#take care of yourself its the best way of standing up to patriarchy and beauty standards

[natalias-pierogi]

honestly it frustrates me so much that exercising and eating well and getting enough sleep truly are one of the best things you can do for your mental health, but most of us has such a damaged and skewed relationship with those things because of the things we've been hearing since childhood.

when we're told to work out its usually not in a "move your body in ways that feels good and is enjoyable" but in a "work out so you can fit into this unnatainable beauty standard that will change in a few years anyway". when we're told to eat healthy were not being taught how to balance our diet so that we have energy and enjoy food. instead we're told to count calories and cut down on sugar and carbs.

we're not being taught to love ourselves and take care of ourselves. we're being taught self hate and self sabotage instead.

and that makes me so mad.

[dreamingofaizawa]

Powerful Ch. 1

Yakuza! Shouta Aizawa x Fem! Reader

*Mafia AU* Quirkless as well

Warnings: Arranged (sort of) marriage, brief mention of champagne, mentions of violence (nothing too specific). In later chapters: Probably smut

Word Count: 3.4 k

Author’s Note: ALRIGHTY here we go. I just had a fixation on Mafia AUs and, of course, it’s Shouta. What else did you expect? I’m a sucker for arranged relationships. Also he’s a little ooc in here, more confident, more ‘I want it I got it’. Hey, he’s the most powerful man in Japan, might as well have him act like it right? Anywho, I have no clue how many chapters this’ll end up being. Let’s just say this is ongoing for now.

Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4

Enjoy~

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25 years old and you haven’t been married off yet. This was strategic on your father’s part. As a rather low-ranking clan he’d purposely saved you, his eldest daughter, for marrying into a higher ranked clan. You’d bring immense honor to the family name. If only you’d known what you were getting into, maybe you could have been better prepared for your world to flip on its head.

The black velvet gown you wear is tailored perfectly to your form, accentuating every curve and dip on your body. The skirt fanned out around you gracefully and a short train trailed behind you as you stepped through the grand doors of the massive mansion. Tonight is the annual celebratory ball, held to celebrate successful unions and achievements. This one was particularly special, you just didn’t quite know it yet.

Since the event wasn’t mandatory, you were told to go in alone as a representative of your clan, while Mother and Father attended to more important matters. Before you even stepped in you fixed your posture and schooled your expression, keeping your form humbled. Heavens know what could happen should you irk the wrong clan.

Inside you were met with an onslaught of mixed everything, mixed drinks and colors and styles. Some wore traditional Japanese kimono, others more modern versions of the garment and others, like you, wearing more extravagant european or western style clothing. Though a rather interesting mix, nothing quite clashed which you were slightly grateful for, since there was no possible way you could make it through the night without a headache if there was an unpleasant mix of visuals.

You strode through and instantly met several lower clan heads that you respectfully bowed to and engaged in pleasant small talk with, moving from person to person, couple to couple and paying respects to all of them. You kept a small smile, a pleasant facade as you waltzed over the hardwood flooring. It took almost two hours of endless conversation before you managed to catch a break in the madness, snatching a small flute of champagne from a waiter and leaning up against a wall for a breath. 

You still hadn’t noticed the pair of dark eyes that studied you from the moment you arrived.

____

You struck him as intriguing at first. From the moment you walked over the threshold his eyes drank you in, studying you, observing and judging just as he had with many other women before you. No one here knows it, but the man is looking for a bride. Someone who could stand by his side,improve and uphold his image, help him wield the power that is the Yakuza. Yes, rank is important, but Shouta is too picky to care about rank. He is looking for a specific type of woman, one that can hold untold depths of power without crumbling under the pressure or getting swept up in the rush of it all.

A woman, he decides, like you.

You held yourself with grace, pride and humility. You seemed to understand your position, your probable low rank, while also not undermining your importance nor worth. A woman like you is hard to come by in this world, most just as power hungry and ruthless and greedy as their husbands, all while putting up a cotton candy sweet mask and using it to disguise their conniving ways. 

But in truth, that’s what it took to live this kind of life, isn’t it?

It was clear you knew that, while still managing to feel genuine in everything you did, even with an action as simple as sipping champagne. At the same time he can’t deny you are quite beautiful, soft lips and softer eyes, fingers gently grasping your glass with unmatched elegance and an unwavering strength in your posture. You’d bowed before many this evening, and yet you stood taller than even the highest ranking clan heads without challenging a single one of them. Bamboo in this forest of tall, unyielding trees. Capable of wielding so much power.

For a split second his mind wandered to other things, filthy moments shared in the privacy of his chambers, shared breaths and shimmering sweaty skin. He wondered what you would be like underneath him, if you would be a brat or willingly submit yourself to him. He hopes it to be the latter, but wouldn’t completely deny the chance to tame someone difficult. How would you look pinned under his weight, completely helpless to his hands that have killed and tortured? Would you claw at his shoulders or grip the sheets instead? What would you sound like? Your image plagued his mind even if only for a moment.

He’d studied many women over the few hours since the event started, none of them giving him a good enough first impression for him to continue watching further than a minute. There was no question in his mind now. You’d be returning home with him tonight.

____

You had just finished your drink and set the empty glass on a passing waiter’s tray when suddenly the ballroom fell extremely silent. All heads turned, eyes focused on the man that began his descent from the balcony overlooking the floor. He’s gorgeous, long black hair pulled into a low bun and exposing the light scruff on his chin and impossibly sharp jaw, a deep scar curved under his right eye. The full black satin suit is fitted to his form, strong shoulders and rolling muscle evident even under the thick materials. Ink peeked over the collar, a hint at what was definitely intricate sleeves and detailed artwork. His steps were measured, calculated and purposeful as he made his way down and across the floor, the entire room bowing down at his presence. 

You know who he is, as does every person here. Top rung of the ladder, Oyabun of the most powerful clan in Japan, his name widely known through the entire organization and yet almost never spoken. Shouta Aizawa, a name both respected and feared, holding unknown power and strength. His reputation is enough to make anyone feel small in his presence, known for his cold demeanor and the violence he’d committed, many losing their fingers, loved ones, and their own lives for misdeeds against him. He’d done most of that himself, marking him as a very dangerous man to be involved with, and an ally everyone wanted backing them.

You bowed down respectfully just as everyone else did, waiting patiently for a release, whether it was from the man himself or a collective understanding that it was alright to rise once again. The former was the first to come to fruition, though you didn’t expect him to be so close to you as he said it. Your eyes met with sharp onyx as you fixed yourself upright. It made you freeze in place, not quite tense, not quite relaxed, your expression hopefully not showing the utter shock you were feeling.

“What is your name?” You blinked only once before your mind caught up, and you willed your voice steady as you responded. What had you done to piss him off? What punishment awaited you for what you didn’t know you’d done? Despite fearing what may come, you don’t dare speak out of turn, even to beg for your life. His next words were addressed to the entire ballroom, you included, his smooth, deep voice booming out and yet somehow not loud at all.

“Any transgression against this woman is a transgression against me. As my future wife she is untouchable, and will remain that way until I explicitly state otherwise.” A collective hushed gasp sounded through the massive hall, your own eyes growing wide and your heart damn near stopping as your brain dissected the information. He just made you his fiance, with no warning, no hesitation, and full confidence. You are now engaged to the most powerful man in Japan, and you have exactly zero say in the matter. Really though, you never expected to be able to voice any opinions considering the patriarchy of the organization, so that bit of shock was quickly overlooked.

“It’s time to retire, little one.” His hand was held out to you, waiting for your own. You blinked, deciding it was best that you saved your shock for later you focused on the here and now and what to do in this moment. Taking a breath, you schooled your face into a pleasant smile and placed your hand in his waiting palm, allowing him to tuck you into his side as you both walked out the front doors and climbed into a black limouzine.

You didn’t allow yourself to relax, sitting silently next to the man as trees and telephone poles whizzed by the vehicle. It was tense, to say the least, his hand possessively sat on your knee as his eyes remained fixed in front of him and yours did the same. Neither of you talked, you slightly out of fear, of respect, and slightly out of sheer shock, your mind just barely able to keep itself together. He remained silent for a purpose. He would talk when you were alone, or when he felt like talking. Which isn’t right now.

You let your mind whirl a bit, worrying about what this meant for you. Worrying about how this powerful man would treat you, how he acted behind closed doors and if he even cared about you or what you might have to say. It’s nerve-wracking, suddenly bound to a power such as him, not knowing what could happen next, not knowing what to do next. There was nothing that could have prepared you for this.

The car slowed as it pulled up to the gate of the enormous estate, shaking you out of your thoughts, and once it opened the drive to the main house took nearly five minutes on its own. It’s a modern home, several stories tall with the top clearly penthouse-style with a full glass wall that overlooks the landscape, the rest of the huge inner home hidden behind crisp walls.

At a full stop, a man opens the door for you, the Oyabun having already exited and held a hand out for you to grab once again, strong muscles pulling you up with ease and leading you through the building and into an elevator. The silence is stifling as you wait for the machine to come to a stop, the soft chime indicating you’ve landed. 

Now you’re completely alone with him.

He leads you in and stops in the center of the large main room, stepping away and turning his scrutinizing gaze onto you. You do your best not to tense in front of him, not to show fear, partially for his comfort though you’re sure he’s used to it. His shoes clack softly, rhythmically on the polished wood floor as he begins to circle you, like a predator eyeing its prey, eyes burning paths up and down your form. You barely keep from squirming under his intense gaze, managing to keep still from sheer willpower. He stops suddenly behind you and you feel his warmth as he leans in close before a hand presses into your mid back and another gently grasps your shoulder, gently making you straighten even more, stand even taller.

Once he’s satisfied with your posture he rounds you and tilts your chin just a tad higher with a hooked finger. He’s silent as he shapes you, adjusting your body to his liking. You let him tenderly push and tug, grab and knead and trail those deadly fingers over you until he stops before you, studying you once again. 

“You’re my fiance now. You will hold yourself as such, radiate power as I do and command the attention of a room with only a glance.” The reminder of just what was happening made your breath stutter a little, and his hand came up to grasp your chin, making you look up into his dark eyes.

“You will learn, little one, to be the powerful woman I see.” He was so close, the heat from his body rolling over your skin and his breaths fanning over your face. Then he was walking away, motioning for you to follow as he led you to his chambers and bathroom to get cleaned up. You’d be sleeping with him from now on, he said, handing you a robe to change into after you’ve bathed and guiding you into the bathroom before closing the door and leaving you alone with your thoughts as you set to cleaning yourself.

Given you don’t screw things up, you are going to be the most powerful woman in Japan, solely because of a sudden arranged marriage dropped seemingly from out of nowhere. But the longer you think about it, it isn’t really out of nowhere is it? The Oyabun is 30 now, and until tonight hadn’t named a wife, nor any love interests, and therefore no possible heirs. If the man were to die for any reason, those chances only increasing the older he gets, the power vacuum his absence would create would be absolute madness. You’re part of a strategy, just as before. Just as always.

Yet there was no denying he’d struck something inside you. Of all the women in that hall he approached you, a woman he didn’t know from a low ranked clan, for reasons you could only barely begin to guess. He’d called you powerful earlier, the sincerity in his voice making your mind spin. Did he really see you as powerful? And the name he’d used for you felt far too tender on the tongue of such a dangerous man, though you understood the nod toward your previous rank. 

Father and Mother must be either confused, shocked, or overflowing with joy right about now. Confused as to why you haven’t returned, shocked, happy, or both at the news had they learned it. With your mind processing everything, your body finally begins to feel fatigued. 

You shut off the water before drying yourself, patting your hair in the towel before pulling on the fluffy robe. It was clearly meant for him, the fuzzy black garment large around the shoulders and sleeves engulfing your hands, the garment nearly touching the floor where it’s meant to hang several inches from it on his frame. Despite swimming in the robe, you couldn’t help but feel a bit vulnerable. You’re bare beneath it, not having planned to not return home. Still, it’s late, and the Oyabun needs to shower as well. With a steadying breath, you step out into the room.

He’s standing near the bed, the top half of his clothing discarded and bare skin exposed, along with the heavy tattooing and scars along his body. Dragon scales decorated his skin, along with delicate swirls heavily resembling smoke and clouds that followed the curves of his corded muscles. He is undoubtedly a beautiful man. You don’t realize you’re staring until a miniscule smirk tugs at the corner of his mouth.

“Enjoying the view, little one?” You blink away your daze and shift your eyes to the side, feeling the slight burn in your face at being caught. Instead of answering the cheeky question you choose to change the subject.

“I’m finished with my shower, Oyabun.” He hums, a low sound you can feel in your chest.

“I can see that, little one. And you call me Shouta.” You take a quiet, sharp inhale and nod.

“Yes, of course...Shouta.” His name feels heavy on your tongue, a name that people didn’t normally dare speak. He’s silent as he gathers his things and moves toward the bathroom, stopping momentarily by your side. You’re confused a moment before his calloused fingers gently grip your jaw and turn your head, his lips pressing softly against your temple for a split second before he’s disappearing into the bathroom. 

You stand in shock, the tender touch unexpected. Shaking your head, you decide it’s best to lay down. Hopefully you’d fall asleep by the time he finishes bathing, but you doubted it. You’re proven right when, in the midst of mulling over your own thoughts, he emerges in nothing but sweatpants, dark hair still damp as it fell around his shoulders. You managed to avert your eyes before he could catch you staring for a second time tonight, and it wasn’t long before he slipped under the blankets next to you.

There wasn’t a single word shared between you as he flicked off the lights with a remote and settled into the plush mattress. There was no movement from the man as you lay with your back to him. You aren’t entirely sure if the lack of movement unsettles you more than if he were to be shuffling around. It felt like hours had passed in the darkness, your eyes had adjusted and you couldn’t sleep despite how exhausted you felt. 

Your mind raced with questions. What happens now? What happens with your clan and parents? Would you have clothes soon? How would he treat you? How were you supposed to act around him? When is the wedding? Is the engagement already official? What if you disappoint him and fuck everything over? The entire situation makes you anxious, for more than something as trivial as your own safety. You shift onto your back and listen to Shouta’s soft snores, signaling his sleep. As silently and gently as you can, you slip out of bed.

You have no clue what you were going to do or where you were going to do it, but you had to get away from him if only for a moment, to let yourself breathe and think. Almost mindlessly, you find yourself staring out of the glass wall and out into the night. This far out, you can see the stars in the night sky clear and bright, and it was a sight you missed having lived in the city most of your life. Right here you have room to think, space to spread your thoughts and calm your mind to keep from jumbling everything in your brain and stressing over it more. 

From what you can tell there is a very small chance Shouta would treat you maliciously, so for now you don’t have to worry about that. Considering his power and status, you won’t be without clothing for long. The thought was silly in the first place, but stress tended to make you question even the most ridiculous. As for how you’re meant to act, well that would have to be tested. He’d already told you how to appear to the public, so that shouldn’t be too hard, but being alone with the man was driving you insane.

Soft footsteps broke you from your thoughts. You spin around, suddenly very much on guard, before Shouta’s voice broke through the darkness, his figure slowly approaching. 

“What are you doing up, little one?” You bite your lip and turn to gaze outside again, hugging your arms tight.

“Just thinking. I apologize for waking you, Oya-… Shouta.” His warmth hit you before his skin did, chest pressed into your back and large rough hands gripping your shoulders firm but gentle. His breath is hot on your ear and neck, sending a shiver down your spine. Such an intimate action from him only hours after he’d made you his fiance was quite the shock in and of itself, only enhanced by the fact that this man is known for his cold nature.

“Thinking about what?” His hands smoothed down your arms, following them around your waist and encompassing your hands in his, tugging you into him further. Unnatural as it may seem, it feels good, his warmth. In the arms of such a dangerous and powerful man you should feel small and scared, but you don’t. You aren’t entirely sure what it is you feel. Truthfully, you don’t have the energy to answer his question properly.

“About a lot of things. Too many things.” Right now, the only thing you want to do is melt into the man’s arms. His presence is suddenly comforting, instead of worrying, and you feel safe in his embrace. You sigh and lean into him, fatigue finally beginning to tug at your body and mind. Strong arms scoop you up like nothing, and suddenly you’re being placed down on the bed before he climbs in and pulls you onto him. An arm circles your waist while the other cradles your head, a tender kiss placed at your hairline.

“Sleep, little one.” His fingers thread through your hair, massaging your scalp lightly. It’s a soothing action, especially after nearly giving yourself a headache from stress. It isn’t long before you’re nodding off, relaxing into his body and letting his steady heartbeat lull you to sleep.

[thepeakygurl]

Well I'm here. I wanted to tell you what a sucker I'm for some good fluff Tommy Shelby fluff..

I had this idea at the back of my mind where the Tommy married the reader as a formality because Polly had been constantly nagging him to get Charles a mother.(Like after Grace dies). Now he makes it clear that he cannot give her "love" and she should not expect it but she should be a dutiful wife (I know, patriarchy) and take care of Charlie. Reader decides to give the marriage a try.. and thinks it's not always love that builds marriage. As long as Tommy keeps her safe, it's fine.. It's only when the reader gets pregnant with Tommy's kid, the way her body starts changing, Tommy's heart starts changing as well and he starts falling in love with her as her pregnancy progresses..

I'm sorry if this is too much. 🙊🥺

A/N: I’m so in love with this one, I really, really hope you like it!🥺 thank you for requesting this amazing piece✨ honestly this one gave me so much life that I could wrote a whole series out of it!

Another Day

Thomas Shelby x Fem!Reader

Word count: 1,834

When Grace died, Thomas knew that a part of himself went with her. Part of his heart and his capacity of loving followed the woman who owned that same heart into the abyss of death. And he was fine with it, the only reasonable thing to do was to let his heart rest next to his beloved wife, that was alright with him.

Everyday that went by Thomas felt as his life were slowly drowning into a whirlwind of inconsolable sorrow. Nevertheless, he was trying his best for Charlie and he was darned proud of how such a sweet boy he happened to become. So mannered and so caring that sometimes he almost failed to believe he was his son, this was his only spiral of joy. Every time Ada would come around with Karl, Charlie wouldn’t help, but ask about his mommy and why him and daddy were always alone. And he was right, Thomas and Charlie were always going to be alone in a way, that thought was so dreadful and achingly painful that one morning he did what he had to do. Polly spent the last few weeks begging him to meet the daughter of this friends of hers, single and behaved, What more could you ask for? Polly would always end up saying. A question he would have promptly answer with Grace.

The first time he laid eyes on you, he couldn’t help but think how pretty you were. He was a man with pride, but he also had eyes and he would never say something that he doesn’t mean so he said it “You are a very beautiful woman” in a tone so cold and unemotional that made you laugh, clearly he was forced into this meeting as well. Marriage was the last thing in your list: Travel and study the art of painting that was your dream and see it being crushed by the economical need of your family almost crushed you a well. Being the respectful and obedient wife of Thomas Shelby was never part of your plan, but you weren’t selfish enough to say no and let your family sink in debt. And while Polly was taking your mom’s arm and pulling her aways from you two for some intimacy, you look at time a stare that he didn’t give back and said “Next time be more convincing.”

The wedding came soon enough, everyone on your side of the family was happy, excited and hopeful for the future that this union would bring. The Shelby’s on the other side, they weren’t allowed to celebrate as this wasn’t a marriage of love, but need. A small wedding, no reception. You never really thought about marriage, but somehow it made you sad how so careless this man was. How cruel he was to care so little about something that for you could have a meaning.

On the night of your wedding Thomas didn’t talking much, if anything at all. Some candles were lit on the side of the bed, they smelled nice you remember, but nothing could ease up the tension in that room. You in your night gown standing in front of him as he close the door behind him while he enters the room. His eyes locked in yours but it’s hard to tell whether he wants this or it’s just a duty. A step after another he finally was in front of you, so close that he could easily hear your heart racing on your chest. His hand slowly reached your cheek and he smiled a small imperceptible smile “Love is a tricky thing. From this night on I will respect you, protect you, but love...” he eyes were now somewhere else, they were still looking at you, but you could tell they were elsewhere. That was enough for you, or so you thought.

Time passed and the only thing that made those miserable day bearable was Charlie. You saw in him a lot of Thomas, but there was also a side of him that you didn’t quite get, probably from his mom. Grace a woman that was still an important presence in the house, in their life. Charlie would sometimes stare at the paint of him, Thomas and Grace and would point and her, asking where she is. You would then proceed to sit next to his and point at his chest close to where his heart his “She is here. She’s in here everyday, even if you don’t see her” you would say smiling at him. She was beautiful, so beautiful and so much loved that you would pity yourself, a resentment that caused you to be sickened by yourself, at some point in time you realised that you started to compete with the death and that feeling brought so much shame that you decided it was time to get back at your art. So you did, painting and looking after Charlie. When the Sun would disappear in order for the Moon to gloriously take its place, Thomas would come home, sometimes even later than that. He would kiss Charlie on the forehead, then he would smile at you. After all expectations, Thomas had no problem in engaging in a conversation with you, however he never talked to you as his wife, more like a newfound acquaintance and that again was alright with you.

Then one day you found out you were pregnant. You had all the signs, morning sickness, late period, body changing, but a part of you didn’t want it to be true. You were so afraid of bring to Earth a creature that was not made out of love that you took quite enough time to tell Thomas, the enough time it took you to start showing and made it impossible for you to hide it longer. Your heart was racing as fast as the horses that Thomas so much loved, when one night he grabbed you by your hand and pulled you closer to him, not a moment of love, but a need. And while a hand slowly caressed your arms, the other was finding his way under your night gown but stopped as soon as he felt your stomach. Surprised as it was he went from looking at your body to staring at your face, while you were nervously biting your lips “I’m pregnant” you said in a whisper. His hand fell down as soon as those words left your mouth and he quickly stepped back. He didn’t want another child, not like this, but he was not going to say it. In fact he didn’t say anything and went to bed.

Weeks after that Thomas didn’t touch you, or talked to you. He even barely looked at you. He felt as if he was betraying Grace, as this baby could bring an end to the connection he had with her. He wasn’t ready for any of that, but neither were you and so the hostility between you two grew. Charlie however was super excited to have a little brother or sister. Seeing his son so excited about the news made him think that maybe that was such a bad news, after all that’s what he wanted for the both of them, not being alone.

And the baby was growing, strong as ever. Polly and Ada started to come visit more and you liked that, that made you feel less alone.

“Don’t worry he will come along someday” Polly would always say to you and you would always smile repeating yourself that you didn’t need his love, that this was a marriage without love, but now with this baby inside you, you couldn’t help but thinking if he was ever going to love your baby.

Thomas was now at home more often “I do not have so many employees for nothing now eh?” He would say every time you would wake up in the morning and see him already on his feet preparing Charlie for the day. The truth was that Thomas knew you had trouble sleeping since the baby, he woke up sometimes during the night to see you walking around the room while moaning in pain. He knew how stressful it could be to not having enough sleep, carrying a baby and providing for another one, so he decided to stick around for a while. Seeing your daily routine, how you would play with Charlie, sit in front of the painting of hi late mom, telling him those kind word and seeing you meticulously give time to your own passion, that did something to him. Perhaps it was just time what he needed, perhaps love was something that he could feel again, because now every time he looked at you, he felt alive again.

“What now? Are you going to do the laundry as well?” You jokingly said while you were having breakfast.

He looked and you and chuckled “No, I pay other people to do that. But you are more than welcome to do it yourself, it’s money that I can save” and as he saw you rolling your eyes in response he smiled “I got you something” he said talking a little bag under the table and placing it in front of you.

You almost gasped in surprise, Thomas Shelby caring to waste a bit of his time to buy you something? Not even your birthday made him turn around like that. You were almost scolding yourself out loud for how much you were smiling at that gesture. You carefully opening the bag to reveal a pair of white baby shoes, the most precious thing he could ever get you. Thomas looked at you with the same big smile that was on your lips and he hold your hand, he didn’t say much after, but your hand on his meant something for the both of you.

You gave birth to the most beautiful and precious baby girl. Polly and Ada were at tears when they first saw her and you could tell to have seen even Arthur shredding some tears and being scolded by John. You even shredded some tears. The love that you thought you couldn’t get and that you were never going to experience, it was all there in this tiny little girl. Charlie was absolutely in love with her, so much that it was hard to convince him that he was to big to sleep in the crib with her. You were looking at your baby girl, sleeping peacefully and there it was, the most beautiful piece of art you ever made. While this thought slid through your mind, Thomas wrapped his arms around your waste in a hug from behind, resting his chin on your shoulder and he smiled looking at his daughter “So darned beautiful” he whispered while looking at her, he was completely astonished and happy, so darned happy. “You both are” he then said holding you a bit tighter than before and this time, you believed him.

[lilxberry]

You Owe Me 20 Bucks - Steve Rogers

Synopsis;

Steve just simply wants to protect you, you find it extremely annoying how his plans to protect you get in the way of you doing your job as an Avenger, and Bucky and Sam have a running bet.

Warnings: A lil bit of language. Arguing. Mentions of violence. Mentions of betting. Wack ass stuff man. Fluff.

Words: 2,030

Pairings: Steve Rogers x Reader 

_______________

You walked into the meeting room, ready to be briefed by Fury for the next mission. This would be your first assignment in 2 months since your injury. Ever since you had woken up, everyone had babied you, especially a certain super soldier, which ticked you off to no end.

You took your place in-between Wanda and Bucky and prepared yourself for the droning voice of Fury and the nagging of Steve. “Hey, you good?”

You inwardly groaned at Bucky’s question. It was nice that the team cared so much but it was a bitch to deal with all their incessant babying and over protectiveness. “I’m fine, Buck, really.”

As if he could sense your irritation, he retreated and opted to leave you be. You signed in relief and sunk back into your chair. Just as you had gotten comfortable, Fury entered, followed by Maria then Mr. Patriarchy himself. “Avengers.” Fury simply greeted to grab everyone’s attention.

And so, the briefing had commenced and passed by, the only thing left on the check list was to discuss who will be part taking in the mission. “A team of 6 will be going in, the others will stay behind and only move out when needed. Stark, Barnes, Barton, Maximoff, Y/L/N, you 5 will be joining Rogers at the base.”

Before any body got the chance to voice their readiness, Steve had spoken up. “Y/L/N isn’t ready.”

You saw red as he had easily diminished your ability to be out in the field. “Like fuck I’m not ready.” You quickly stood from your seat so fast, the chair had scrapped against the floor before falling over harshly.

“If I say you’re not ready then you’re not ready.” Steve crossed his arms over his chest, standing his ground. Thing is, you were stubborn, every Avenger and agent knew that about you.

You walked towards in quick, long strides and stared him down, inches from his face. “It’s my body, I know when it’s damn ready.” You stepped back and looked towards Fury. “So, when we due to head out?”

“In an hour.”

“Great, see you guys at the jet.” You quickly turned on your heel and headed towards your room, ignoring the calls of your peers.

“I guess that’s all. Dismissed.” Fury disbanded the meeting, sending the remaining Avengers to prepare for their mission or go back to lazing around, ready to be called out as back up. Steve sighed heavily through his nose as her closed his eyes and pinched the bridge between his pointer finger and thumb.

As Bucky passed his best friend, he patted his shoulder and flashed him a tight-lipped smile, sympathising with his friend. This is gonne be one long mission.

_______________

The time came for the team to meet at the jet. You stepped on to the platform and headed over to the jet to meet with the others. Just as you placed one foot on to the flying metal contraption, the blonde of the 40’s due spoke. “I said you’re not ready.”

You rolled your eyes and chose to ignore his complaints. Ensuring your gear that you’re decked out in is securely strapped on, you made haste towards a free seat at the back off the jet, unfortunately getting blocked off by Steves’ broad and muscular form. You huffed and quickly side stepped him, proceeding to sit.

“No matter how much you nag, they’re still gonna tag along, dude. May as well give up before you’re driven mad.” Clint commented, eliciting a soft giggle from Wanda and a snicker from Tony, both trying desperately to cover their amusement up in any way available to them.

“He has a point. Maybe instead of butting heads, you could help her through this mission.” Bucky spoke directly to his friend.

“Or they could actually listen and not go.” Steve narrowed his eyes towards your ignorant and slouched form, folding his arms across his chest. Tony rolled his eyes before making his way through the jet to pilot it.

“Okay losers, can we all quieten down now. Daddy’s got a jet to fly.” And with that, Tony had the jet off the platform and heading to your destination. Steve huffed and sat opposite you next to Bucky. He stared you down whilst you continuously ignored him through the whole flight.

_______________

“What the hell, Steve?! I had it handled!” You yelled at your fellow Avenger as you all boarded the jet, ready to head back to the compound.

“Didn’t look like it!” Steve had replied, matching your volume.

You scoffed and threw your arms up into the arm in exasperation. “You have a seriously fucked up hero complex, you know that?!”

The yelling match continued between you both throughout most of the flight. By this point, the others within the small confides of the jet had pounding migraines and are in need of about 20 Advils each.

As soon as the jet landed back within the grounds of the compound, you both stormed out of the jet, heading to your separate rooms, both slamming them shut as loudly as possible, hoping the other would hear and convey how pissed you were.

“Ah, young love.” Tony quipped as his suit disassembled from around his form.

_______________

It had been a full week of you ignoring Steve. He had tried previously throughout the week, but you blanked him, simply as if he hadn’t existed. He knew he seriously messed up the second enemy after enemy headed towards you. He knew you could have easily defended yourself and have taken them out even easier but, you were right. He does have a fucked up hero complex.

But mostly, he always felt the need to protect you. Falling in love with a completely independent and able Avenger is a tough gig. Apparently.

Steve had had enough and decided he was going to talk to you, whether you wanted to or not. He marched with determination straight to your room and knocked brashly. He heard you groan from the opposite side of the door before the light patter of your feet pad along the floor. You swung the door open widely with a look of annoyance across your face, but it had quickly faltered as you tried to close the door just as hastily. He jammed his foot between the door and its frame.

“Leave me alone Steve.” He could easily detect the irritation and impatience within your voice. He pushed the rest of the way into your room and you groaned loudly once again. “You clearly don’t understand English, should I try Spanish? German? Ukrainian? Mandarin?”

“Okay, I get it, you’re pissed and you don’t want to see me. Well tough shit.” He stepped closer to you as you stood your ground. “We need to talk whether you like it or not.”

“Oh yeah? And what do we need to talk about exactly?”

Steve inhaled deeply before continuing. “About how you’re acting. You can’t act like a stroppy teenager whenever someone gives you a helping hand during a mission.”

You scoff, unbelieving of what he is saying. “That wasn’t a ‘helping hand’, that was undermining myself as an abled agent and my abilities to handle the enemy. That wasn’t a ‘helping hand’, that was throwing me to the side while you did all the work.” Your shoulders heaved up and down as your breathing became heavier the more anger filled you.

“Jesus Christ Y/N, I was trying to help! I led the mission that day and it’s my responsibility if any of you screw up. All I did was ensure none of you did.” Steves’ voice raised to match yours.

“NO! You ensured I didn’t screw up because “I’M NOT READY!”” At some point you had started to pace around the room in an attempt to calm you.

Steve ran his hand down his face as he groaned loudly. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath in, willing himself to calm himself down also. “I just care about you Y/N/N. Please, why can’t you just understand that.”

“Well, you should go care about someone else. I didn’t see you hounding Starks’ ass about being careful.”

“Jesus H Christ, I’m in love with you, alright?!” Steve had exclaimed loudly in exasperation. You froze on the spot and slowly turned, shock evident across your face.

“Wha-what?” You stuttered out in a quiet whisper. Steve registered what had just slipped passed his lips and opened and closed his mouth, attempting to come up with some form of excuse for what he had said. “What did you just say Steve?” You spoke, your voice raised, pronunciation clear.

Steve sighed and looked down before tilting his head in the slightest to gaze into your eyes as he spoke sheepishly. “I said I’m in love with you, I love you.” He searched your face for the slightest inkling of reciprocation in the mix of a million emotions displayed across it. It had been a good minute or so of silence as you comprehended what he had just told you. He began to feel self-conscious and paranoia presented itself within him deeply. “Please say something.” He pleaded, his voice quiet.

This seemed to have snapped you out of whatever trance had engulfed you and you swallowed thickly as you looked up at him with wide eyes. You willed yourself to be brave as if you were back out in the field. You charged forward and crashed your lips to his, the move bolder than what you were used to doing.

You grasp on to him tightly, afraid he would pull away, although, you knew that was not going to be the case for he instantaneously reciprocated the intimate action with as much gusto and desperation. His larger hands came to hold on to your hips, knuckles turning white from how tightly his hands balled up your shirt.

Sooner than you had liked, you both parted and laid your foreheads against the others as you panted, desperate for any intake of oxygen. “I love you too, Steve.” You whispered breathlessly, looking up into his beautiful, blue orbs. They had even seemed to have an extra shine in this moment as you gazed deeply into them.

He smiled a huffed out a small chuckle, his thumb rubbing up and down against your side in a soothing and loving manner. “God, you drive me crazy.”

You both continued to stand there for what felt like hours when in actuality, was only a minute or so. Suddenly, a loud knock at the door echoed throughout the room before opening and revealing Sam and Bucky on the other side. “Hey, you guys comin-oh, damn, our bad. We’ll uh, leave you to it.” And with that, Sam quickly turned and shoved Bucky out along with him as he closed the door behind them.

“I think you owe me 20 bucks.” You heard Bucky’s voice through the door which had muffled the sound slightly.

“Man, I was sure they’d go another week before one of ‘em confessed.” You heard Sam whine as you presumed while he fished out the bills from his pocket to hand over to his apparent betting partner.

Their interaction had caused both you and Steve let out a small bout of laugh before turning your attention back towards one another. “I guess we should head down for food, huh?” Steve suggested whilst he had a boyish grin etched upon his face.

All you could do was mirror his smile and release a near inaudible ‘yes’ as you nod and step back, taking his larger hand into one of your own. He quickly pulled you towards him to lay a final pure, sweet, gentle kiss upon your plump lips. “Let’s go.”

He led you out of your room and towards the elevator, ready to join the others for food. As you stood in the elevator, you felt Steves’ gaze on you. You turned you head and sent him a wolfish smirk. “Bet you 20 bucks that they told everyone.”

Steve threw his head back in laughter as he wrapped his arm around your shoulders and brought you closer into his side. “You’re on.”

_______________

Those pants are nice, yeah, just the pants, definitely just the pants I’m admiring, nothing else... *definitely is looking square at his ass* ...yeah man, nice pants...

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I did a Steve fic, noice

I’ve been super sucky with fics recently but I mean, college stuff, losing family, this, plus messing my knee up badly yesterday after accidently yeeting myself down some stairs, it be like that 

I really hope you enjoy this

As always, constructive criticism and requests are welcomed and greatly appreciated :D

[path-of-my-childhood]

The Rolling Stone Interview: Taylor Swift

By: Brian Hiatt for The Rolling Stone Magazine Date: September 18th 2019

In her most in-depth and introspective interview in years, Swift tells all about the rocky road to 'Lover' and much, much more.

Taylor Swift bursts into her mom’s Nashville kitchen, smiling, looking remarkably like Taylor Swift. (That red-lip, classic thing? Check.) “I need someone to help dye my hair pink,” she says, and moments later, her ends match her sparkly nail polish, sneakers, and the stripes on her button-down. It’s all in keeping with the pastel aesthetic of her new album, Lover; black-leather combat-Taylor from her previous album cycle has handed back the phone. Around the black-granite kitchen island, all is calm and normal, as Swift’s mom, dad, and younger brother pass through. Her mom’s two dogs, one very small, one very large, pounce upon visitors with slurping glee. It could be any 29-year-old’s weekend visit with her parents, if not for the madness looming a few feet down the hall.

In an airy terrace, 113 giddy, weepy, shaky, still-in-disbelief fans are waiting for the start of one of Swift’s secret sessions, sacred rituals in Swift-dom. She’s about to play them her seventh album, as-yet unreleased on this Sunday afternoon in early August, and offer copious commentary. Also, she made cookies. Just before the session, Swift sits down in her mom’s study (where she “operates the Google,” per her daughter) to chat for a few minutes. The black-walled room is decorated with black-and-white classic-rock photos, including shots of Bruce Springsteen and, unsurprisingly, James Taylor; there are also more recent shots of Swift posing with Kris Kristofferson and playing with Def Leppard, her mom’s favorite band.

In a corner is an acoustic guitar Swift played as a teenager. She almost certainly wrote some well-known songs on it, but can’t recall which ones. “It would be kind of weird to finish a song and be like, ‘And this moment, I shall remember,’'” she says, laughing. “‘This guitar hath been anointed with my sacred tuneage!'”

The secret session itself is, as the name suggests, deeply off-the-record; it can be confirmed that she drank some white wine, since her glass pops up in some Instagram pictures. She stays until 5 a.m., chatting and taking photos with every one of the fans. Five hours later, we continue our talk at length in Swift’s Nashville condo, in almost exactly the same spot where we did one of our interviews for her 2012 Rolling Stone cover story. She’s hardly changed its whimsical decor in the past seven years (one of the few additions is a pool table replacing the couch where we sat last time), so it’s an old-Taylor time capsule. There’s still a huge bunny made of moss in one corner, and a human-size birdcage in the living room, though the view from the latter is now of generic new condo buildings instead of just distant green hills. Swift is barefoot now, in pale-blue jeans and a blue button-down tied at the waist; her hair is pulled back, her makeup minimal.

How to sum up the past three years of Taylor Swift? In July 2016, after Swift expressed discontent with Kanye West’s “Famous,” Kim Kardashian did her best to destroy her, unleashing clandestine recordings of a phone conversation between Swift and West. In the piecemeal audio, Swift can be heard agreeing to the line “…me and Taylor might still have sex.” We don’t hear her learning about the next lyric, the one she says bothered her — “I made that bitch famous” — and as she’ll explain, there’s more to her side of the story. The backlash was, well, swift, and overwhelming. It still hasn’t altogether subsided. Later that year, Swift chose not to make an endorsement in the 2016 election, which definitely didn’t help. In the face of it all, she made Reputation — fierce, witty, almost-industrial pop offset by love songs of crystalline beauty — and had a wildly successful stadium tour. Somewhere in there, she met her current boyfriend, Joe Alwyn, and judging by certain songs on Lover, the relationship is serious indeed.

Lover is Swift’s most adult album, a rebalancing of sound and persona that opens doors to the next decade of her career; it’s also a welcome return to the sonic diversity of 2012’s Red, with tracks ranging from the St. Vincent-assisted über-bop “Cruel Summer” to the unbearably poignant country-fied “Soon You’ll Get Better” (with the Dixie Chicks) and the “Shake It Off”-worthy pep of “Paper Rings.”

She wants to talk about the music, of course, but she is also ready to explain the past three years of her life, in depth, for the first time. The conversation is often not a light one. She’s built up more armor in the past few years, but still has the opposite of a poker face — you can see every micro-emotion wash over her as she ponders a question, her nose wrinkling in semi-ironic offense at the term “old-school pop stars,” her preposterously blue eyes glistening as she turns to darker subjects. In her worst moments, she says, “You feel like you’re being completely pulled into a riptide. So what are you going to do? Splash a lot? Or hold your breath and hope you somehow resurface? And that’s what I did. And it took three years. Sitting here doing an interview — the fact that we’ve done an interview before is the only reason I’m not in a full body sweat.”

When we talked seven years ago, everything was going so well for you, and you were very worried that something would go wrong. Yeah, I kind of knew it would. I felt like I was walking along the sidewalk, knowing eventually the pavement was going to crumble and I was gonna fall through. You can’t keep winning and have people like it. People love “new” so much — they raise you up the flagpole, and you’re waving at the top of the flagpole for a while. And then they’re like, “Wait, this new flag is what we actually love.” They decide something you’re doing is incorrect, that you’re not standing for what you should stand for. You’re a bad example. Then if you keep making music and you survive, and you keep connecting with people, eventually they raise you a little bit up the flagpole again, and then they take you back down, and back up again. And it happens to women more than it happens to men in music.

It also happened to you a few times on a smaller scale, didn’t it? I’ve had several upheavals in my career. When I was 18, they were like, “She doesn’t really write those songs.” So my third album I wrote by myself as a reaction to that. Then they decided I was a serial dater — a boy-crazy man-eater — when I was 22. And so I didn’t date anyone for, like, two years. And then they decided in 2016 that absolutely everything about me was wrong. If I did something good, it was for the wrong reasons. If I did something brave, I didn’t do it correctly. If I stood up for myself, I was throwing a tantrum. And so I found myself in this endless mockery echo chamber. It’s just like — I have a brother who’s two and a half years younger, and we spent the first half of our lives trying to kill each other and the second half as best friends. You know that game kids play? I’d be like, “Mom, can I have some water?” And Austin would be like, “Mom, can I have some water?” And I’m like, “He’s copying me.” And he’d be like, “He’s copying me.” Always in a really obnoxious voice that sounds all twisted. That’s what it felt like in 2016. So I decided to just say nothing. It wasn’t really a decision. It was completely involuntary.

But you also had good things happen in your life at the same time — that’s part of Reputation. The moments of my true story on that album are songs like “Delicate,” “New Year’s Day,” “Call It What You Want,” “Dress.” The one-two punch, bait-and-switch of Reputation is that it was actually a love story. It was a love story in amongst chaos. All the weaponized sort of metallic battle anthems were what was going on outside. That was the battle raging on that I could see from the windows, and then there was what was happening inside my world — my newly quiet, cozy world that was happening on my own terms for the first time. . . . It’s weird, because in some of the worst times of my career, and reputation, dare I say, I had some of the most beautiful times — in my quiet life that I chose to have. And I had some of the most incredible memories with the friends I now knew cared about me, even if everyone hated me. The bad stuff was really significant and damaging. But the good stuff will endure. The good lessons — you realize that you can’t just show your life to people.

Meaning? I used to be like a golden retriever, just walking up to everybody, like, wagging my tail. “Sure, yeah, of course! What do you want to know? What do you need?” Now, I guess, I have to be a little bit more like a fox.

Do your regrets on that extend to the way the “girl squad” thing was perceived? Yeah, I never would have imagined that people would have thought, “This is a clique that wouldn’t have accepted me if I wanted to be in it.” Holy shit, that hit me like a ton of bricks. I was like, “Oh, this did not go the way that I thought it was going to go.” I thought it was going to be we can still stick together, just like men are allowed to do. The patriarchy allows men to have bro packs. If you’re a male artist, there’s an understanding that you have respect for your counterparts.

Whereas women are expected to be feuding with each other? It’s assumed that we hate each other. Even if we’re smiling and photographed together with our arms around each other, it’s assumed there’s a knife in our pocket.

How much of a danger was there of falling into that thought pattern yourself? The messaging is dangerous, yes. Nobody is immune, because we’re a product of what society and peer groups and now the internet tells us, unless we learn differently from experience.

You once sang about a star who “took the money and your dignity, and got the hell out.” In 2016, you wrote in your journal, “This summer is the apocalypse.” How close did you come to quitting altogether? I definitely thought about that a lot. I thought about how words are my only way of making sense of the world and expressing myself — and now any words I say or write are being twisted against me. People love a hate frenzy. It’s like piranhas. People had so much fun hating me, and they didn’t really need very many reasons to do it. I felt like the situation was pretty hopeless. I wrote a lot of really aggressively bitter poems constantly. I wrote a lot of think pieces that I knew I’d never publish, about what it’s like to feel like you’re in a shame spiral. And I couldn’t figure out how to learn from it. Because I wasn’t sure exactly what I did that was so wrong. That was really hard for me, because I cannot stand it when people can’t take criticism. So I try to self-examine, and even though that’s really hard and hurts a lot sometimes, I really try to understand where people are coming from when they don’t like me. And I completely get why people wouldn’t like me. Because, you know, I’ve had my insecurities say those things — and things 1,000 times worse.

But some of your former critics have become your friends, right? Some of my best friendships came from people publicly criticizing me and then it opening up a conversation. Hayley Kiyoko was doing an interview and she made an example about how I get away with singing about straight relationships and people don’t give me shit the way they give her shit for singing about girls — and it’s totally valid. Like, Ella — Lorde — the first thing she ever said about me publicly was a criticism of my image or whatever. But I can’t really respond to someone saying, “You, as a human being, are fake.” And if they say you’re playing the victim, that completely undermines your ability to ever verbalize how you feel unless it’s positive. So, OK, should I just smile all the time and never say anything hurts me? Because that’s really fake. Or should I be real about how I’m feeling and have valid, legitimate responses to things that happened to me in my life? But wait, would that be playing the victim?

How do you escape that mental trap? Since I was 15 years old, if people criticized me for something, I changed it. So you realize you might be this amalgamation of criticisms that were hurled at you, and not an actual person who’s made any of these choices themselves. And so I decided I needed to live a quiet life, because a quiet personal life invites no discussion, dissection, and debate. I didn’t realize I was inviting people to feel they had the right to sort of play my life like a video game.

“The old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now. Why? Because she’s dead!” was funny — but how seriously should we take it? There’s a part of me that definitely is always going to be different. I needed to grow up in many ways. I needed to make boundaries, to figure out what was mine and what was the public’s. That old version of me that shares unfailingly and unblinkingly with a world that is probably not fit to be shared with? I think that’s gone. But it was definitely just, like, a fun moment in the studio with me and Jack [Antonoff] where I wanted to play on the idea of a phone call — because that’s how all of this started, a stupid phone call I shouldn’t have picked up.

It would have been much easier if that’s what you’d just said. It would have been so, so great if I would have just said that [laughs].

Some of the Lover iconography does suggest old Taylor’s return, though. I don’t think I’ve ever leaned into the old version of myself more creatively than I have on this album, where it’s very, very autobiographical. But also moments of extreme catchiness and moments of extreme personal confession.

Did you do anything wrong from your perspective in dealing with that phone call? Is there anything you regret? The world didn’t understand the context and the events that led up to it. Because nothing ever just happens like that without some lead-up. Some events took place to cause me to be pissed off when he called me a bitch. That was not just a singular event. Basically, I got really sick of the dynamic between he and I. And that wasn’t just based on what happened on that phone call and with that song — it was kind of a chain reaction of things.

I started to feel like we reconnected, which felt great for me — because all I ever wanted my whole career after that thing happened in 2009 was for him to respect me. When someone doesn’t respect you so loudly and says you literally don’t deserve to be here — I just so badly wanted that respect from him, and I hate that about myself, that I was like, “This guy who’s antagonizing me, I just want his approval.” But that’s where I was. And so we’d go to dinner and stuff. And I was so happy, because he would say really nice things about my music. It just felt like I was healing some childhood rejection or something from when I was 19. But the 2015 VMAs come around. He’s getting the Vanguard Award. He called me up beforehand — I didn’t illegally record it, so I can’t play it for you. But he called me up, maybe a week or so before the event, and we had maybe over an hourlong conversation, and he’s like, “I really, really would like for you to present this Vanguard Award to me, this would mean so much to me,” and went into all the reasons why it means so much, because he can be so sweet. He can be the sweetest. And I was so stoked that he asked me that. And so I wrote this speech up, and then we get to the VMAs and I make this speech and he screams, “MTV got Taylor Swift up here to present me this award for ratings!” [His exact words: “You know how many times they announced Taylor was going to give me the award ’cause it got them more ratings?”] And I’m standing in the audience with my arm around his wife, and this chill ran through my body. I realized he is so two-faced. That he wants to be nice to me behind the scenes, but then he wants to look cool, get up in front of everyone and talk shit. And I was so upset. He wanted me to come talk to him after the event in his dressing room. I wouldn’t go. So then he sent this big, big thing of flowers the next day to apologize. And I was like, “You know what? I really don’t want us to be on bad terms again. So whatever, I’m just going to move past this.” So when he gets on the phone with me, and I was so touched that he would be respectful and, like, tell me about this one line in the song.

The line being “. . . me and Taylor might still have sex”? [Nods] And I was like, “OK, good. We’re back on good terms.” And then when I heard the song, I was like, “I’m done with this. If you want to be on bad terms, let’s be on bad terms, but just be real about it.” And then he literally did the same thing to Drake. He gravely affected the trajectory of Drake’s family and their lives. It’s the same thing. Getting close to you, earning your trust, detonating you. I really don’t want to talk about it anymore because I get worked up, and I don’t want to just talk about negative shit all day, but it’s the same thing. Go watch Drake talk about what happened. [West denied any involvement in Pusha-T’s revelation of Drake’s child and apologized for sending “negative energy” toward Drake.]

When did you get to the place that’s described on the opening track of Lover, “I Forgot That You Existed”? It was sometime on the Reputation tour, which was the most transformative emotional experience of my career. That tour put me in the healthiest, most balanced place I’ve ever been. After that tour, bad stuff can happen to me, but it doesn’t level me anymore. The stuff that happened a couple of months ago with Scott [Borchetta] would have leveled me three years ago and silenced me. I would have been too afraid to speak up. Something about that tour made me disengage from some part of public perception I used to hang my entire identity on, which I now know is incredibly unhealthy.

What was the actual revelation? It’s almost like I feel more clear about the fact that my job is to be an entertainer. It’s not like this massive thing that sometimes my brain makes it into, and sometimes the media makes it into, where we’re all on this battlefield and everyone’s gonna die except one person, who wins. It’s like, “No, do you know what? Katy is going to be legendary. Gaga is going to be legendary. Beyoncé is going to be legendary. Rihanna is going to be legendary. Because the work that they made completely overshadows the myopia of this 24-hour news cycle of clickbait.” And somehow I realized that on tour, as I was looking at people’s faces. We’re just entertaining people, and it’s supposed to be fun.

It’s interesting to look at these albums as a trilogy. 1989 was really a reset button. Oh, in every way. I’ve been very vocal about the fact that that decision was mine and mine alone, and it was definitely met with a lot of resistance. Internally.

After realizing that things were not all smiles with your former label boss, Scott Borchetta, it’s hard not to wonder how much additional conflict there was over things like that. A lot of the best things I ever did creatively were things that I had to really fight — and I mean aggressively fight — to have happen. But, you know, I’m not like him, making crazy, petty accusations about the past. . . . When you have a business relationship with someone for 15 years, there are going to be a lot of ups and a lot of downs. But I truly, legitimately thought he looked at me as the daughter he never had. And so even though we had a lot of really bad times and creative differences, I was going to hang my hat on the good stuff. I wanted to be friends with him. I thought I knew what betrayal felt like, but this stuff that happened with him was a redefinition of betrayal for me, just because it felt like it was family. To go from feeling like you’re being looked at as a daughter to this grotesque feeling of “Oh, I was actually his prized calf that he was fattening up to sell to the slaughterhouse that would pay the most.”

He accused you of declining the Parkland march and Manchester benefit show. Unbelievable. Here’s the thing: Everyone in my team knew if Scooter Braun brings us something, do not bring it to me. The fact that those two are in business together after the things he said about Scooter Braun — it’s really hard to shock me. And this was utterly shocking. These are two very rich, very powerful men, using $300 million of other people’s money to purchase, like, the most feminine body of work. And then they’re standing in a wood-panel bar doing a tacky photo shoot, raising a glass of scotch to themselves. Because they pulled one over on me and got this done so sneakily that I didn’t even see it coming. And I couldn’t say anything about it.

In some ways, on a musical level, Lover feels like the most indie-ish of your albums. That’s amazing, thank you. It’s definitely a quirky record. With this album, I felt like I sort of gave myself permission to revisit older themes that I used to write about, maybe look at them with fresh eyes. And to revisit older instruments — older in terms of when I used to use them. Because when I was making 1989, I was so obsessed with it being this concept of Eighties big pop, whether it was Eighties in its production or Eighties in its nature, just having these big choruses — being unapologetically big. And then Reputation, there was a reason why I had it all in lowercase. I felt like it wasn’t unapologetically commercial. It’s weird, because that is the album that took the most amount of explanation, and yet it’s the one I didn’t talk about. In the Reputation secret sessions I kind of had to explain to my fans, “I know we’re doing a new thing here that I’d never done before.” I’d never played with characters before. For a lot of pop stars, that’s a really fun trick, where they’re like, “This is my alter ego.” I had never played with that before. It’s really fun. And it was just so fun to play with on tour — the darkness and the bombast and the bitterness and the love and the ups and the downs of an emotional-turmoil record.

“Daylight” is a beautiful song. It feels like it could have been the title track. It almost was. I thought it might be a little bit too sentimental.

And I guess maybe too on-the-nose. Right, yeah, way too on-the-nose. That’s what I thought, because I was kind of in my head referring to the album as Daylight for a while. But Lover, to me, was a more interesting title, more of an accurate theme in my head, and more elastic as a concept. That’s why “You Need to Calm Down” can make sense within the theme of the album — one of the things it addresses is how certain people are not allowed to live their lives without discrimination just based on who they love.

For the more organic songs on this album, like “Lover” and “Paper Rings,” you said you were imagining a wedding band playing them. How often does that kind of visualization shape a song’s production style? Sometimes I’ll have a strange sort of fantasy of where the songs would be played. And so for songs like “Paper Rings” or “Lover” I was imagining a wedding-reception band, but in the Seventies, so they couldn’t play instruments that wouldn’t have been invented yet. I have all these visuals. For Reputation, it was nighttime cityscape. I didn’t really want any — or very minimal — traditional acoustic instruments. I imagined old warehouse buildings that had been deserted and factory spaces and all this industrial kind of imagery. So I wanted the production to have nothing wooden. There’s no wood floors on that album. Lover is, like, completely just a barn wood floor and some ripped curtains flowing in the breeze, and fields of flowers and, you know, velvet.

How did you come to use high school metaphors to touch on politics with “Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince”? There are so many influences that go into that particular song. I wrote it a couple of months after midterm elections, and I wanted to take the idea of politics and pick a metaphorical place for that to exist. And so I was thinking about a traditional American high school, where there’s all these kinds of social events that could make someone feel completely alienated. And I think a lot of people in our political landscape are just feeling like we need to huddle up under the bleachers and figure out a plan to make things better.

I feel like your Fall Out Boy fandom might’ve slipped out in that title. I love Fall Out Boy so much. Their songwriting really influenced me, lyrically, maybe more than anyone else. They take a phrase and they twist it. “Loaded God complex/Cock it and pull it”? When I heard that, I was like, “I’m dreaming.”

You sing about “American stories burning before me.” Do you mean the illusions of what America is? It’s about the illusions of what I thought America was before our political landscape took this turn, and that naivete that we used to have about it. And it’s also the idea of people who live in America, who just want to live their lives, make a living, have a family, love who they love, and watching those people lose their rights, or watching those people feel not at home in their home. I have that line “I see the high-fives between the bad guys” because not only are some really racist, horrific undertones now becoming overtones in our political climate, but the people who are representing those concepts and that way of looking at the world are celebrating loudly, and it’s horrific.

You’re in this weird place of being a blond, blue-eyed pop star in this era — to the point where until you endorsed some Democratic candidates, right-wingers, and worse, assumed you were on their side. I don’t think they do anymore. Yeah, that was jarring, and I didn’t hear about that until after it had happened. Because at this point, I, for a very long time, I didn’t have the internet on my phone, and my team and my family were really worried about me because I was not in a good place. And there was a lot of stuff that they just dealt with without telling me about it. Which is the only time that’s ever happened in my career. I’m always in the pilot seat, trying to fly the plane that is my career in exactly the direction I want to take it. But there was a time when I just had to throw my hands up and say, “Guys, I can’t. I can’t do this. I need you to just take over for me and I’m just going to disappear.”

Are you referring to when a white-supremacist site suggested you were on their team? I didn’t even see that, but, like, if that happened, that’s just disgusting. There’s literally nothing worse than white supremacy. It’s repulsive. There should be no place for it. Really, I keep trying to learn as much as I can about politics, and it’s become something I’m now obsessed with, whereas before, I was living in this sort of political ambivalence, because the person I voted for had always won. We were in such an amazing time when Obama was president because foreign nations respected us. We were so excited to have this dignified person in the White House. My first election was voting for him when he made it into office, and then voting to re-elect him. I think a lot of people are like me, where they just didn’t really know that this could happen. But I’m just focused on the 2020 election. I’m really focused on it. I’m really focused on how I can help and not hinder. Because I also don’t want it to backfire again, because I do feel that the celebrity involvement with Hillary’s campaign was used against her in a lot of ways.

You took a lot of heat for not getting involved. Does any part of you regret that you just didn’t say “fuck it” and gotten more specific when you said to vote that November? Totally. Yeah, I regret a lot of things all the time. It’s like a daily ritual.

Were you just convinced that it would backfire? That’s literally what it was. Yeah. It’s a very powerful thing when you legitimately feel like numbers have proven that pretty much everyone hates you. Like, quantifiably. That’s not me being dramatic. And you know that.

There were a lot of people in those stadiums. It’s true. But that was two years later. . . . I do think, as a party, we need to be more of a team. With Republicans, if you’re wearing that red hat, you’re one of them. And if we’re going to do anything to change what’s happening, we need to stick together. We need to stop dissecting why someone’s on our side or if they’re on our side in the right way or if they phrased it correctly. We need to not have the right kind of Democrat and the wrong kind of Democrat. We need to just be like, “You’re a Democrat? Sick. Get in the car. We’re going to the mall.”

Here’s a hard question for you: As a superfan, what did you think of the Game of Thrones finale? Oh, my God. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this. So, clinically our brain responds to our favorite show ending the same way we feel when a breakup occurs. I read that. There’s no good way for it to end. No matter what would have happened in that finale, people still would have been really upset because of the fact that it’s over.

I was glad to see you confirm that your line about a “list of names” was a reference to Arya. I like to be influenced by movies and shows and books and stuff. I love to write about a character dynamic. And not all of my life is going to be as kind of complex as these intricate webs of characters on TV shows and movies.

There was a time when it was. That’s amazing.

But is the idea that as your own life becomes less dramatic, you’ll need to pull ideas from other places? I don’t feel like that yet. I think I might feel like that possibly when I have a family. If I have a family. [Pauses] I don’t know why I said that! But that’s what I’ve heard from other artists, that they were very protective of their personal life, so they had to draw inspiration from other things. But again, I don’t know why I said that. Because I don’t know how my life is going to go or what I’m going to do. But right now, I feel like it’s easier for me to write than it ever was.

You don’t talk about your relationship, but you’ll sing about it in wildly revealing detail. What’s the difference for you? Singing about something helps you to express it in a way that feels more accurate. You cannot, no matter what, put words in a quote and have it move someone the same way as if you heard those words with the perfect sonic representation of that feeling... There is that weird conflict in being a confessional songwriter and then also having my life, you know, 10 years ago, be catapulted into this strange pop-culture thing.

I’ve heard you say that people got too interested in which song was about who, which I can understand — at the same time, to be fair, it was a game you played into, wasn’t it? I realized very early on that no matter what, that was going to happen to me regardless. So when you realize the rules of the game you’re playing and how it will affect you, you got to look at the board and make your strategy. But at the same time, writing songs has never been a strategic element of my career. But I’m not scared anymore to say that other things in my career, like how to market an album, are strictly strategic. And I’m sick of women not being able to say that they have strategic business minds — because male artists are allowed to. And so I’m sick and tired of having to pretend like I don’t mastermind my own business. But, it’s a different part of my brain than I use to write.

You’ve been masterminding your business since you were a teenager. Yeah, but I’ve also tried very hard — and this is one thing I regret — to convince people that I wasn’t the one holding the puppet strings of my marketing existence, or the fact that I sit in a conference room several times a week and come up with these ideas. I felt for a very long time that people don’t want to think of a woman in music who isn’t just a happy, talented accident. We’re all forced to kind of be like, “Aw, shucks, this happened again! We’re still doing well! Aw, that’s so great.” Alex Morgan celebrating scoring a goal at the World Cup and getting shit for it is a perfect example of why we’re not allowed to flaunt or celebrate, or reveal that, like, “Oh, yeah, it was me. I came up with this stuff.” I think it’s really unfair. People love new female artists so much because they’re able to explain that woman’s success. There’s an easy trajectory. Look at the Game of Thrones finale. I specifically really related to Daenerys’ storyline because for me it portrayed that it is a lot easier for a woman to attain power than to maintain it.

I mean, she did murder... It’s a total metaphor! Like, obviously I didn’t want Daenerys to become that kind of character, but in taking away what I chose to take away from it, I thought maybe they’re trying to portray her climbing the ladder to the top was a lot easier than maintaining it, because for me, the times when I felt like I was going insane was when I was trying to maintain my career in the same way that I ascended. It’s easier to get power than to keep it. It’s easier to get acclaim than to keep it. It’s easier to get attention than to keep it.

Well, I guess we should be glad you didn’t have a dragon in 2016... [Fiercely] I told you I don’t like that she did that! But, I mean, watching the show, though, maybe this is a reflection on how we treat women in power, how we are totally going to conspire against them and tear at them until they feel this — this insane shift, where you wonder, like, “What changed?” And I’ve had that happen, like, 60 times in my career where I’m like, “OK, you liked me last year, what changed? I guess I’ll change so I can keep entertaining you guys.”

You once said that your mom could never punish you when you were little because you’d punish yourself. This idea of changing in the face of criticism and needing approval — that’s all part of wanting to be good, right? Whatever that means. But that seems to be a real driving force in your life. Yeah, that’s definitely very perceptive of you. And the question posed to me is, if you kept trying to do good things, but everyone saw those things in a cynical way and assumed them to be done with bad motivation and bad intent, would you still do good things, even though nothing that you did was looked at as good? And the answer is, yes. Criticism that’s constructive is helpful to my character growth. Baseless criticism is stuff I’ve got to toss out now.

That sounds healthy. Is this therapy talking or is this just experience? No, I’ve never been to therapy. I talk to my mom a lot, because my mom is the one who’s seen everything. God, it takes so long to download somebody on the last 29 years of my life, and my mom has seen it all. She knows exactly where I’m coming from. And we talk endlessly. There were times when I used to have really, really, really bad days where we would just be on the phone for hours and hours and hours. I’d write something that I wanted to say, and instead of posting it, I’d just read it to her.

I somehow connect all this to the lyric in “Daylight,” the idea of “so many lines that I’ve crossed unforgiven” — it’s a different kind of confession. I am really glad you liked that line, because that’s something that does bother me, looking back at life and realizing that no matter what, you screw things up. Sometimes there are people that were in your life and they’re not anymore — and there’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t fix it, you can’t change it. I told the fans last night that sometimes on my bad days, I feel like my life is a pile of crap accumulated of only the bad headlines or the bad things that have happened, or the mistakes I’ve made or clichés or rumors or things that people think about me or have thought for the last 15 years. And that was part of the “Look What You Made Me Do” music video, where I had a pile of literal old selves fighting each other.

But, yeah, that line is indicative of my anxiety about how in life you can’t get everything right. A lot of times you make the wrong call, make the wrong decision. Say the wrong thing. Hurt people, even if you didn’t mean to. You don’t really know how to fix all of that. When it’s, like, 29 years’ worth.

To be Mr. “Rolling Stone” for a second, there’s a Springsteen lyric, “Ain’t no one leaving this world, buddy/Without their shirttail dirty or hands a little bloody.” That’s really good! No one gets through it unscathed. No one gets through in one piece. I think that’s a hard thing for a lot of people to grasp. I know it was hard for me, because I kind of grew up thinking, “If I’m nice, and if I try to do the right thing, you know, maybe I can just, like, ace this whole thing.” And it turns out I can’t.

It’s interesting to look at “I Did Something Bad” in this context. You pointing that out is really interesting because it’s something I’ve had to reconcile within myself in the last couple of years — that sort of “good” complex. Because from the time I was a kid I’d try to be kind, be a good person. Try really hard. But you get walked all over sometimes. And how do you respond to being walked all over? You can’t just sit there and eat your salad and let it happen. “I Did Something Bad” was about doing something that was so against what I would usually do. Katy [Perry] and I were talking about our signs. . . . [Laughs] Of course we were.

That’s the greatest sentence ever. [Laughs] I hate you. We were talking about our signs because we had this really, really long talk when we were reconnecting and stuff. And I remember in the long talk, she was like, “If we had one glass of white wine right now, we’d both be crying.” Because we were drinking tea. We’ve had some really good conversations.

We were talking about how we’ve had miscommunications with people in the past, not even specifically with each other. She’s like, “I’m a Scorpio. Scorpios just strike when they feel threatened.” And I was like, “Well, I’m an archer. We literally stand back, assess the situation, process how we feel about it, raise a bow, pull it back, and fire.” So it’s completely different ways of processing pain, confusion, misconception. And oftentimes I’ve had this delay in feeling something that hurts me and then saying that it hurts me. Do you know what I mean? And so I can understand how people in my life would have been like, “Whoa, I didn’t know that was how you felt.” Because it takes me a second.

If you watch the video of the 2009 VMAs, I literally freeze. I literally stand there. And that is how I handle any discomfort, any pain. I stand there, I freeze. And then five minutes later, I know how I feel. But in the moment, I’m probably overreacting and I should be nice. Then I process it, and in five minutes, if it’s gone, it’s past, and I’m like, “I was overreacting, everything’s fine. I can get through this. I’m glad I didn’t say anything harsh in the moment.” But when it’s actually something bad that happened, and I feel really, really hurt or upset about it, I only know after the fact. Because I’ve tried so hard to squash it: “This probably isn’t what you think.” That’s something I had to work on.

You could end up gaslighting yourself. Yeah, for sure. ’Cause so many situations where if I would have said the first thing that came to my mind, people would have been like, “Whoa!” And maybe I would have been wrong or combative. So a couple of years ago I started working on actually just responding to my emotions in a quicker fashion. And it’s really helped with stuff. It’s helped so much because sometimes you get in arguments. But conflict in the moment is so much better than combat after the fact.

Well, thanks. I do feel like I just did a therapy session. As someone who’s never been to therapy, I can safely say that was the best therapy session.

[cozycryptidcorner]

Here is a monster match for the wonderful @rofax! 

“Aquarius Sun/Virgo Moon/Taurus Rising. Little bit of an astrology nerd. I like to learn about it. I also think it’s totally made up and makes no logical/scientific sense, but is also right basically 100% of the time. Idk how much you know about astrology but basically I am an eccentric bitch who wants to save the world, is emotionally precise and perfectionist, and seems to really like material things and food! WAHOO. People say my sense of humor is the best thing about me and/or I make them laugh the most, big old bleeding heart, especially for animals. Easily overstimulated ): Anxiety and ADHD are a bitch lol. No self esteem to speak of. I am an atrocity before god. Speaking of: very quiet convert to and practitioner of old (would now be considered) pagan faith. Multiple gods, ancestor worship, local spirits, etc.”

You have been matched with a Huldrekall, the shy, beautiful male counterpart of the alluring Huldra. Contrary to popular belief brought to you by the patriarchy, the Huldrekall are not, in fact, shriveled and disgusting to look at, it’s just that straight men don’t like feeling sexually threatened, not even by forest spirits that they don’t ever see. Like the females, the Huldrekall are almost intangibly beautiful, with soft, glossy hair and large, innocent eyes, and have mossy, hollowed out backs. While they might easily cover up their backs with clothing, the tails are a bit less easy to hide, as the Huldrekall and Huldras use them for balance, and thus must shift them about while moving.

Like other forest spirits, the Huldra and Huldrekall can be found among the trees at a reasonable distance from human society. Oh, they do sometimes come out of their hiding places, put on a dress, and mingle, in the guise of a mysterious visitor or a passing traveler, but their home will always be back in the forest, no matter how many broken hearts they might leave behind. Besides the occasional affair, the Huldra and Huldrekall have a symbiotic relationship with coal burners, as they are willing to watch over the kilns at night in exchange for human food and the occasional piece of clothing. The coal burners don’t get the privilege of seeing their helpers, though, but sleep easy knowing their equipment is being cared for.

Shockingly, the Huldra and Huldrekall seem to respond well to things like good manners, polite exchanges, and positive interactions, almost like they are people with thoughts and opinions of their own. Though, when crossed, the Huldra and Huldrekall are terrifying when they want to be, merciless, cold, just as a human who has been horribly slighted might act. You think that their kind are, well, people, though that’s not what the fear-mongering, power-hungry humans would have anyone believe. Despite the lower, working-class people out in the country knowing better, the city folk are quick to think that what is unknown must be evil.

You met your Huldrekall while you were out gathering herbs and flowers, deep within the forest. He was laying out in the sun on a large tree root, back towards the sky, face nestled in his arms. It takes you exactly three seconds to realize what you’re looking at before you manage to step on a stray stick, the noise snapping loud enough to make your hair stand on end. Your Huldrekall sits up like a shot, his wide, sparkling eyes a light, dusty magenta, and he looks at you, fear dancing across his face, but something else, too. Curiosity? Fascination? You can’t tell before he scampers his tall but lithe body up the tree and through the leaves, hiding from you in the greenery, yet still clearly present as you try to go about your day.

Your Huldrekall follows you as you try to focus on the herbs you need, clinging to the bark of the trees like a child might hang on their mother. At first, you try ignoring him, thinking that he’s only keeping an eye on you because of fear, but there doesn’t seem to be a single essence of tenseness in his body as he slides down from one branch to another. While you focus solely on pretending to not notice his movements, he slowly, tentatively approaches, you can feel his unabashed stare burning through your back. Still, you don’t turn around, nor give him any hint that you know that he is there, because a part of you is just as interested in him as he seemingly is in you, and you don’t want to scare him off.

While you can hear him stiffen every time you accidentally make a move too sudden for his comfort, you don’t realize how close to you he really is until you risk a glance over your shoulder. He’s right there, balanced carefully on a low hanging branch, watching you work with fascinated eyes. He also doesn’t run when he catches you looking at him, either, which you suppose is a step in the right direction, he only flinches back ever so slightly. But he’s still there.

You have to go back home eventually, even though you would like for a moment so magical as this to continue on. As you walk back to the forest’s edge, your friend disappears along the way, slinking back through the trees. You don’t even know that he’s gone until you turn around to look for him, finding nothing more than the grass and leaves, and you feel… well, disappointed, you suppose, but unsurprised. Still, your work will have you back in the forest to forage again soon enough, and a part of you hopes that you will see him when that time comes.

He finds you when it does come, in the dusty rose of the early twilight sky, looking for the petal of a particular flower that only blooms during the first light of dawn. Your Huldrekall approaches with more openness this time around, no longer poised and ready flee. There are times when he is… very close, looking over your shoulder, cheek almost touching yours, becoming more and more difficult to ignore. Almost as though he’s suddenly decided to demand attention, yet is still too shy to put anything to words.

You’re on your knees, fingers digging through the ground in search of certain roots. He’s mirroring you, sitting across the thicket, hands carefully to the side as he watches you work. Absentmindedly, you begin speaking, not really sure what to do with yourself or the strange silence. “This is used for joint pain, you grind it up into a paste, then rub it in the inflamed areas.”

“Really?” He asks, the first thing he ever says to you. His voice is smooth, soft, like a sip of cool water on a hot day, and a little tingle runs down your spine.

“Y-yes,” you manage to gain your footing again, “it can ease stomach pains too if chewed and swallowed in low quantities.”

He’s a quick learner, you’ll give him that. It probably helps that his curiosity seems insatiable, and once he starts talking, he shows no signs of stopping. The chatting isn’t unwelcome, though, and you find him to be a good conversationalist, despite his immediate lack of knowledge of anything outside the forest. Well, he actually has much information when it comes to the ancient magic of the trees themselves, even showing you how to gently tease a bit of energy from the bark if needed. Prayers must be said before and after, as the spirits of the forest don’t take kindly to pillaging.

Your Huldrekall is remarkably bright, too, able to pick up your tips and tricks with little to no trouble, able to remember just about everything that comes out of your mouth. All the little remedies and medicines you make don’t seem to matter much to him or his kind, though, because of their little magic tricks that seem to do the same, just in a different manner of execution. Still, though, he’s interested in “human way of things,” as he calls it, copying your work as you forage and search for different plants. One day, though, you go home and find a little bouquet of plants tied together with a vine, a collection that you don’t remember assembling.

You’ve started making a pretty penny selling roots and herbs from the deeper center of the forest since your kind doesn’t like going very far passed the outlying trees. Thanks to your magical guide, though, you’re able to venture out much deeper than you might risk by yourself, without having to worry about finding your way back. You could blindfold your Huldrekall, shake him about, and drag him through the trees and vines for miles, and he’d still be able to lead you back to the village where you live. It’s rather convenient, you suppose, but you don’t let anyone know just how easy it is for you, people pay you more if you act like you almost died by some giant, carnivorous flower mere hours before.

The gifts keep appearing. No longer in your basket, sometimes you find a pretty stone or dried blossom in your pockets, now, too, and though you try to figure out how he managed to slip them there without noticing, you can’t. You keep everything in a little box, pressing any flowers carefully between books of medicine, and polishing the stones if you get the chance. After letting the gifts pile up a bit, you decide to return the favor, getting a little knick-knack that you’ve kept lying around your home. You don’t really have anything you can slip it in since your Huldrekall is… well, naked, so you cut out the third party and give him the gift point-blank.

He’s enthralled by it, and by the seeming lack of shyness on your part. Even though it’s just a little cheap object you’ve managed to pick up sometime in your past, he acts like it might be worth its weight in gold. While you don’t really know what he does with it, you suppose that he must have a nest of some kind, but after that day, you begin to see more of his kind out of the corner of your eye. Up in the trees, hiding between leaves, watching with careful, weary eyes. Like him, though, they warm up to you eventually, some taking longer than others.

You fell asleep, perhaps by accident, one evening. Last night and the night before had been late ones, so your brain is clouded and your movements sluggish. In your head, you only meant to lay among the flowers for a few moments, just to restore a bit of your strength, but after you open your eyes, the sun is in an entirely different position in the sky. Your Huldrekall is nearby, sitting atop a log, his vulnerable back facing you as he plays lookout. He looks back when he hears you stirring, offering a reassuring, sweet smile. You lay your head back down and continue resting, feeling the warmth of safety emanating from him.

Sometime after that, he started to gently tug at your hand when you leave the forest, a little, reassuring squeeze, one that you don’t find unwelcome. Once, he follows you through the town, wearing fairly clean clothes from god knows where, and spends the night at your home. People look and people talk, but no one’s whispers bother you or your business, and they sure as hell don’t bother your Huldrekall. His spirit is free and magnetic, those same people who would demonize you for fraternizing outside your species soon become enthralled in his stories and words. Maybe you are a little jealous of all the attention he gets, but he makes it clear that he only has eyes for you. 

The old gods in the forest are long forgotten by man, but not by your Huldrekall or his kind. They do a sort of worship that must have existed since the dawn of time, dancing and singing towards the moon whenever it is full. You get invited soon after your acceptance by his people, and even though you are nothing more than a quiet, interested viewer at first, that is quick to change. Eventually, you end up holding hands with other Huldra, aiming your face towards the sky and singing a hymn made with a language so old that the words themselves hold power.

[cannabisrefugee-esq]

(via Antiauthoritarianism: Illustration via Juxtaposition.)

If the above vid is not the perfect illustration of concept I don’t know what is. This is the most recent YouTube upload by Royalty Soaps, what used to be a one-woman soapmaking business that has grown over several years into something else. The backstory here seems to be that at some point, the eldest yet still teenaged daughter in some freakishly large Quiverfull-type family consisting of a mother, a father and a dozen(ish) Irish twins* started making soap and with the help and support of that family has become very successful and has now delegated some of her substantial duties to others.

As described in this vid, this woman’s business recently experienced an unexpected and frightening setback and she relied heavily on her family to correct the situation and save the day, which they did in spades.  They also had the time, energy, material resources and desire to throw her an Insta-worthy backyard 25th birthday party in the midst of this family project.  The party was beautiful and the familial love and care given and received there, as documented in this vid…well watch it for yourself and see what you think.  For me, the experience of watching this was somewhat complicated.  I enjoyed it, was moved by it but it made me deeply uncomfortable and thinky…and hungry for salad, cake and sun tea.

What was so deeply disturbing to me about this footage was the backdrop against which it was shot and I’m not referring to her (albeit somewhat disturbing) home state of Texas, or a photo prop.  The backdrop here, as it is most everywhere, is the social context of capitalism and patriarchy and what that means is that, in order for this situation and this footage to exist, this woman has had to comply, comply, comply in order to reap what must be conditional rewards of love; affection; physical presence and caretaking; emotional care and concern; and finally, material things that, under the current system, really only money can buy.  Doesn’t it?  In her case, she has had to buy into the religious, political and social traditions of her family including the patriarchal authority of her parents, the heterosexual and mommy mandates and more in order to have what she has.  Of course, the traditions of her family mirror the traditions of her culture more or less exactly.

Luckily for her there does not seem to be any obvious conflict between her own values, conscience etc. and that of her family (or culture) but what if there was?  What would happen to her if she woke up one day with, say, environmental concerns implicating overpopulation and natalism, or economic concerns implicating capitalism and the money system and the ethics of making and selling soap (or doing anything) for profit?  What if, God forbid, this Quiverfull (or whatever) daughter woke up one day with feminist concerns which implicate all of that plus the destablization of the patriarchal authority of her father/parents, her husband, her church and the State?

Let’s talk about anitauthoritarianism for a bit.  Antiauthoritarians, as far as I understand, do not normally stand around trying to sip lemonade through twigs, pissing in the wind or paddling swamped canoes sideways upstream; antiauthoritarians accept some authority in other words, like natural authority/natural law including the laws of physics.  As described in this article from the Mad In America blog, antiauthoritarians just flatly reject illegitimate authority, or authority that appears to be illegitimate to them:

Anti-authoritarians question whether an authority is a legitimate one before taking that authority seriously. Evaluating the legitimacy of authorities includes assessing whether or not authorities actually know what they are talking about, are honest, and care about those people who are respecting their authority. And when anti-authoritarians assess an authority to be illegitimate, they challenge and resist that authority—sometimes aggressively and sometimes passive-aggressively, sometimes wisely and sometimes not.

People who do not or cannot accept what they see as illegitimate authority commonly become socially and financially disenfranchised leading to isolation and chronic poverty, homelessness and physical injury and disease.  Contributing to their disenfranchisement, they are also often diagnosed, by capitalistic patriarchal medical authority no less, as being mentally ill.  Which is exactly what authoritarian medical providers would tend to think of — and do to — anti-authoritarians innit.

In the case of the founder of Royalty Soaps, she seems to be doing quite well for herself, as far as we know is happy, healthy, and (therefore implicitly) socially, mentally, emotionally, intellectually and materially well-supported.  But what did it take for her to get there?  Under the current system of capitalism and patriarchy, since she is not particularly disenfranchised I think we can infer at least that either she is an authoritarian or that she is an antiauthoritarian who has decided that capitalistic and patriarchal authority is legitimate.   Can’t we?  I suspect that she is an authoritarian but even if she isn’t, in either case, she has been willing and able to take direction and correction from (for example) a serial impregnator (her father), a domesticated/patriarchal woman (her mother), an entitled male child (her young husband) and others with such dubious credentials and she seems to be fine with this.  To be fair, her parents and family do seem to be nice people.

Funnily enough, in this vid we also see her taking direction and correction directly from the capitalistic patriarchal State by way of the town’s Fire Marshall who evicted her noncompliant workspace from her property, but if she ever wakes up with antiauthoritarian tendencies and an anticapitalist or pro-feminist bent the Fire Marshall — or even the State — will be the least of her problems.

The concept of antiauthoritarianism under conditions of capitalism and patriarchy has given me much food for thought and insights into my own life and struggles as a feminist woman in a capitalist patriarchy: I am pretty obviously an antiauthoritarian myself and have been unable to consistently take direction and correction from patriarchal authority which I have deemed illegitimate on its face.  Of course, under a more or less global social system founded on patriarchy ALL social authority is rather inherently patriarchal isn’t it.  That explains a lot.

I simply cannot take impregnators and oppressors of women or their authority seriously, I cannot take patriarchal handmaidens and/or domesticated women and their authority seriously.  If some fucking porn addicted greasy manager/patriarchal enforcer/capitalist/prick says or implies that I have to do thus and so or else I will become homeless and raped (disenfranchised in other words) I have always had a serious problem with that.**  I don’t know why more people don’t, except that they are either authoritarians, or antiauthoritarians who think the authority of porn addicted greasy pricks is rooted in something legitimate.  Some people probably do think that, yes.  But I don’t.  And “authoritarian” is not that great of a thing to be.

au·thor·i·tar·i·an adjective favoring or enforcing strict obedience to authority, especially that of the government, at the expense of personal freedom.

“the transition from an authoritarian to a democratic regime”

synonyms:  autocratic, dictatorial, totalitarian, despotic, tyrannical, autarchic, draconian, absolute, arbitrary, oppressive, repressive, illiberal, undemocratic, antidemocratic

noun an authoritarian person. synonyms:  autocrat, despot, dictator, tyrant, absolutist.

*The youngest sibling, a toddler girl, was born with Down’s Syndrome and has leukemia for which the parents are subjecting her to chemo and radiation treatment. On that basis alone some people would start to seriously question the values and customs of this family and this culture but this woman doesn’t.  Not yet anyway.

**I don’t have any problem avoiding homelessness by, say, not playing with fire, not living on a flood plain if I can help it (learned that one the hard way) or not disassembling my home with a screwdriver and selling the pieces for scrap.  That means something.  And the sicker I get, not-doing things — as opposed to doing things — is about the best I can do anyway.

Comments Open.

[drunklander]

Drunj!Der Yells About Outlander

Thoughts on Ep. 402

It shouldn’t be surprising when I say this post is going to be less jokey than last week. If that’s not your jam, I recommend you stop reading now and maybe just sing “Everyone is Garbage” to the tune of Everything is Awesome while you instead go watch the entirety of Underground, or the Rosa Parks episode of Doctor Who.

I have to say, the producers on this show have said a lot of dumb shit in the past. From “Frank’s a good guy!” when he’s portrayed as being objectively awful on screen to “We don’t shy away from the horrors of the past because we’re so daring like that!” as a justification of their need to rape or assault everyone with a pulse. But one of the dumbest things in recent memory was at NYCC when Ron tried to claim that Outlander isn’t a political show.

Bullshit. Everything is political.

Using America the Beautiful to underscore how America didn’t, and still doesn’t, live up to the ideals we sing about in our romanticized versions of our history was political. Albeit in an overly heavy-handed way. Choosing to do an episode about slavery that focuses solely on white people and not the enslaved, who are just there as props for the white people’s moral dilemmas, is political. Choosing to show a lynching on screen in a time when Black people are still being killed in horrifying numbers at the hands of white people who are supposed to serve and protect, in a time when Black people have the police called on them while simply having a cookout in a public park, in a time when a white man can shoot an unarmed Black boy and walk away with no consequences, is political.

How we portray Black bodies on screen matters. And in this instance, a *very* white show chose to frame enslaved people as the props against which they highlight the guilt of the white protagonists.

I really do wish they included someone checking to see if Claire, who had a man killed right in front of her, was ok. But instead she just does the emotional labor of assuaging Jamie’s guilt over Bonnet’s attack. Because doing emotional labor is just what women do. *flips off the patriarchy and also the producers*

Young Ian’s awe at River Run, how it’s befitting a king, just highlights how he has no context for what the symbol of a big white plantation house means for so many people. That image is so laden with white supremacy it should immediately trigger a bad taste in any decent person’s mouth. Go ahead and @ me.

Jocasta Cameron is straight garbage, but Maria Doyle Kennedy is fucking amazing. A++ casting, show.

Not sure if the parallel of Jocasta telling Claire to call her Auntie and Claire telling Phaedre and Mary to call her Claire was intentional or not. Will have more to say about that in a second...

Honest question, if the dog who plays Rollo is so poorly trained that they have to cut him out of most scenes, why didn’t they get a different dog? Slash, I thought they’d been training this one since it was a puppy?

“Some River Run hospitality.” *feels nauseous*

I SO hope they don’t do the Jocasta and Ulysses having an affair storyline from the books. Please, show, don’t do it.

Show!Jocasta is so much more overtly garbage than book!Jocasta. This is a woman who had to flee her country after the Rising because of how horrible the English were to the Scots. Yet she doesn’t bat an eye at the concept of keeping human beings as property. Even with Jamie, she isn’t thinking of him as his own person, but rather someone she can make do her bidding and use for her own purposes. She should fucking know better, but the promise of benefiting from white supremacy is apparently more beneficial than actually having morals. Fuck you, Jocasta.

Claire’s palpable discomfort with being led around by an enslaved man juxtaposed with Jamie thinking nothing of it as he reminisces about his mother is just the start of me side-eyeing Jamie a lot this episode.

Don’t worry, I’m an equal opportunity side-eye’er. Claire’s gonna get her share of it too. Starting with her asking Phaedre and Mary to call her Claire.

Claire. You know all about chattel slavery. You know it’s wrong. You know how enslaved people are treated. Why the fuck would you ask Phaedre and Mary to put themselves in a position to potentially face serious consequences for not being “properly deferential” to a white person just to make yourself feel better about being complicit in their enslavement. She’s prioritizing making herself feel better at the expense of the potential well-being of Phaedre and Mary. JFC, Claire, do not endanger the marginalized people you claim to care about in the name of wokeness.

The skunk bit with Young Ian and John Quincy Myers is a tad off-putting tbh. I love that Ian wants to learn about Native Americans and looks to find similarities with them rather than think of them as “savages,” but like they’re having this convo while completely ignoring the fact that an enslaved boy is filling the tub and like immediately just start talking about banging Native American women. It just feels like they were stretching for some levity when the characters in this episode don’t deserve any.

Jamie: “Uncle Hector and you have achieved a great amount here, Auntie.” Me:

Jocasta: “I purchase them in lots, in order to keep those with children together.” Me:

“Over the years, I found my slaves to be more productive when treated with benevolence. You see, I don’t actually see them as people. I only treat them nicely so my property can reach its maximum potential output. I am a garbage human and the myth of the benevolent slave owner is just bullshit that white people tell themselves to absolve themselves of the fact that they benefit from white supremacy.”

That Jocasta can refer to the people she enslaves as both too expensive to be livestock and friends in almost the same breath is peak caucasity. Seriously, show!Jocasta is an irredeemably shit person.

Also Jamie being like oh well done, Auntie, you are so nice to these people makes me want to punch him in his dumbass face. Show!Jamie has been on my last nerve for a while tbh.

Like bro, you literally lived in a cave for fucking years because the English were out to fuck Scots up. You were in prison for fucking years. You served on an English estate, where you were raped, for fucking years. And now you see people who were ripped from their homes and families and brought across the sea against their will (hey remember your nephew, Ian?) and you’re like oh Auntie, you’re such a nice white lady. Go fuck yourself, Jamie.

Jocasta playing the woman card with Jamie to justify her needing him to get involved with the enslaved labor on her plantation is something Colum would be proud of.

And Jocasta being like hey, “Claire, you’ve been homeless for a hot minute, shower me in praise for how nice my slave-run house is as I ‘graciously’ let you stay here” is such a power move in the worst possible way. Colum and Dougal raise a glass from whatever afterworld they ended up in.

Claire, girl, why couch your opposition to slavery in the Quaker influence. Own your opinions on this. Take a fucking stand. There are things in life worth standing up for. This is fucking one of them.

Oh Jenny. I love that she wrote to Jocasta about Claire. But also last season still turned me the hell off from show!Jenny so really I don’t like that lady.

Fuck each and every one of these yuppie white men.

Aw, woke-ish!Ian. Yes, it was their land, but let’s please not think of the Native American women as sexual conquests like you were earlier. KThxBai.

Ok for real, after living at Leoch and scheming through Paris and then being fucked over by Bonnet, Jamie sure doesn't learn much about people being sneaky. How does he not see where Jocasta was going when she so readily positioned him in a position of authority on the plantation.

Jamie, bro, buying into the benevolent slave owner narrative is not a good look. And by not a good look, I mean you are a garbage person. I get that that’s the point, but still.

Ok so the book frames Campbell as a friend to the Frasers, and the show is trying to frame him as someone genuinely trying to look out for the Frasers’ best interest. But he has also resigned himself to the reality of his current situation with no desire to try to make things better since it would mean making a personal sacrifice. To which I say, fuck you very much, you coward.

Hi, I’m Der, and I’m of the opinion that if you are in a place of privilege and see bigotry and oppression taking place, it’s your duty to stand the fuck up and try to make a change. 

“If we take the Tryon option, we don’t need to feel bad about slavery and can just bask in our white privilege on stolen Native American land and not have to deal with the consequences of accepting free land from the English, y’know, the people we hate, for almost a decade.” Cool, Jamie. Cool cool cool. Remember last episode when you were almost woke? 

Claire acting naive about what’s going to happen to Rufus should seem out of character. She went back into the past knowing full well how things were there. She knew that if she went back, she’d be in a time where this was the reality. Yes, she thought she’d be in Scotland, but that’s just another sign of her fucking privilege. She was like oh, I’ll just be in Edinburgh and not have to consider slavery. Joe Abernathy did not deserve the shaft he got in season three and he does not deserve fucking peak-white-privilege-the-past-is-fine-because-it-doesn’t-really-affect-me Claire as his friend.

Scrub Nurse!Ian is literally the only positive part of this episode.

This entire scene of a room of white guys being like “we need to uphold the law!” makes me want to kick the shit out of each and every fucker who has ever owned a confederate battle flag t-shirt or a bumper sticker. 

Also fuck each and every person who voted for the authoritarian narcissist who currently occupies the white house in 2016 or any of his fucking lackeys in the midterms. All these fuckers are straight garbage. And all the fuckers defending the authoritarian tendencies of the current administration can go fuck themselves. Go ahead and @ me.

“Don’t worry, my husband is heir to this estate.” Oh don’t fucking delude yourself, Claire. Rufus is going to die. And you are complicit in his death. Fucking own it.

*insert obligatory Joe Abernathy deserved better rant here*

I don’t like giving partial credit, but at least the show let fucking Rufus tell his own story. Just for a little bit though.

Ok I’m calling fucking bullshit that Ulysses, a man who (I don’t care what his relationship with Jocasta has been) has been enslaved for years, fucking calls Claire out and tells her she should have let Rufus die. Way to fucking try to absolve Claire by having a Black, enslaved man try to make her upcoming actions ok.

Don’t act naive, Claire. You know how this was going to end. Rufus was always going to die. You are complicit. There is no escaping that. Fucking own your part. Fucking own your privilege. And also fuck the show for centering this so much on the fucking white people.

Rufus didn't get to be an active participant in his own death. Claire should *not* have been absolved of her decision to kill him by having him ask her to do it. But by not even telling him what she's doing, she's just another white person making decisions for him without his consent. She also should have known to kill him without Jamie telling her to. *gestures at the Graham Menzies part of the books* She knows what's about to happen. She should accept that by choosing to be in the southern colonies, she's going to be complicit in slavery. She made her bed when she decided to go back into the past and now she should have to lay in it. 

Sure she may not have known that she’d end up in the colonies, but she still knew she’d be going back to a time when she’d end up being part of something that is morally abhorrent. But apparently getting that ginger dick was worth it.

It’s cute they do a parallel of her helping Rufus to die with her helping Geordie to die. But I can’t help but think this is as much for her as for him.

Every white person in this episode is trash. As they fucking should be.

Fuck everyone who defends the continued existence of confederate memorial statues tbh.

I know that’s out of left field, but yeah, fuck those people.

The fact that this shit is bringing up very real feelings about today’s political climate makes me fucking angry at the fuckers around today and also the fucking production crew for trying to cater to the meemaws by saying the show isn’t political.

Fuck Jamie for being like yeah, I can just pray this shit away. No. God is a cop out. You did this. YOU. You need to own this. Don’t you dare hide behind your faith. You will not be absolved.

Fuck this show for showing a fucking lynching and them immediately cutting to Claire’s face to make the lynching about her white guilt. Fuck them. 

If Jamie and Claire really don't want to be complicit in the atrocities of colonial America, they should move to a city where they could join in the work of starting to dismantle the things they claim to be morally opposed to. Instead they embrace their privilege of getting to ignore slavery by leaving River Run next week and go out to colonize Native American lands.

And just think. After all of this. After witnessing a lynching. In a couple episodes, Jamie’s gonna voluntarily send a guy into slavery! 

Fuck.

Please all go read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me. KThxBai.

[frankincenseisnotamonster]

The Rise

EXPECT IT! 

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DEETS:  

Today is the day we investigate. 

“Then one day you realized you would still be fighting duels, 

That you don’t just wake up changed, 

Your fight for change is in all the work, 

In every micro adjustment you make,

Every time you learn a new chord progression, 

It’s in the days your pinky slowly becomes more mobile, 

In accepting each setback after each triumph, 

And taking refuge, 

And feeling a sense of solace, 

That it is all practice, 

Practice in not betraying yourself, 

Practice in being soft, 

Practice in injuring the patriarchy, 

Practice in holding up up one more stair for the womxn who will come after, 

Gazing up at the infinite spiral, hoping for a better chance for the next generations, 

A view from the summit, 

That’s why you practice, 

That’s why you fight, 

That’s a reason to rock.” 

What a wild time to be alive. This shelter in place has been stressful and devastating for so many, and while there is suffering I am grateful for the pause. I have been practicing more guitar and yoga, and doing shadow work. Shadow work refers to a type of psychology that examines the shadow, part of ourselves we may try to hide or deny. Hi ego, hey shame, welcome back pride, you never really left though right, I accept you selfishness, oh judgement my old friend. 

Stuff like that, I don’t want to look at it, but that’s a gift of time, like the universe saying, “oh I see you have a lot to work on, well you gon work on it now!” 

And I feel personal work, shadow work, inner work are important for activism and helping others, so you can meet community from a place of deep awareness. This is important. 

It’s strange similar to the guitar battles, this quarantine, this time is making me face my self. Like I’M REALLY FACING MYSELF! And this is hard, but it is strangely enjoyable. I’m thankful for the privilege to be able to look at myself as a complex, imperfect human being. I feel like I am going through a dark night of the soul over here, but maybe thats what I’m always doing. 

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I am thinking of my upcoming guitar battle, the 3rd one, the last one. And to go forward I want to take a moment to go back to what I post 2 years ago in May 2018: 

Over the course of about 5 years I ran into 3 guys that I had different experiences with, but all of them left me very changed and usually for the better.

I was lovely lonely and wanted attention so I reluctantly ran towards guys who wouldn’t and couldn’t give me affection. But this wasn’t all true.

I wanted what was unavailable because I didn’t want to face myself. And the problem with attention is that you cannot have enough. I ran to the wrong people to run away from myself.

After many tears, waking up at 6 am, doing things I wasn’t proud of, manic, and out of breath what I remembered was guitar. I think what we seek out and what we envy says a lot about us.

And what I noticed about all these dudes was how much fun they seemed to be having playing guitar. So I try to listen to my envy now, my difficult parts, the hyena. Walk with your hyena.  I want do what I admire others for doing.

So instead of running to guys with guitar, I will try to be a girl with a guitar running to myself. But is that really such a good idea?

Looking at this is so fun, because even though I am still doing lots of work on myself and on guitar. This is the time to do it, and I am learning again and again how to run to myself in the most authentic and true way for me.

 I still do things I am not proud of, but things do knock me down like they used to, trespasses make me laugh, I’m walking with my hyena, accepting the hard parts of myself and I’m having fun playing guitar!  I know the more I learn the more fun I’ll have. 

One of my dear friends was married recently, and although the wedding that was planned couldn’t happen, like the rebels we are my group of friends created a small event for the married couple! This was really special to me because my band mate and I got to play some music for them and create a special song just for them. When I think back to a few years ago maybe I could have done a play or something I don’t know! But now I can make and play music, I can give a special gift to my friend who has been in life for 16 years!  Even if I am not that good yet, it truly warms my heart that I can give in that way, especially to the important people in my life. 

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The joy I have been able to experience because of playing guitar only happened because I let hard things happen so I am thankful for the hard things too even as I work on them. 

Some area of darkness I have been focusing on are self-sabotage and self- betrayal. In my first guitar battle and before 2019 I was really focused  on undoing societal messaging, undoing the toxic norms I was internalizing from capitalism and the patriarchy. In this revolution, in 2019 and 2020 I got more feedback from 2nd guitar battle and beyond. 

Now I am digging into what I like to think of as a 2nd ring of conditioning, parental experiences, and how they play out in my life.  There’s some generational healing especially around addiction. I have a lot more empathy now for those struggling with addiction. Addiction is the kind of god that makes your knees  tremble, the human-ness in me has reverence for something that can take your soul so completely. 

One of my good friends shared a poem with my a few years ago by Portia Nelson that reminds me how the process of moving through self-betrayal or bad habits, doesn’t happen fast, it doesn’t happen easily and will just look like small changes over time that can add up to a hard won new behavior. 

I love this poem so much. I cry every time I read it. The chapters acknowledge the process, and shows the change in how we take responsibility for and ultimately give love to ourselves. I’m at like Chapter 3 now, and looking forward to 4. 

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One of my other wonderful and lovely friends said to me some words, that I am like a detective investigating and I was like wow I relate to that so much. All this work I like to look at, as if I am solving a big mystery. The only big mystery is reconnecting to myself when I really think about it, and a lot is life work, like all our lives just letting it all be a fun mystery party. 

As I investigate and self-examine I have been reading and going back to old things to give me some perspective and its been awesome! I started reading, “Untamed” by Glennon Doyle and did not know how badly I needed this nor, how much felt like revisiting old truths with even more verve even more vigor. I had some reservations at first, but after hearing some recommendations from multiple people I had to dive in. Glennon as the title implies  weaves a memoir of how she was caged and how she got free. So much of the book resonates with ideals that I love like womxn being wild, be dark, insatiable, untamable. It covers these usual things like how the patriarchial society teaches women to look outside themselves for validations, to not have wants, to be desirable rather than to desire. How it hurts guys too,how it cages everyone no matter your gender.  So theres all of that usual stuff and other great reminders that feel really relevant as I shift through shadows. Here are some echoes and snippets from the book that made me feel full: 

don’t avoid pain, pain is magic, maybe you don’t have to seek it out, but if you try to resist it, try to stop it you’re gonna stop yourself, your gonna stop your spirit. 

not in rebelling and not in obedience

know and let it stand, know what you want, do what you want, don’t ask permission, don’t explain. 

a woman full of herself is what we need 

One line that reminded me a lot of the guitar battles for me was , “the moral arch of our lives bends towards meaning, especially if we bend it with all our god damn might”. The guitar battles are my way of bending with all my might, and I’m so glad I did and so glad that no matter what I’ll continue. 

This book also reminds me of another book I have been reviewing, “Succulent Women” by Sark, which talks about so many different great ways to heal and be a woman that really living. It mentions how when we block our darkness we also block our joy and I couldn’t agree more. Sometimes pain is to big to feel, but I think if you have the opportunity and the space for it exploring the darkness is always a fruitful venture. 

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The most revolutionary world to me is one where womxn are living in a way that is most true and beautiful (as the author of Untamed notes) a world with no war, where people are fed and have healthcare, have homes, have clean water, that honors softness, honors feeling and empathy for surely in that kind of world many womxn would rejoice and capitalism and the patriarchy could not exist. 

I want the music I make to be a dream plan for womxn that know life can be more beautiful more just, more caring, more true. 

Investigating the darkness feels good and feels right and my guitar battles are also my way of doing that. One day these battles will be over, but whether I beat my rivals or not isn’t the main point. I’m discovering things about myself, so in the best way I can,  I practice so I’m able to dream, plan and imagine through music a world of joy for womxn, because I believe that would be the most joyous world ever. 

I rewatched a film that is dear to my heart that I saw as a kid. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind a Hayao Miyazaki film, which takes place fear in the future after the conflicts of humans have left the earth’s ecosystem completely devastated. Most of the earth has become a toxic jungle and small villages try to survive, and in the Valley of the Wind lives Nausciaa who loves plants and animals, and is a scientists. Seeing how things are today wearing masks, like they do in the film, conflicts raging so sporadically its hard to know which side is which, the film doesn’t feel to far off from life today. 

I bring this up because Nausicaa is a great example of a female protagonist who leads with her softness and sweetness. She loves deeply and is thrown into a rage when her father is killed needlessly by a neighboring kingdom hellbent on destroying the toxic jungle. I appreciate Nausicaa because she is strong and intelligent and seemingly fearless, but what I admire the most is that she cares.  

I work a lot to protect myself and sometimes hide my softness (although I could never really forget it!). I guess for a while as I have been growing up (and I still have so much growing up to do man!) I started to think maybe I shouldn’t be soft anymore, or vulnerable. 

However its something I really like about all my friends, that I like about Nausicaa and now always want to say I like about myself. I am soft! I am a tender heart here me roar!

I hope as it is May day all the work from shadows, from investigations can help us all imagine and create and take with our hands, as labour and the oppressed of the earth have done so often the justice we all so duly deserve.   

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UPDATES

I have been practicing a lot of basics like scales and chord progressions which is good for me since I am always trying to go to fast.  Since we have more time I have been getting a lot more hours of practice in which is really all I want just to practice forever muwhahahaha!  Really trying to slow down even though I can barely play as it is and already want to move on to sweep picking. I am slowing down like a snail working on different signature for a project. No plans. No expectations. Enjoying making something that I can’t wait to share, mostly with the ladies :) . 

I love when you call me names by Joan Armatrading *my new fav 

[swiftlyrics13-blog]

The Rolling Stone Interview: Taylor Swift

In her most in-depth and introspective interview in years, Swift tells all about the rocky road to 'Lover' and much, much more

By BRIAN HIATT

Taylor Swift bursts into her mom’s Nashville kitchen, smiling, looking remarkably like Taylor Swift. (That red-lip, classic thing? Check.) “I need someone to help dye my hair pink,” she says, and moments later, her ends match her sparkly nail polish, sneakers, and the stripes on her button-down. It’s all in keeping with the pastel aesthetic of her new album, Lover; black-leather combat-Taylor from her previous album cycle has handed back the phone. Around the black-granite kitchen island, all is calm and normal, as Swift’s mom, dad, and younger brother pass through. Her mom’s two dogs, one very small, one very large, pounce upon visitors with slurping glee. It could be any 29-year-old’s weekend visit with her parents, if not for the madness looming a few feet down the hall.

In an airy terrace, 113 giddy, weepy, shaky, still-in-disbelief fans are waiting for the start of one of Swift’s secret sessions, sacred rituals in Swift-dom. She’s about to play them her seventh album, as-yet unreleased on this Sunday afternoon in early August, and offer copious commentary. Also, she made cookies. Just before the session, Swift sits down in her mom’s study (where she “operates the Google,” per her daughter) to chat for a few minutes. The black-walled room is decorated with black-and-white classic-rock photos, including shots of Bruce Springsteen and, unsurprisingly, James Taylor; there are also more recent shots of Swift posing with Kris Kristofferson and playing with Def Leppard, her mom’s favorite band.

In a corner is an acoustic guitar Swift played as a teenager. She almost certainly wrote some well-known songs on it, but can’t recall which ones. “It would be kind of weird to finish a song and be like, ‘And this moment, I shall remember,’'” she says, laughing. “‘This guitar hath been anointed with my sacred tuneage!'”

The secret session itself is, as the name suggests, deeply off-the-record; it can be confirmed that she drank some white wine, since her glass pops up in some Instagram pictures. She stays until 5 a.m., chatting and taking photos with every one of the fans. Five hours later, we continue our talk at length in Swift’s Nashville condo, in almost exactly the same spot where we did one of our interviews for her 2012 Rolling Stone cover story. She’s hardly changed its whimsical decor in the past seven years (one of the few additions is a pool table replacing the couch where we sat last time), so it’s an old-Taylor time capsule. There’s still a huge bunny made of moss in one corner, and a human-size birdcage in the living room, though the view from the latter is now of generic new condo buildings instead of just distant green hills. Swift is barefoot now, in pale-blue jeans and a blue button-down tied at the waist; her hair is pulled back, her makeup minimal.

How to sum up the past three years of Taylor Swift? In July 2016, after Swift expressed discontent with Kanye West’s “Famous,” Kim Kardashian did her best to destroy her, unleashing clandestine recordings of a phone conversation between Swift and West. In the piecemeal audio, Swift can be heard agreeing to the line “…me and Taylor might still have sex.” We don’t hear her learning about the next lyric, the one she says bothered her — “I made that bitch famous” — and as she’ll explain, there’s more to her side of the story. The backlash was, well, swift, and overwhelming. It still hasn’t altogether subsided. Later that year, Swift chose not to make an endorsement in the 2016 election, which definitely didn’t help. In the face of it all, she made Reputation — fierce, witty, almost-industrial pop offset by love songs of crystalline beauty — and had a wildly successful stadium tour. Somewhere in there, she met her current boyfriend, Joe Alwyn, and judging by certain songs on Lover, the relationship is serious indeed.

Lover is Swift’s most adult album, a rebalancing of sound and persona that opens doors to the next decade of her career; it’s also a welcome return to the sonic diversity of 2012’s Red, with tracks ranging from the St. Vincent-assisted über-bop “Cruel Summer” to the unbearably poignant country-fied “Soon You’ll Get Better” (with the Dixie Chicks) and the “Shake It Off”-worthy pep of “Paper Rings.”

She wants to talk about the music, of course, but she is also ready to explain the past three years of her life, in depth, for the first time. The conversation is often not a light one. She’s built up more armor in the past few years, but still has the opposite of a poker face — you can see every micro-emotion wash over her as she ponders a question, her nose wrinkling in semi-ironic offense at the term “old-school pop stars,” her preposterously blue eyes glistening as she turns to darker subjects. In her worst moments, she says, “You feel like you’re being completely pulled into a riptide. So what are you going to do? Splash a lot? Or hold your breath and hope you somehow resurface? And that’s what I did. And it took three years. Sitting here doing an interview — the fact that we’ve done an interview before is the only reason I’m not in a full body sweat.”

When we talked seven years ago, everything was going so well for you, and you were very worried that something would go wrong.

Yeah, I kind of knew it would. I felt like I was walking along the sidewalk, knowing eventually the pavement was going to crumble and I was gonna fall through. You can’t keep winning and have people like it. People love “new” so much — they raise you up the flagpole, and you’re waving at the top of the flagpole for a while. And then they’re like, “Wait, this new flag is what we actually love.” They decide something you’re doing is incorrect, that you’re not standing for what you should stand for. You’re a bad example. Then if you keep making music and you survive, and you keep connecting with people, eventually they raise you a little bit up the flagpole again, and then they take you back down, and back up again. And it happens to women more than it happens to men in music.

It also happened to you a few times on a smaller scale, didn’t it?

I’ve had several upheavals in my career. When I was 18, they were like, “She doesn’t really write those songs.” So my third album I wrote by myself as a reaction to that. Then they decided I was a serial dater — a boy-crazy man-eater — when I was 22. And so I didn’t date anyone for, like, two years. And then they decided in 2016 that absolutely everything about me was wrong. If I did something good, it was for the wrong reasons. If I did something brave, I didn’t do it correctly. If I stood up for myself, I was throwing a tantrum. And so I found myself in this endless mockery echo chamber. It’s just like — I have a brother who’s two and a half years younger, and we spent the first half of our lives trying to kill each other and the second half as best friends. You know that game kids play? I’d be like, “Mom, can I have some water?” And Austin would be like, “Mom, can I have some water?” And I’m like, “He’s copying me.” And he’d be like, “He’s copying me.” Always in a really obnoxious voice that sounds all twisted. That’s what it felt like in 2016. So I decided to just say nothing. It wasn’t really a decision. It was completely involuntary.

But you also had good things happen in your life at the same time — that’s part of Reputation.

The moments of my true story on that album are songs like “Delicate,” “New Year’s Day,” “Call It What You Want,” “Dress.” The one-two punch, bait-and-switch of Reputation is that it was actually a love story. It was a love story in amongst chaos. All the weaponized sort of metallic battle anthems were what was going on outside. That was the battle raging on that I could see from the windows, and then there was what was happening inside my world — my newly quiet, cozy world that was happening on my own terms for the first time. . . . It’s weird, because in some of the worst times of my career, and reputation, dare I say, I had some of the most beautiful times — in my quiet life that I chose to have. And I had some of the most incredible memories with the friends I now knew cared about me, even if everyone hated me. The bad stuff was really significant and damaging. But the good stuff will endure. The good lessons — you realize that you can’t just show your life to people.

Meaning?

I used to be like a golden retriever, just walking up to everybody, like, wagging my tail. “Sure, yeah, of course! What do you want to know? What do you need?” Now, I guess, I have to be a little bit more like a fox.

Do your regrets on that extend to the way the “girl squad” thing was perceived?

Yeah, I never would have imagined that people would have thought, “This is a clique that wouldn’t have accepted me if I wanted to be in it.” Holy shit, that hit me like a ton of bricks. I was like, “Oh, this did not go the way that I thought it was going to go.” I thought it was going to be we can still stick together, just like men are allowed to do. The patriarchy allows men to have bro packs. If you’re a male artist, there’s an understanding that you have respect for your counterparts.

Whereas women are expected to be feuding with each other?

It’s assumed that we hate each other. Even if we’re smiling and photographed together with our arms around each other, it’s assumed there’s a knife in our pocket.

How much of a danger was there of falling into that thought pattern yourself?

The messaging is dangerous, yes. Nobody is immune, because we’re a product of what society and peer groups and now the internet tells us, unless we learn differently from experience.

You once sang about a star who “took the money and your dignity, and got the hell out.” In 2016, you wrote in your journal, “This summer is the apocalypse.” How close did you come to quitting altogether?

I definitely thought about that a lot. I thought about how words are my only way of making sense of the world and expressing myself — and now any words I say or write are being twisted against me. People love a hate frenzy. It’s like piranhas. People had so much fun hating me, and they didn’t really need very many reasons to do it. I felt like the situation was pretty hopeless. I wrote a lot of really aggressively bitter poems constantly. I wrote a lot of think pieces that I knew I’d never publish, about what it’s like to feel like you’re in a shame spiral. And I couldn’t figure out how to learn from it. Because I wasn’t sure exactly what I did that was so wrong. That was really hard for me, because I cannot stand it when people can’t take criticism. So I try to self-examine, and even though that’s really hard and hurts a lot sometimes, I really try to understand where people are coming from when they don’t like me. And I completely get why people wouldn’t like me. Because, you know, I’ve had my insecurities say those things — and things 1,000 times worse.

But some of your former critics have become your friends, right?

Some of my best friendships came from people publicly criticizing me and then it opening up a conversation. Haley Kiyoko was doing an interview and she made an example about how I get away with singing about straight relationships and people don’t give me shit the way they give her shit for singing about girls — and it’s totally valid. Like, Ella — Lorde — the first thing she ever said about me publicly was a criticism of my image or whatever. But I can’t really respond to someone saying, “You, as a human being, are fake.” And if they say you’re playing the victim, that completely undermines your ability to ever verbalize how you feel unless it’s positive. So, OK, should I just smile all the time and never say anything hurts me? Because that’s really fake. Or should I be real about how I’m feeling and have valid, legitimate responses to things that happened to me in my life? But wait, would that be playing the victim?

How do you escape that mental trap?

Since I was 15 years old, if people criticized me for something, I changed it. So you realize you might be this amalgamation of criticisms that were hurled at you, and not an actual person who’s made any of these choices themselves. And so I decided I needed to live a quiet life, because a quiet personal life invites no discussion, dissection, and debate. I didn’t realize I was inviting people to feel they had the right to sort of play my life like a video game.

“The old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now. Why? Because she’s dead!” was funny — but how seriously should we take it?

There’s a part of me that definitely is always going to be different. I needed to grow up in many ways. I needed to make boundaries, to figure out what was mine and what was the public’s. That old version of me that shares unfailingly and unblinkingly with a world that is probably not fit to be shared with? I think that’s gone. But it was definitely just, like, a fun moment in the studio with me and Jack [Antonoff] where I wanted to play on the idea of a phone call — because that’s how all of this started, a stupid phone call I shouldn’t have picked up.

It would have been much easier if that’s what you’d just said.

It would have been so, so great if I would have just said that [laughs].

Some of the Lover iconography does suggest old Taylor’s return, though.

I don’t think I’ve ever leaned into the old version of myself more creatively than I have on this album, where it’s very, very autobiographical. But also moments of extreme catchiness and moments of extreme personal confession.

Did you do anything wrong from your perspective in dealing with that phone call? Is there anything you regret?

The world didn’t understand the context and the events that led up to it. Because nothing ever just happens like that without some lead-up. Some events took place to cause me to be pissed off when he called me a bitch. That was not just a singular event. Basically, I got really sick of the dynamic between he and I. And that wasn’t just based on what happened on that phone call and with that song — it was kind of a chain reaction of things.

I started to feel like we reconnected, which felt great for me — because all I ever wanted my whole career after that thing happened in 2009 was for him to respect me. When someone doesn’t respect you so loudly and says you literally don’t deserve to be here — I just so badly wanted that respect from him, and I hate that about myself, that I was like, “This guy who’s antagonizing me, I just want his approval.” But that’s where I was. And so we’d go to dinner and stuff. And I was so happy, because he would say really nice things about my music. It just felt like I was healing some childhood rejection or something from when I was 19. But the 2015 VMAs come around. He’s getting the Vanguard Award. He called me up beforehand — I didn’t illegally record it, so I can’t play it for you. But he called me up, maybe a week or so before the event, and we had maybe over an hourlong conversation, and he’s like, “I really, really would like for you to present this Vanguard Award to me, this would mean so much to me,” and went into all the reasons why it means so much, because he can be so sweet. He can be the sweetest. And I was so stoked that he asked me that. And so I wrote this speech up, and then we get to the VMAs and I make this speech and he screams, “MTV got Taylor Swift up here to present me this award for ratings!” [His exact words: “You know how many times they announced Taylor was going to give me the award ’cause it got them more ratings?”] And I’m standing in the audience with my arm around his wife, and this chill ran through my body. I realized he is so two-faced. That he wants to be nice to me behind the scenes, but then he wants to look cool, get up in front of everyone and talk shit. And I was so upset. He wanted me to come talk to him after the event in his dressing room. I wouldn’t go. So then he sent this big, big thing of flowers the next day to apologize. And I was like, “You know what? I really don’t want us to be on bad terms again. So whatever, I’m just going to move past this.” So when he gets on the phone with me, and I was so touched that he would be respectful and, like, tell me about this one line in the song.

The line being “. . . me and Taylor might still have sex”?

[Nods] And I was like, “OK, good. We’re back on good terms.” And then when I heard the song, I was like, “I’m done with this. If you want to be on bad terms, let’s be on bad terms, but just be real about it.” And then he literally did the same thing to Drake. He gravely affected the trajectory of Drake’s family and their lives. It’s the same thing. Getting close to you, earning your trust, detonating you. I really don’t want to talk about it anymore because I get worked up, and I don’t want to just talk about negative shit all day, but it’s the same thing. Go watch Drake talk about what happened. [West denied any involvement in Pusha-T’s revelation of Drake’s child and apologized for sending “negative energy” toward Drake.]

When did you get to the place that’s described on the opening track of Lover, “I Forgot That You Existed”?

It was sometime on the Reputation tour, which was the most transformative emotional experience of my career. That tour put me in the healthiest, most balanced place I’ve ever been. After that tour, bad stuff can happen to me, but it doesn’t level me anymore. The stuff that happened a couple of months ago with Scott [Borchetta] would have leveled me three years ago and silenced me. I would have been too afraid to speak up. Something about that tour made me disengage from some part of public perception I used to hang my entire identity on, which I now know is incredibly unhealthy.

What was the actual revelation?

It’s almost like I feel more clear about the fact that my job is to be an entertainer. It’s not like this massive thing that sometimes my brain makes it into, and sometimes the media makes it into, where we’re all on this battlefield and everyone’s gonna die except one person, who wins. It’s like, “No, do you know what? Katy is going to be legendary. Gaga is going to be legendary. Beyoncé is going to be legendary. Rihanna is going to be legendary. Because the work that they made completely overshadows the myopia of this 24-hour news cycle of clickbait.” And somehow I realized that on tour, as I was looking at people’s faces. We’re just entertaining people, and it’s supposed to be fun.

It’s interesting to look at these albums as a trilogy. 1989 was really a reset button.

Oh, in every way. I’ve been very vocal about the fact that that decision was mine and mine alone, and it was definitely met with a lot of resistance. Internally.

After realizing that things were not all smiles with your former label boss, Scott Borchetta, it’s hard not to wonder how much additional conflict there was over things like that.

A lot of the best things I ever did creatively were things that I had to really fight — and I mean aggressively fight — to have happen. But, you know, I’m not like him, making crazy, petty accusations about the past. . . . When you have a business relationship with someone for 15 years, there are going to be a lot of ups and a lot of downs. But I truly, legitimately thought he looked at me as the daughter he never had. And so even though we had a lot of really bad times and creative differences, I was going to hang my hat on the good stuff. I wanted to be friends with him. I thought I knew what betrayal felt like, but this stuff that happened with him was a redefinition of betrayal for me, just because it felt like it was family. To go from feeling like you’re being looked at as a daughter to this grotesque feeling of “Oh, I was actually his prized calf that he was fattening up to sell to the slaughterhouse that would pay the most.”

He accused you of declining the Parkland march and Manchester benefit show.

Unbelievable. Here’s the thing: Everyone in my team knew if Scooter Braun brings us something, do not bring it to me. The fact that those two are in business together after the things he said about Scooter Braun — it’s really hard to shock me. And this was utterly shocking. These are two very rich, very powerful men, using $300 million of other people’s money to purchase, like, the most feminine body of work. And then they’re standing in a wood-panel bar doing a tacky photo shoot, raising a glass of scotch to themselves. Because they pulled one over on me and got this done so sneakily that I didn’t even see it coming. And I couldn’t say anything about it.

In some ways, on a musical level, Lover feels like the most indie-ish of your albums.

That’s amazing, thank you. It’s definitely a quirky record. With this album, I felt like I sort of gave myself permission to revisit older themes that I used to write about, maybe look at them with fresh eyes. And to revisit older instruments — older in terms of when I used to use them. Because when I was making 1989, I was so obsessed with it being this concept of Eighties big pop, whether it was Eighties in its production or Eighties in its nature, just having these big choruses — being unapologetically big. And then Reputation, there was a reason why I had it all in lowercase. I felt like it wasn’t unapologetically commercial. It’s weird, because that is the album that took the most amount of explanation, and yet it’s the one I didn’t talk about. In the Reputation secret sessions I kind of had to explain to my fans, “I know we’re doing a new thing here that I’d never done before.” I’d never played with characters before. For a lot of pop stars, that’s a really fun trick, where they’re like, “This is my alter ego.” I had never played with that before. It’s really fun. And it was just so fun to play with on tour — the darkness and the bombast and the bitterness and the love and the ups and the downs of an emotional-turmoil record.

RS1332Taylor SwiftPhotograph by by Erik Madigan Heck for Rolling Stone

Photograph by by Erik Madigan Heck for Rolling Stone.

Dress by Louis Vuitton. Earrings by Jessica McCormack

“Daylight” is a beautiful song. It feels like it could have been the title track.

It almost was. I thought it might be a little bit too sentimental.

And I guess maybe too on-the-nose.

Right, yeah, way too on-the-nose. That’s what I thought, because I was kind of in my head referring to the album as Daylight for a while. But Lover, to me, was a more interesting title, more of an accurate theme in my head, and more elastic as a concept. That’s why “You Need to Calm Down” can make sense within the theme of the album — one of the things it addresses is how certain people are not allowed to live their lives without discrimination just based on who they love.

For the more organic songs on this album, like “Lover” and “Paper Rings,” you said you were imagining a wedding band playing them. How often does that kind of visualization shape a song’s production style?

Sometimes I’ll have a strange sort of fantasy of where the songs would be played. And so for songs like “Paper Rings” or “Lover” I was imagining a wedding-reception band, but in the Seventies, so they couldn’t play instruments that wouldn’t have been invented yet. I have all these visuals. For Reputation, it was nighttime cityscape. I didn’t really want any — or very minimal — traditional acoustic instruments. I imagined old warehouse buildings that had been deserted and factory spaces and all this industrial kind of imagery. So I wanted the production to have nothing wooden. There’s no wood floors on that album. Lover is, like, completely just a barn wood floor and some ripped curtains flowing in the breeze, and fields of flowers and, you know, velvet.

How did you come to use high school metaphors to touch on politics with “Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince”?

There are so many influences that go into that particular song. I wrote it a couple of months after midterm elections, and I wanted to take the idea of politics and pick a metaphorical place for that to exist. And so I was thinking about a traditional American high school, where there’s all these kinds of social events that could make someone feel completely alienated. And I think a lot of people in our political landscape are just feeling like we need to huddle up under the bleachers and figure out a plan to make things better.

I feel like your Fall Out Boy fandom might’ve slipped out in that title.

I love Fall Out Boy so much. Their songwriting really influenced me, lyrically, maybe more than anyone else. They take a phrase and they twist it. “Loaded God complex/Cock it and pull it”? When I heard that, I was like, “I’m dreaming.”

You sing about “American stories burning before me.” Do you mean the illusions of what America is?

It’s about the illusions of what I thought America was before our political landscape took this turn, and that naivete that we used to have about it. And it’s also the idea of people who live in America, who just want to live their lives, make a living, have a family, love who they love, and watching those people lose their rights, or watching those people feel not at home in their home. I have that line “I see the high-fives between the bad guys” because not only are some really racist, horrific undertones now becoming overtones in our political climate, but the people who are representing those concepts and that way of looking at the world are celebrating loudly, and it’s horrific.

You’re in this weird place of being a blond, blue-eyed pop star in this era — to the point where until you endorsed some Democratic candidates, right-wingers, and worse, assumed you were on their side.

I don’t think they do anymore. Yeah, that was jarring, and I didn’t hear about that until after it had happened. Because at this point, I, for a very long time, I didn’t have the internet on my phone, and my team and my family were really worried about me because I was not in a good place. And there was a lot of stuff that they just dealt with without telling me about it. Which is the only time that’s ever happened in my career. I’m always in the pilot seat, trying to fly the plane that is my career in exactly the direction I want to take it. But there was a time when I just had to throw my hands up and say, “Guys, I can’t. I can’t do this. I need you to just take over for me and I’m just going to disappear.”

Are you referring to when a white-supremacist site suggested you were on their team?

I didn’t even see that, but, like, if that happened, that’s just disgusting. There’s literally nothing worse than white supremacy. It’s repulsive. There should be no place for it. Really, I keep trying to learn as much as I can about politics, and it’s become something I’m now obsessed with, whereas before, I was living in this sort of political ambivalence, because the person I voted for had always won. We were in such an amazing time when Obama was president because foreign nations respected us. We were so excited to have this dignified person in the White House. My first election was voting for him when he made it into office, and then voting to re-elect him. I think a lot of people are like me, where they just didn’t really know that this could happen. But I’m just focused on the 2020 election. I’m really focused on it. I’m really focused on how I can help and not hinder. Because I also don’t want it to backfire again, because I do feel that the celebrity involvement with Hillary’s campaign was used against her in a lot of ways.

You took a lot of heat for not getting involved. Does any part of you regret that you just didn’t say “fuck it” and gotten more specific when you said to vote that November?

Totally. Yeah, I regret a lot of things all the time. It’s like a daily ritual.

Were you just convinced that it would backfire?

That’s literally what it was. Yeah. It’s a very powerful thing when you legitimately feel like numbers have proven that pretty much everyone hates you. Like, quantifiably. That’s not me being dramatic. And you know that.

There were a lot of people in those stadiums.

It’s true. But that was two years later. . . . I do think, as a party, we need to be more of a team. With Republicans, if you’re wearing that red hat, you’re one of them. And if we’re going to do anything to change what’s happening, we need to stick together. We need to stop dissecting why someone’s on our side or if they’re on our side in the right way or if they phrased it correctly. We need to not have the right kind of Democrat and the wrong kind of Democrat. We need to just be like, “You’re a Democrat? Sick. Get in the car. We’re going to the mall.”

Here’s a hard question for you: As a superfan, what did you think of the Game of Thrones finale?

Oh, my God. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this. So, clinically our brain responds to our favorite show ending the same way we feel when a breakup occurs. I read that. There’s no good way for it to end. No matter what would have happened in that finale, people still would have been really upset because of the fact that it’s over.

I was glad to see you confirm that your line about a “list of names” was a reference to Arya.

I like to be influenced by movies and shows and books and stuff. I love to write about a character dynamic. And not all of my life is going to be as kind of complex as these intricate webs of characters on TV shows and movies.

There was a time when it was.

That’s amazing.

But is the idea that as your own life becomes less dramatic, you’ll need to pull ideas from other places?

I don’t feel like that yet. I think I might feel like that possibly when I have a family. If I have a family. [Pauses] I don’t know why I said that! But that’s what I’ve heard from other artists, that they were very protective of their personal life, so they had to draw inspiration from other things. But again, I don’t know why I said that. Because I don’t know how my life is going to go or what I’m going to do. But right now, I feel like it’s easier for me to write than it ever was.

You don’t talk about your relationship, but you’ll sing about it in wildly revealing detail. What’s the difference for you?

Singing about something helps you to express it in a way that feels more accurate. You cannot, no matter what, put words in a quote and have it move someone the same way as if you heard those words with the perfect sonic representation of that feeling. . . . There is that weird conflict in being a confessional songwriter and then also having my life, you know, 10 years ago, be catapulted into this strange pop-culture thing.

I’ve heard you say that people got too interested in which song was about who, which I can understand — at the same time, to be fair, it was a game you played into, wasn’t it?

I realized very early on that no matter what, that was going to happen to me regardless. So when you realize the rules of the game you’re playing and how it will affect you, you got to look at the board and make your strategy. But at the same time, writing songs has never been a strategic element of my career. But I’m not scared anymore to say that other things in my career, like how to market an album, are strictly strategic. And I’m sick of women not being able to say that they have strategic business minds — because male artists are allowed to. And so I’m sick and tired of having to pretend like I don’t mastermind my own business. But, it’s a different part of my brain than I use to write.

You’ve been masterminding your business since you were a teenager.

Yeah, but I’ve also tried very hard — and this is one thing I regret — to convince people that I wasn’t the one holding the puppet strings of my marketing existence, or the fact that I sit in a conference room several times a week and come up with these ideas. I felt for a very long time that people don’t want to think of a woman in music who isn’t just a happy, talented accident. We’re all forced to kind of be like, “Aw, shucks, this happened again! We’re still doing well! Aw, that’s so great.” Alex Morgan celebrating scoring a goal at the World Cup and getting shit for it is a perfect example of why we’re not allowed to flaunt or celebrate, or reveal that, like, “Oh, yeah, it was me. I came up with this stuff.” I think it’s really unfair. People love new female artists so much because they’re able to explain that woman’s success. There’s an easy trajectory. Look at the Game of Thrones finale. I specifically really related to Daenerys’ storyline because for me it portrayed that it is a lot easier for a woman to attain power than to maintain it.

I mean, she did murder . . .

It’s a total metaphor! Like, obviously I didn’t want Daenerys to become that kind of character, but in taking away what I chose to take away from it, I thought maybe they’re trying to portray her climbing the ladder to the top was a lot easier than maintaining it, because for me, the times when I felt like I was going insane was when I was trying to maintain my career in the same way that I ascended. It’s easier to get power than to keep it. It’s easier to get acclaim than to keep it. It’s easier to get attention than to keep it.

Well, I guess we should be glad you didn’t have a dragon in 2016. . . .

[Fiercely] I told you I don’t like that she did that! But, I mean, watching the show, though, maybe this is a reflection on how we treat women in power, how we are totally going to conspire against them and tear at them until they feel this — this insane shift, where you wonder, like, “What changed?” And I’ve had that happen, like, 60 times in my career where I’m like, “OK, you liked me last year, what changed? I guess I’ll change so I can keep entertaining you guys.”

You once said that your mom could never punish you when you were little because you’d punish yourself. This idea of changing in the face of criticism and needing approval — that’s all part of wanting to be good, right? Whatever that means. But that seems to be a real driving force in your life.

Yeah, that’s definitely very perceptive of you. And the question posed to me is, if you kept trying to do good things, but everyone saw those things in a cynical way and assumed them to be done with bad motivation and bad intent, would you still do good things, even though nothing that you did was looked at as good? And the answer is, yes. Criticism that’s constructive is helpful to my character growth. Baseless criticism is stuff I’ve got to toss out now.

That sounds healthy. Is this therapy talking or is this just experience?

No, I’ve never been to therapy. I talk to my mom a lot, because my mom is the one who’s seen everything. God, it takes so long to download somebody on the last 29 years of my life, and my mom has seen it all. She knows exactly where I’m coming from. And we talk endlessly. There were times when I used to have really, really, really bad days where we would just be on the phone for hours and hours and hours. I’d write something that I wanted to say, and instead of posting it, I’d just read it to her.

I somehow connect all this to the lyric in “Daylight,” the idea of “so many lines that I’ve crossed unforgiven” — it’s a different kind of confession.

I am really glad you liked that line, because that’s something that does bother me, looking back at life and realizing that no matter what, you screw things up. Sometimes there are people that were in your life and they’re not anymore — and there’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t fix it, you can’t change it. I told the fans last night that sometimes on my bad days, I feel like my life is a pile of crap accumulated of only the bad headlines or the bad things that have happened, or the mistakes I’ve made or clichés or rumors or things that people think about me or have thought for the last 15 years. And that was part of the “Look What You Made Me Do” music video, where I had a pile of literal old selves fighting each other.

But, yeah, that line is indicative of my anxiety about how in life you can’t get everything right. A lot of times you make the wrong call, make the wrong decision. Say the wrong thing. Hurt people, even if you didn’t mean to. You don’t really know how to fix all of that. When it’s, like, 29 years’ worth.

To be Mr. “Rolling Stone” for a second, there’s a Springsteen lyric, “Ain’t no one leaving this world, buddy/Without their shirttail dirty or hands a little bloody.”

That’s really good! No one gets through it unscathed. No one gets through in one piece. I think that’s a hard thing for a lot of people to grasp. I know it was hard for me, because I kind of grew up thinking, “If I’m nice, and if I try to do the right thing, you know, maybe I can just, like, ace this whole thing.” And it turns out I can’t.

It’s interesting to look at “I Did Something Bad” in this context.

You pointing that out is really interesting because it’s something I’ve had to reconcile within myself in the last couple of years — that sort of “good” complex. Because from the time I was a kid I’d try to be kind, be a good person. Try really hard. But you get walked all over sometimes. And how do you respond to being walked all over? You can’t just sit there and eat your salad and let it happen. “I Did Something Bad” was about doing something that was so against what I would usually do. Katy [Perry] and I were talking about our signs. . . . [Laughs] Of course we were.

That’s the greatest sentence ever.

[Laughs] I hate you. We were talking about our signs because we had this really, really long talk when we were reconnecting and stuff. And I remember in the long talk, she was like, “If we had one glass of white wine right now, we’d both be crying.” Because we were drinking tea. We’ve had some really good conversations.

We were talking about how we’ve had miscommunications with people in the past, not even specifically with each other. She’s like, “I’m a Scorpio. Scorpios just strike when they feel threatened.” And I was like, “Well, I’m an archer. We literally stand back, assess the situation, process how we feel about it, raise a bow, pull it back, and fire.” So it’s completely different ways of processing pain, confusion, misconception. And oftentimes I’ve had this delay in feeling something that hurts me and then saying that it hurts me. Do you know what I mean? And so I can understand how people in my life would have been like, “Whoa, I didn’t know that was how you felt.” Because it takes me a second.

If you watch the video of the 2009 VMAs, I literally freeze. I literally stand there. And that is how I handle any discomfort, any pain. I stand there, I freeze. And then five minutes later, I know how I feel. But in the moment, I’m probably overreacting and I should be nice. Then I process it, and in five minutes, if it’s gone, it’s past, and I’m like, “I was overreacting, everything’s fine. I can get through this. I’m glad I didn’t say anything harsh in the moment.” But when it’s actually something bad that happened, and I feel really, really hurt or upset about it, I only know after the fact. Because I’ve tried so hard to squash it: “This probably isn’t what you think.” That’s something I had to work on

You could end up gaslighting yourself.

Yeah, for sure. ’Cause so many situations where if I would have said the first thing that came to my mind, people would have been like, “Whoa!” And maybe I would have been wrong or combative. So a couple of years ago I started working on actually just responding to my emotions in a quicker fashion. And it’s really helped with stuff. It’s helped so much because sometimes you get in arguments. But conflict in the moment is so much better than combat after the fact.

Well, thanks.

I do feel like I just did a therapy session. As someone who’s never been to therapy, I can safely say that was the best therapy session.

[genderassignment]

Fools, Fellas, Feminism and Oprah: An Interview with Stephanie Graham

Fella #3, Stephanie Graham

I got to meet Stephanie Graham at the BING Reading Room for the Chicago on My Mind afterparty, thanks to connector extraordinare, Sabina Ott. We swung it out and I felt great in her presence. Graham says “Oprah is a girlfriend and I want to be that to my subjects”, which feels 100% true spending even five minutes with her. It makes for some extraordinary artwork—from the loving, hilarious, and incredibly absorbing interviews in So This One Guy, to #NEWGLOBALMATRIARCHY, her project with Maya Mackrandilal slaying sexism for all.

Enjoy this irresistible interview!

First of all, I am crazy about your work from a lot of perspectives. I really enjoy the performance strategies, the inclusion of many voices—even when they are all your own. Let’s start with Fellas Project, a series of re-enactments and photographs staging relationship events. I would love to hear more about your choice to use yourself as all the characters! As well, I’d love to hear what you’ve uncovered in the process.

YAY! That makes me so happy to hear you enjoy the work! Thanks for interviewing me too! I'm really honored!! Shout out to Sabina Ott for connecting us! I'm very thankful!

So the FELLA Project was a personal project I wanted to create after I felt like I was just getting into these ridiculous situations with guys I was dating, and I was over it! I was over them, and I was over myself for putting myself in these situations with FOOLS. I mean complete FOOLS! I don't know if they are Fools or just the situations but anyway. Since these were my stories, I wanted to participate in them. I don't think it would have worked the other way.  Dudes would be like "ooh are you going to do a photo on me?" I'm like um…this is not a celebratory thing boo boo this is real life LOL.

Others have wanted me to photograph them as their past relationships, I thought that was interesting, but then it also felt gimmicky like I was running a Groupon and that's not the goal of the work.  FELLAS is a project of how I saw the situation.

FELLAS was also a project where I learned that I was being seen as a performance artist and I didn't like that because I always saw performance art as black leotards and being weird but now I see that its not ALWAYS black leotards and I'm getting better at accepting the medium for myself now.

Laura, So This One Guy Project

So This One Guy explores similar themes, but from the perspective of diverse, dating women. I love the inclusion of your laughter and feedback in the interviews, it has an intimacy. These have a conversational, but storytelling quality and reveal a lot about gender dynamics. How do you think your various strategies uncovered new narratives? What was your process of interviewee selection?

Thank you! I love hearing peoples’ experiences it's my favorite thing to listen to a great story. I'm also very nosy so I like to ask questions to find out how someone got to a certain point. I'm trying to be Oprah in my interview strategy, Oprah is a girlfriend I want to be that to my subjects. Also sometimes feminism stuff can be so structured, I can be mad feminist but homeboy still needs to pay the bill WTF! 

My process for finding interviewees was anyone who felt comfortable sharing a story where they can have a good sense of humor. I never know the stories the ladies are going to share, unless they have several stories and just need help picking one, and then I look at the following:

1. Is this funny;

2. Will the dude bother my subject after this story is out there;

3. Does this show the woman in a good light?

#3 is interesting for me, and something I think about. I remember interviewing a woman that was a jerk about her situation; she used the man she was speaking about for free meals and jewelry! It was intriguing because that's not my life I've never dated someone to take me out to get jewelry but I'm not trying to have comments making fun of my subjects or putting them down, and that was what would have happened to her. Maybe I will change that in the future because dating has all sorts of levels but for now. I just want the ladies to be chill, look fly and tell a story that we can all chuckle at and find it relatable.

I'm always experimenting with different ways to get the stories because this is a project that I want to keep going but I want it to be visually interesting for the viewer.

I have learned that internet dating is a no go! I have tried it I know many finds success but damn...lots of the stories comes from dudes found on a website or app.

#NEWGLOBALMATRIARCHY Maya Mackrandilal, Stephanie Graham Photo: Doug McGoldrick

I am beyond excited you will be sharing #NEWGLOBALMATRIARCHY at our Revolution at Point Zero Feminist Social Practice Symposium April 21! As someone who grew up around goddess-worshiping feminists, I particularly love the strategies of performance of myth and radical rethinking of culture and our collective future. How did this project evolve, and what are your plans for new interventions?

Thanks! I'm excited also the line up you have is awesome its going to be a beautiful day! I'm curious which goddesses you grew up worshiping that's amazing!

Maya and I met at the HATCH Projects Residency at the Chicago Artists Coalition. Maya had been working on this project called "Bedtime Stories of White Supremacy" where she plays the Goddess Lakshmi and tells stories of slaying white supremacy with another performance collective FemMelanin.  I loved it, and Maya approached me about working together once. I said to her hmmm what if Lakshmi had a friend... 

So here comes Oya. If you look at the way media displays female friendships there is some sort of hierarchy where there is always one friend that is higher than the other, I always give the example of Oprah and Gayle, both successful but we all know Oprah is the big dog right? With Oya and Lakshmi, both of these goddesses can end the world on their own neither is bigger than the other they are seen and treat each other as equals. 

So together Oya and Lakshmi has come into Chicago creating mini-protests and letting the world know that we are not here for the patriarchal bullshit!! They are ruining everything, so we are here to fix it all, per usual everything is better when a woman takes care of it.

I think #NEWGLOBALMATRIARCHY is fun and approachable which is good because I like to create things that have an easy access point because once you've decided to go to the party the next step is talking to the people and the viewer gets to decide how deep they want to get in the work. Some people like to just take a protest button and post themselves wearing it, others want to go deeper and share their own experiences of and radical dreams and I'm here for all of that. 

Maya and I recently contributed an essay to Jessica Caprnigro's "Feminist Advice From the City of Broad Shoulders." That was a fantastic opportunity and challenge for me because I've never contributed an essay before so now not only am I performance artist( got dammit!) I'm an essayist. Maya on the other hand writes all the time and is an excellent writer.

Maya is currently living and working in Los Angeles which is great for expansion, we are brainstorming what’s next.

I am crazy for this quote from #NEWGLOBALMATRIARCHY: “What does it mean to be a strong woman with friends in a culture that can only imagine female sexual competition for the ever-elusive ‘good man’?” How do you two construct new mythologies and futures for women?

Well, I would hope at its most basic form it shows “see women can get along and love each other and slay the world all at the same damn time, we recognize each others strengths see each other as equals and get the job done”!

I get tired of the nit pick that women can bring or hearing women maybe having issue with another woman co worker or someone in management and its like okay.. if everyone would stop and work together everyone would have a lot less anxiety and a lot more could get done. Oya and Lakshmi both understand each other in a sense that they are both equally the bomb. You don’t want to mess with either goddess on there own but once you found out they are best girlfriends…look out world!!!! The Patriarchy should be afraid….

Sort of reminds me of a friend of mine that was shocked to find out a girl he once dated was one of my friends. He was like “oh i didn’t know y’all were friends’ well now you know buddy so WATCH OUT!!

I’m really interested in hearing how you see your mythical and fantasy-based work like #NEWGLOBALMATRIARCHY in conversation with the womanist tradition of artists like Walker and Morrison, and current artists like Cauleen Smith, Wagechi Mutu, Krista Franklin, and other artists who use Afrosurreal or AfroFuturist strategies to construct representations of women.

Oh man these are some heavy hitters that you have named here. It would be an honor to be grouped with any of these women I’m fans of them all, I think I am still discovering where my voice would lie with these women but what I do know is that I like to make work that has an easy entry point because art can be hard to get into, I want to make that easier because I think art should be enjoyed and talked about with everyone so it takes all kinds and all access points, and I think if you imagining with me that you are a goddess and it makes you slay your day and stand up to racism and patriarchal foolishness dope, if hearing a woman talk about a date makes you think…you know what EFF MY SITUATION or whatever that's good with me. I think my work is playful and humorous but still deals with real shit so its digestible...hmmm gee could I be the Key and Peele of the art world oh shit I don’t know if i like that…I’m new to the game so I’m still working on that.

Golden Kids, exhibition still. Photo: David Crewe

Some artists who come to mind I think share some your ideas include Ryan Trecartin, Nikki S. Lee, and Howardina Pindell--who are some of your inspirations?

Wow, thanks for the afternoon of learning of these artists, the only one out of this bunch that I heard of was Nikki S. Lee.  I love Carrie Mae Weems, Mickalene Thomas, Renee Cox and of course Cindy Sherman, Gary Wineogrand, Kerry James Marshall but most of all I really really love Anthony Gioceloa. 

Where can we see your work in the upcoming months?

I'm really working on organizing and making my studio great because I want to start having people over for conversations about my work, so after your symposium and Open Engagement are concluded I'm participating in the Petty Biennial curated by La Keisha Leek and Sadie Woods.  I'm exploring a new idea for that show though and that idea is investigating and celebrating the culture around a leather coat company called Pelle Pelle! I’m really excited about the show and it opens May 19th.

[kershmaru-blog]

What is Feminism? An outside male perspective

First I think I need to acknowledge that feminism means vastly different things to different people. There are quite incompatible, warring factions within the movement, and what I dub amateur feminism or feminism of the masses, is another story altogether. I am talking about the feminism of the vast majority of self-described feminists who never came in direct contact with professional gender studies or feminist theory and wish for nothing but equality.

What I think all feminists have in common is the perspective that our world is male-dominated, that there is a relative lack of positive female role models even within the west - which is true if your viewpoint is that you need your role models to share such superficial criteria as sex, sexuality, and gender with yourself - and that our society values males more than it does females.

 I should introduce myself. I go by Kershmaru, which is an old Gamertag I came up with. It consists of a nonsensical first syllable and an ending for Japanese first names. So I am Japanophile. Sue me.

I do value my privacy and privacy rights in general (you don’t have to fear that I expose private conversations between us, or even write about them in an anonymous format without your express permission), but that is not the reason I go by a pseudonym. I may or may not announce my real name after some time. There is a reason for my anonymity: Part of my philosophy is that the source shouldn’t matter and that every post, every argument, and every article should be able to stand on their own, on their own merit.

I am 27, single, male, white, an atheist and from Austria, for those of you who care about such things. Personally, I think that my writing tells you more about myself than those more or less random metrics. In fact, I think the only thing I mentioned which tells you anything worth knowing about my worldview is that I am an atheist.

 Why write about feminism at all? Firstly, because there is a growing divide between feminists and social justice advocates on one side and anti-feminists and anti-SJWs on the other.  There is very little civilized dialogue between the two sides, and in all honesty, I believe such dialogue would be enriching for both sides.

Secondly, despite its vast influence over politics and media, some strains of feminism seem to have developed an “us vs. the world” mentality. I think those people would benefit from an outside perspective. The aim of this blog isn’t to explain your own ideology to you; it is only a subjective viewpoint and an outside perspective.

 I am neither a feminist nor an anti, despite the fact that I am sure I will be accused of being both, if nothing else because of the forums I plan to post this on (minds.com and tumbler).

 I am an advocate for equality as far as it is reasonable.

Some of you might have read this far only to stop after reading about reasonable inequality. For those who didn’t, hear me out: There are currently disparities in rights that are unfair but without an alternative.

The most striking of these rights is the right to bodily autonomy and reproductive rights. (I am well aware that in some states in America, the religious right fights against the right to choose, and I am squarely on board with the feminists on this one. Women need to remain the sole decision makers regarding their own bodies)

To clarify my views on abortion, I regard it as a necessary evil. There are cases in which it entirely is a medical necessity (i.e., Pregnancy within the fallopian tubes, which cannot be brought to term and if unchecked will cause massive internal bleeding and the death of the mother), but for a variety of reasons - I can go more into detail if you want me to - I also am in favor of all other cases except late-term abortion. There needs to be some time for a prospective mother to decide what she wants to do, and she shouldn’t have to make rash decisions. But there should be a time limit after which the rights of the fetus are protected. Such a limit is necessarily arbitrary, but as I said before, a necessity to give the mother time to think. Would I be in favor of fewer abortions? Absolutely. But the way we can arrive there is only by providing easy access to contraceptives, not through clumsy attempts at social engineering through abstinence-only education. It would also help if there were more resources for nascent mothers, like easy access to childcare, legally protected maternity leave (which of course makes women less attractive on the job market) and easy access to adoption services.

 My personal views aside, the status quo in wide parts of the western world is that women have the unilateral power to make decisions on whether or not they will become parents, even after the fact. Men cannot legally interfere with this decision.

If the woman decides thusly, the men become fathers, with all the legally binding obligations that entail. (An exception is a policy in Sweden of which I am not sure whether it has been implemented which would allow men to opt out of paternity, but only by relinquishing all legal rights. That is not equal to the female power to chose; in my opinion a useless policy)

If the woman doesn’t want to be a parent, the man also never gets the chance to.

 This situation is intrinsically unfair. But the alternative, making women into incubators against their will is so dystopian that I will not even consider advocating for it. (on a side note, if artificial wombs were already available, I would likely be in favor of protecting the fetus and bringing it to term in such a device if one of the parents - in this case, the father - wishes it, at least if the conception was consensual in the first place. But because such devices don’t yet exist and will likely have to navigate a maze of “ethical” obstacles, this point though interesting is mute)

There you have it: A right, in favor of women no less, which is intrinsically unfair and unequal but needs to stay this way.

 But enough distractions. Time to get to the meat of it. Feminism.

To some a necessary struggle against oppressive structures, to others a totalitarian system based on religious dogma aiming to police, form, and control every aspect of culture, politics and interpersonal relationships.

Firstly, I agree that there are inequalities in men and women, even within the western world.

I also believe that there are differences between men and women based in biology. Are these differences reinforced by cultural norms and traditional gender roles? I think they are.

As you can see, I neither fully subscribe to an entirely biologic-deterministic nor to a socially constructed worldview. Both lack - to me as a layman regarding gender studies - merit (I also will avoid using overly technical or predefined language in this blog due to the emotional baggage and presuppositions associated with such terms. Here, where I was forced to use it nevertheless is the best place to inform you of my rationale for this decision).

What are these differences? Most of them, like muscle strength, are irrelevant regarding the modern work environment. The obvious exception here are positions that demand high fitness and muscle strength, like construction, firefighting or some military jobs. I am of the opinion that such positions should absolutely be open to women who pass the requirements, though I will admit that men aiming for these posts hold an unfair biological and physiological advantage. Two mutually dependent differences aren’t irrelevant: Risk aversion and resource management (meant are personal resources like stress)

Men are less risk-averse than women (as can be seen in factors such as gender differences in gambling behavior https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4736715/ )

This primes them for high risk, high reward positions which are highly valued by our society (politicians, CEOs)

To clarify, I don’t believe that women aren’t qualified for these positions. Quite the opposite, I think those who make it there in a meritocratic system are qualified. I also find them to be outliers.

Can the frequency of such outliers be increased by shifting cultural norms and by nurture? I believe it can be. But should it at all costs? I am not a father, and I may well never be. But the way I would raise my children, regardless of gender, would be to try to instill in them the same primal curiosity, the same drive to see the beauty in our universe I feel, and to reinforce in them whatever interests they have. I wouldn’t project my insecurities and wishes on them.

The other thing I mentioned, resource management, is in favor of women. Women manage their own stress better, this meta-study on burnout suggests http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001879110000771 and have a higher life expectancy.

There are fields in which women are yet underrepresented which cannot be explained by the two metrics of risk aversion and resource management, for example, science and engineering. This may be partially due to biologic differences, but I do believe we will see more women drift to these professions organically over time. After all, curiosity isn’t a male trait. At least I didn’t see any evidence for it.

I believe in a meritocratic and free system. It may take some time until the gender balance approaches the distribution of genders as dictated by biology, but I don’t see the problem in that. In most circles, no one doubts that women can be as capable as men in a given position, and that, rather than gender parity, is to me the sign of achieved equality.

 Which brings me to my main gripe with feminism. Regardless of their exact strain of feminism, a lot of feminists believe in particular policy implementations that go against meritocracy, such as diversity quotas.

 The belief that those measures are necessary is founded partially in what presents itself to me as a persecution complex: That the world is still in the fangs of patriarchy. There is an interesting philosophical debate to be had on the topic who or rather what is in control of our world and society, but that goes beyond the scope of this blog. I may write an article on it on minds.

 I am not saying sexism is dead, or that unconscious bias doesn’t exist. What I am saying is that bias isn’t the sole explanation for societal ills and injustices. Consider this if you will: A biased opinion against people with the descriptor d. A person with d may be discriminated against by d-cist people and learn that this bias exists. They will now be conditioned to look out for this prejudice, and it will color their perception of reality. If they encounter repeated injustice, perceived or real, they are more likely to attribute it to d and d-cist opinions.

This in itself can pose a problem, if they set out to cure d-cist attitudes. An overreach can antagonize and prejudice people who didn’t hold d-cist positions to start with. Overestimating the scope of a problem or applying the wrong solution can be as destructive as doing nothing at all. It can not only promote d-cist attitudes in reaction to the overreach but can lead to its own set of social problems and injustices. For example, if you insist on thinking in these categories, a person with d might be promoted due to a diversity quota over a socio-economically disadvantaged person without d, who might even have better qualifications and a more significant need for the position.

The belief that d-cist attitudes are rampant in society at large can also lead D’s to self-segregate and take on a hostile attitude towards people outside their community or society at large. This can lead to other problems, like shifting attitudes towards D’s, actual d-cism and mutual hostility.

D can, in this context stand for any arbitrary attribute, from gender, sex, sexuality, race to wearing glasses. (if you think that the last example is ludicrous or ridiculous, remember that Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge murdered people wearing eyeglasses on the suspicion that they were intellectuals. Say what you want about the treatment of women in history and today, but I cannot think of an ideology or system, extant or extinct that promoted female genocide.)

 Herein, as alluded to before, lies my biggest problem with feminism (And the biggest problem of many others): Both its dogmatic, overly simplistic assertions about the nature of our world, and the political solution widely championed by feminists.

 It needs to be said that I respect everybody's right to an opinion. We all would like the world to be different in subtle ways. Some of these problems and complaints seem petty to outsiders (manspreading), but if you feel like there is a problem, you absolutely have a right to speak out. Issues come into play when you try to control culture or media because then you infringe upon others right of expression. I am well aware most feminists, particularly but not exclusively the aforementioned amateur feminists only want perceived equality in specific circumstances that are near and dear to them, such as political representation, positive role models, unbiased education. Again, nothing wrong about that. But most of the proposals I have seen to bring such changes in short time are flawed. And the used rhetoric can be downright abusive. What possible use have “teach boys not to rape” seminars and workshops? Literally everybody knows rape is an unforgivable crime and one of the most damaging, traumatic events to the victims. There is nothing to learn here. The only ones who could learn from such a seminar are those who would never rape in the first place. What right do you have to indoctrinate children to look at each other and themselves as sexual deviants, these barely restrained predatory monsters? But I digress. Do you know that some definitions of rape only encompass penetration, but not forcefull envelopment? That is right, according to some definitions - which have been used for studies and statistics - , if a woman forces herself onto a man that isn’t rape. Not to mention that the current culture makes it very hard for male victims to speak out, especially against female perpetrators. Feminists may interject here that they are addressing these cultural norms, but the truth is that male advocacy or men’s rights is a derogatory term often named in a breath with pick up artists or similar lowlifes. Disparate incarceration and suicide rates, as well as a gendered and biased justice system, are a joke to some feminists. Worse yet, if the issue is brought up some see it as a twisted form of justice, recompense for millennia of oppression.

 There is no doubt that women were denied their fair shake by society. Heck, they still are outside the western world. But there can also be no doubt that things are different now. Claiming otherwise is delusional. We may not yet be a society reflecting the real interests and qualifications of the individuals therein, but the main ingredient missing, in my opinion, is time. Time for genuine bigots to be retired from their place of power. Time for girls to speak out about their “boyish” hobbies and interests and potentially make them into a career. But it is also necessary to acknowledge the progress we already made and to think more critically about complaints concerning sexism or other forms of bigotry in the western world.

 I really don’t know exactly how to structure the following because every subpoint would be deserving of its own blog post, and they may get them, in time. In The meantime, here is a more or less unstructured rant about some common feminist complaints about western society. It is by no means a full list, and I would caution you against using what I have written to extrapolate my stance on other issues. Making assumptions without sufficient information is a profoundly human trait; albeit one we need to work hard to overcome. Feel free to disagree and tell me why it is you disagree. I am more than willing to change my position if you present me with a good argument.

 What about sexualized media? First off, I know that this is an unfair argument because a good part of feminists see female sexuality as liberating and liberated. Personally, I have no problem with any form of sexuality or sexual imagery for the purpose of advertising or marketing. To put it in plain English: Sex sells. Using sexuality in marketing isn’t oppressive or objectifying, it is a good business practice. I agree that it can become ridiculous at times, especially if there is absolutely no connection to the good or service being advertised. It is a cheap tactic to draw eyes, but an effective one.

What about the male gaze in movies? I would argue that the same is true here. And I would also say that not only men sexualize women. Humans, in general, are very good at sexualizing each other, regardless of their sexuality. Envy and critique replace lust as the motivating factor, but women also look at legs and breasts and men at abs.

What about the elephant in the room: the pay gap? It would be more honest to speak about a earnings gap. It is true, men and woman earn disparate incomes, but they also work in different professions. If you compare apples to oranges, of course, there will be a disparity. If you compare people within comparable positions, the earnings gap shrinks. If you control for hours worked, qualifications and other factors it shrinks again. It doesn’t disappear altogether, but that is where the risky behavior and assertiveness comes into play. Women can and should be more self-aware and aware what they are worth, and ask for financial recompense. That is what men do.

(It should be mentioned that there is a gap in payment amongst male and female CEOs, which of course cannot be ascribed to divergent qualifications. But the pay amongst CEOs, in general, is highly variable and depends on the worth of the company. Once a woman is in charge of Amazon, Microsoft or a comparable Company we will see this gap shrink)

On a side note, there are legal protections against pay discrimination in many countries in the western world, including the US. Of course, legal protection doesn’t mean that it cannot happen. Despite my above explanations, I do not doubt that there still is gender-based discrimination in isolated cases. If you think you are being discriminated against, be very careful. You might well have a case, but if you try to litigate and the court doesn’t find in your favor, you might well be out of a job. That being said, you have a right to take up your legal arms and fight in court. As somebody opposed to discrimination, I wish you the best. Nobody should suffer any form of discrimination, least of all due to a trait of their person they have absolutely no control over.

The lion’s share of the earnings gap is due to individual choice. Men work more dangerous and dirtier jobs than women and are compensated for that. You want parity amongst CEOs? What about equality amongst miners or sewer workers? Some careers are simply higher paid than others. A lot of male-dominated fields fall into that category. If a woman wants to enter these fields and she has all the necessary qualifications, she is free to do so, and I would encourage her. As I would encourage everybody to pursue the career they want.

Should some of the traditional female professions be better compensated? Well, talking about dangerous jobs, I think that teachers should be paid much more but also be held to a higher standard.

What about cyberbullying? Well according to the data, http://soc101group2.providence.wikispaces.net/Gender+Distinctions+in+Cyber+Bullying women are more likely to be the perpetrators. That, of course, may change over time and depends on whether or not you count gossip as “bullying.” Also all studies I could find depended on self-reporting, so take them with a grain of salt since that is amongst the least reliable study designs. It should also be said that one amongst the most recent studies I could find (from 2016, conducted amongst US highschoolers), on statista.com showed contrary trends. It might just be that the interviewed girls didn’t count gossiping as cyberbullying; and I am not certain gossip should count. I welcome your thoughts on the matter.

What about “bossy?” When a man is a boss, he isn’t considered “bossy.” Neither is a female boss. The male equivalent to “bossy” isn’t “boss” it is “dick” speaking of which…

What about sexualized slurs you might ask? What about them? How often have you called somebody a dick or a prick and not even thought of it as a sexual slur? This does of course not mean that sexual slurs should be societally acceptable. My point is that those against women already aren’t, while those against men clearly are. Here we come to another aspect of my philosophy, this time concerning free speech: everybody should be allowed a chance to speak freely and out themselves as an ass, the right to free speech doesn’t mean freedom from social condemnation.

 I cannot possibly go into detail on all I touched on without writing a veritable book. This is as good as any a place to take a break. I will be back next week with some thoughts on the Weinstein scandal and rape culture. In the meantime, as alluded to before, I am here to talk. Comment with your thoughts, questions, and of course, criticism. I will do my best to explain myself and my positions. Tell me where you disagree and agree with me and if need be, enlighten me if I made some factual errors or overly simplifying generalizations.