ethnicity & sexuality

Differing ethnicities or sexualities appeared to have no discernible impact on wellbeing in American men. There was no statistical evidence to point to white, heterosexual men being significantly more positive than any other demographic, although being white correlated to increased wealth.

PART III: REGIONAL VARIANCES

While positivity was typically standard across the US, there were some interesting variances that should give food for thought. Our data was split into “all US” and then four regions, namely Northeast; Midwest; West and South, and multi-variant analysis offered up some fascinating differences.

Being married was a significant predictor of PMI in the South, but not elsewhere

Friendship was a strong predictor in the West but not elsewhere

Being aged over 50 was a significant predictor in the West and especially the Midwest

Sports & leisure was a significant predictor in the South, borderline in the Northeast, but not elsewhere

Good pay varied in importance widely across the regions, from the top in the Northeast to fourth in the Midwest

Chat with co-workers was a significant predictor in three of the four regions, and a nonsignificant predictor in the West

In health, grooming was the highest predictor of PMI in the Northeast and West. “Living longer” mattered most in the Midwest, as did “exercise” in the South

Perhaps unsurprisingly, educational level was the highest determinant of salary in every US region, followed by being married, then being in full-time employment

In the Northeast, Midwest and South, “being white” was the fifth highest predictor of income, but did not feature in the South or West

PART IV: CONCLUSIONS & RECOMMENDATIONS

How can policy-makers, public services, charities and frontline professionals apply the findings of this research?

Across our research findings, the strongest single finding – by a factor of three – is that the happiest men are those who are happiest at work. This is not primarily about wealth, but a sense of making a difference, being part of something bigger and more meaningful.

The characteristics which mean the most to American men in 2018 are moral values, such as honesty and dependability, rather than physical traits such as a perfect body, showing that true contentment comes from within.

The lifestyle which is most effective at keeping American men happy, healthy and mentally robust is a combination of meaningful work that allows men to protect and provide for others, good health through a combination of good grooming (the exterior) and healthy diet and team sports (the interior), plus leisure and solid friendships that lay the bedrock of of a healthy social life. A winning Team America is made up of men who are team players.

PART V: MALE WELLBEING: SEVEN MAGNIFICENT PATHS TO INCREASED POSITIVITY

1. Get men into fulfilling work:

Across our research, by far the strongest finding was the importance of rewarding, secure employment to men’s health and wellbeing. Job satisfaction and the dignity of labor fulfills men’s desire to provide and protect. At the same time as noting that job satisfaction improves happiness, we should note the reverse: joblessness erodes the effectiveness of every significant protective factor and makes it harder for men to sustain a healthy, happy lifestyle.

Offering hope to these men is the most compelling clarion call of all, be it in the form of policy makers encouraging or incentivizing employers into socially deprived areas, or on an individual/community level by utilizing social networks, friends and the women in struggling men’s lives, who can lean in and be of assistance. Give a man a job he finds satisfying and you give him not only hope, but sometimes even a reason to live.

2. Health: Looking good and feeling good PART V:

Healthy men are happy men, but this is not about being a slave to a punishing or narcissistic physical routine, rather a more holistic approach to self-improvement. That journey begins in the morning – and the route to positivity could be literally looking at men in the mirror. In the category of health, good grooming was the highest predictor of PMI, proving good grooming isn’t about shallow vanity, rather it actually helps make men feel good about themselves. It’s beyond skin-deep. Clinically, it is important to remember that a lack of grooming can sometimes be an indicator of low mood.

The findings of this survey should highlight to therapists that a change in the grooming of their client might be a proxy measure of their mental positivity. Likewise, encouraging men to take care of their appearance might give them a psychological boost. Furthermore, healthy food and exercise, especially in a team/social environment, all add to this. Combine these factors and you have a template for elevated mood: the proof is in Harry’s data.

3. Support relationships and families

For every age group, being in a relationship (married, cohabiting, or going steady) made men happier compared to being single. This was true of parents and non-parents, although men with children are happiest of all. Men who lose contact with their children after a relationship breakdown are particularly vulnerable to poor mental health and even suicide. Supporting mediation services and the work of charities is essential for men’s wellbeing.

4. Embrace aging

With so much media emphasis placed on the power of youth, it was extremely gratifying to discover that men in their 50s are the happiest of all. Harry’s findings smash the cliche of the “mid-life crisis”. Instead, a man’s mid-life looks to be his happiest life. A public awareness campaign around this would be most welcomed.

5. Support Sports

Americans who value sports & leisure have a more positive mindset. Men’s mental health and wellbeing soar when physical health improves. In particular, men seem to benefit most from more sociable team sports. Providing facilities for these activities, and promoting their benefits to men of all ages would have extensive and far-reaching benefits, well beyond physical health and fitness. This is particularly true for individual men who are struggling with their mental health. We would encourage policymakers to encourage men to stay fit and well for the sake of their families and setting a good example to their children than they are about their own fitness or physique.

6. Promote the positivity of military service

There seems to be evidence that the US forces can “build better men” – and perhaps this could be the basis of an armed forces recruitment/advertising campaign? Conversely, we know that former servicemen can often experience mental health difficulties associated with their lived experiences. This can later be exacerbated to a point where their sense of masculinity means they “bottle up” their feelings or self-medicate with alcohol or substance abuse. These are the men we need to reach out to, and say “it’s strong to talk, to take mastery and control over your destiny”. Here, other servicemen are the mental health role models they are most likely to listen to: strong men like them. All of that said, the findings regarding PMI and military service are intriguing and deserve further research in order to fully understand this phenomenon.

7. Engage with men as they are, and as they want to be

When service providers seek to engage men, whether in health, education, community, voluntary activities or any other front of social policy, there is often a temptation to address either the problems men have, at best, or the problems men cause, at worst. Our findings strongly suggest that the values which men aspire to most are traditional, moral frameworks. Men want to think of themselves as honest, reliable, dependable and fair-minded and it is perhaps those traits which agencies should emphasize when they wish to earn the trust and co-operation of male service users.

Much previous research into masculinity has negatively focused on the problems men cause, often through the nefarious concept of “toxic masculinity”. This has never been more so than in this post-#MeToo landscape and after every mass shooting or domestic terrorist incident. Lately, the dialogue has expanded to include the problems men have: such as the male suicide epidemic, depression, anxiety and addiction, while offering scant few solutions.

But Harry’s wanted to progress this dialogue forward, by flipping the telescope and focusing on what gives men a positive outlook. We wanted to find out which American men were the most positive and content, then look at the core values and behavioral attributes that nurture these men’s mental wellbeing.

Next, we want to utilize these findings to formulate a roadmap to men’s contentment that could help others and help shape government policy around issues that affect men. What we found was that the overriding majority of American men aren’t “in crisis”. Rather, they aspire to be decent; they want to work, provide and nurture; they want to be loving, sharing partners and caring friends, and take care of their health and appearance. Crucially, American men are ready to open up about their mental health which we should see as a real opportunity to help tackle male suicide in particular.

Maybe it’s that when we see men playing/watching sports, or staying late at work, or not talking about their feelings like women do, that we see only one side of them and miss the rest. It could also be that men are too modest to show off how they really feel, and our survey has provided a rare insight into that aspect of the male psyche.

CREDITS AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Dr. John Barry, Director of Research, Male Psychology Network; principal investigator Ethical approval:

University College London (UCL) Research Ethics Committee Funding:

Harry’s Ltd Executive summary written by Martin Daubney, co-author of the Harry’s Masculinity Report UK Access the full US report on the Male Psychology Network here:

https://malepsychology.org.uk/research-library/ Find the 2017 UK report on the Male Psychology Network here:

https://www.malepsychology.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/The-Harrys-Masculinity-Report.pdf

Source

#Masculinity #mens health #mens mental health #male positive

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thevividgreenmoss · 6 years ago

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By any reasonable measure, the neoliberal dream lies in tatters. In 2008 poorly regulated financial markets yielded a world-historic financial collapse. One generation, weaned on reveries of home ownership as the coveted badge of economic independence and old-fashioned American striving, has been plunged into foreclosure, bankruptcy, and worse. And a successor generation of aspiring college students is now discovering that their equally toxic student-loan dossiers are condemning them to lifetimes of debt. Both before and after 2008, ours has been an economic order that, largely designed to reward paper speculation and penalize work, produces neither significant job growth nor wages that keep pace with productivity. Meanwhile, the only feints at resurrecting our nation’s crumbling civic life that have gained any traction are putatively market-based reforms in education, transportation, health care, and environmental policy, which have been, reliably as ever, riddled with corruption, fraud, incompetence, and (at best) inefficiency. The Grand Guignol of deregulation continues apace.

In one dismal week this past spring, for example, a virtually unregulated fertilizer facility immolated several blocks of West, Texas, claiming at least fourteen lives (a number that would have been much higher had the junior high school adjoining the site been in session at the time of the explosion), while a shoddily constructed and militantly unregulated complex of textile factories collapsed in Savar, Bangladesh, with a death toll of more than 1,100 workers.

In the face of all this catastrophism, the placid certainties of neoliberal ideology rattle on as though nothing has happened. Remarkably, our governing elites have decided to greet a moment of existential reckoning for most of their guiding dogmas by incanting with redoubled force the basic catechism of the neoliberal faith: reduced government spending, full privatization of social goods formerly administered by the public sphere, and a socialization of risk for the upper class. When the jobs economy ground to a functional halt, our leadership class first adopted an anemic stimulus plan, and then embarked on a death spiral of austerity-minded bids to decommission government spending at the very moment it was most urgently required—measures seemingly designed to undo whatever prospective gains the stimulus might have yielded. It’s a bit as though the board of directors of the Fukushima nuclear facility in the tsunami-ravaged Japanese interior decided to go on a reactor-building spree on a floodplain, or on the lip of an active volcano.

So now, five years into a crippling economic downturn without even the conceptual framework for a genuine, broad-based, jobs-driven recovery shored up by boosts in federal spending and public services, the public legacy of these times appears to be a long series of metaphoric euphemisms for brain-locked policy inertia: the debt ceiling, the fiscal cliff, the sequestration, the shutdown, the grand bargain. Laid side by side, all these coinages bring to mind the claustrophobic imagery of a kidnapping montage from a noir gangster film—and it is, indeed, no great exaggeration to say that the imaginative heart of our public life is now hostage to a grinding, miniaturizing agenda of neoliberal market idolatry. As our pundit class has tirelessly flogged the non-dramas surrounding the official government’s non-confrontations over the degree and depth of the inevitable brokered deal to bring yet more austerity to the flailing American economy, we civilian observers can be forgiven for suspecting that there is, in fact, no “there” there. For all their sound and fury, these set-tos proceed from the same basic premises on both sides, and produce the same outcome: studied retreat from any sense of official economic accountability for, well, anything.

...You’d think that our recent bruising encounters with the devastating fallout from the deregulators’ handiwork in the housing market of the early aughts should, by rights, render Friedman’s complaints about the public sector’s assaults on market virtue the deadest of dead letters. But, if anything, the ritual defense of the market’s sovereign prerogative has dug in that much more intractably as its basic coordinates have been discredited. As critics such as Dean Baker routinely point out, the stalled recovery out of the Great Recession is almost exclusively a function of the failure of our neoliberal economic establishment to speak honestly about a collapsed housing bubble that created a yawning shortfall in demand—a shortfall that, amid the paralysis of credit markets in the same recession, could be jumpstarted only by government stimulus.

All sorts of absurdities have flowed from this magisterial breakdown in comprehension. Since the neoliberal catechism holds that stimulative government spending can never be justified in the long run, much of our debate over the recovery’s prospective course has been given over to speculative nonsense. Chief among these talismanic invocations of free-market faith is the great question of how to placate the jittery job creators. At virtually every turn in the course of debate over how steeply to cut government spending in this recession, our sachems of neoliberal orthodoxy have insisted that any revenue-enhancing move the government so much as contemplated would spook business leaders into mothballing plans to expand operations and add jobs. It became the all-purpose worst-case scenario of first resort. If health care reform passed, if federal deficits expanded, or if marginal tax rates were permitted to rise for the vapors-prone investor class, why, then the whole prospect of a broad-based economic recovery was as good as shot.[*]

And since neoliberalism is most notably a global—or properly speaking, the globalizing—ideology, such pat distortions of economic reality are no longer confined to the Anglo-American political economy. Nor are they confined to strictly cognitive errors in policymaking. The collapse of the Rana Plaza garment factory in Bangladesh has yielded commentary from neoliberals that might well merit entry into the psychiatric profession’s DSM-5 as textbook illustrations of moral aphasia. Here, after all, was a tragedy that would appall even the darkest Victorian imaginings of a Charles Dickens or a Karl Marx: factory workers earning a monthly wage of $38 crowded into a structurally unsound multistory facility built on a foundation of sand above a drained pond. Three stories of the factory had been hastily erected on top of an already unsound existing structure just to house the fresh battalions of underpaid workers demanded by bottom-feeding international textile contractors.

Government inspectors repeatedly demanded that the facility be shuttered on safety grounds, but the plant’s proprietors ignored their citations, reckoning that the short-term gains of maintaining peak production outweighed the negligible threat of a fine or safety citation. Nor was there likely to be any pressure from Western bastions of enlightenment and human rights. The ceremonial stream of Astroturf labor-and-safety-inspecting delegations from Western nations made zero note of the cracked and teetering foundations of the Rana Plaza structure. Lorenz Berzau, the managing director of one such industry consortium (the Business Social Compliance Initiative), primly told the Wall Street Journal that the group isn’t an engineering concern—and what’s more, “it’s very important not to expect too much from the social audit” that his group and other Western overseers conduct on production facilities. And, as Dave Jamieson and Emran Hossain reported in the Huffington Post, labor organizers have long since learned that the auditing groups serve largely as pro forma conduits of impression management for consumer markets in the West. The auditing of manufacturing facilities in the developing world “ends up catering more to the brands involved than the workers toiling on the line,” Jamieson and Hossain write.

Yes, factory owners and managers well understand the permissible bounds of discourse in such Potemkin-style inquiries—and instruct their workforce accordingly. “What to say to the auditors always comes from the owners,” a Bangladeshi line worker named Suruj Miah told the two reporters. “The owners in most cases would warn workers not to say negative things about the factories. Workers are left without a choice.” Sumi Abedin, one of the survivors of an earlier disaster—a factory fire in the nearby Tazreen plant that claimed the lives of 112 workers in November 2012—told the Huffington Post that on the day of an international audit team’s visit, management compelled workers to wear T-shirts designating them as members of a nonexistent fire safety committee, and had them brandishing prop fire-extinguishing equipment that plant managers had procured only for the duration of the audit.

What this disaster ought to have driven through the neoliberal consensus’s collective solar plexus is something close to the polar opposite of its cherished, evidence-proof theory of the captive regulator: a largely cosmetic global watchdog effort funded overwhelmingly by private-sector concerns, far from delivering oversight and accountability, has incentivized fraud and negligence. And conveniently enough, it’s the race-to-the-bottom competitive forces unleashed by the global workplace that ritually sanctify all of this routine dishonesty. In their malignant neglect of worker safety measures, local factory managers are able to cite the same market pressures to maximize production and profit that have prevented the ornamental Western groups conducting audits of workplace safety practices from releasing their findings to the workers at risk of being killed by the neoliberal regime of global manufacturing.

Still, the dogmas of neoliberal market prerogative are far sturdier than a collapsing factory or a raging fire on the production line. If the dogmatists have thrown overboard Hayek-era intellectual values like experimentation and skepticism, at least they can stave off their inevitable extinction by shoring up Friedman-era platitudes and, from the mantles of the nation’s most prestigious universities and op-ed shops, try to pass them off as the nation’s highest common sense. So former University of Chicago law professor Richard Epstein, who helped found the influential law and economics movement that essentially transposed the shibboleths of public choice theory into legal doctrine, has patiently explained that the just and measured response to the collapse of Rana Plaza is to seek enforcement of preexisting building codes across the Bangladeshi private sector. Writing on the heels of the disaster, in the Hoover Institution’s web journal, Defining Ideas, Epstein takes pains to rule out the passage of any “new laws” to improve worker-safety standards or international monitoring efforts.In other words: Bangladeshi workers can either be more safe or starve more rapidly.But lest even this minimal recourse to regulation sound like too heady a plunge into statist remedies, Professor Epstein also cautions that the aggrieved and grieving workers in the Bangladeshi garment trade must not veer recklessly into unionism or other non-market-approved modes of worker self-determination. After all, he reasons, “in order to stave a shutdown off by improving factory safety, the savvy firm will have to raise its asking price from foreign purchasers . . . and may have to lower wages to remain competitive.” (This is another classic myth of the neoliberal faith—the rational “trade-off” between personal safety and wages that the independent broker makes when he or she contracts with an employer to freely exchange time and skills for wages. Only, of course, the notion of such rational choice has been reduced to a bitter farce in workplaces such as Rana Plaza, where the basic human rights of workers are only acknowledged theatrically, for the purposes of Potemkin auditing tours.) A more activist approach to the crisis in global worker safety would create intolerable distress to Epstein’s utopian vision of the carefully calibrated relations of global market production. Sure, the EU might ban exports of clothes bearing the taint of labor exploitation—but such a measure would just perversely create “undeserved economic protection” for EU economies that are net clothing exporters (and by implication, would deprive consumers of the sacred right to the cheapest possible attire that bullied and undercompensated labor can provide).

Neoliberalism, the Revolution in Reverse

#this one goes #essays #*

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