#the other knows exactly what a prison societal expectations and repression can be and wants nothing more than for her to break free of them

[the-crooked-library]

does anyone else think about Spike and Giles looking at each other and seeing a personification of the most despised and vulnerable aspects of their own past or is it just me

[pointnumbersixteen]

A Head Cannon Biography and Character Analysis and of the Captain, Part 6: the Havers Question That I Still Don’t Answer Very Well, But I Tried My Best and That’s What Counts

That gets us finally to the analysis of the relationship between the Captain and Havers, as shown in Reddy Weddy.

From the first scene in the episode we get a lot:  Cap is obviously in love with Havers, that’s half the point of the episode. Cap is also so incredibly unsubtle with his attractions that Havers can’t have missed it. There’s probably no one in the Captain’s command who missed it, honestly. But what Havers might be thinking or feeling about this is almost more interesting than what the Captain, who is more or less an emotional open book, is thinking, because it’s impossible to tell for sure what Havers’ intentions are.

You can tell Havers is nervous to tell the Captain that he’s leaving. He probably doesn’t think Cap’s going to take it well, and considering how well Cap’s been shown taking things not going his way (not well at all, that is), he’s probably right to be a little nervous about it.

Notably, military courtesy dictates that Havers should have informed his commander that he wanted to put in for a transfer BEFORE doing so. The fact that he doesn’t do so, and in fact waits so long after the fact- not telling the Captain about it until he can piggy back it onto the distraction of the Fall of France, when Cap’s in a relatively upbeat mood due to the possibility of getting to join the fight- that the transfer request is nearly approved, says that he knew or at least suspected that Cap would object and perhaps try to stop him and didn’t want to give him the opportunity to do so.

I think the whole “get in the fight” thing he gives as an excuse for requesting the transfer is a lie. He looks like he feels guilty saying it, and there’s nothing about the way he presents himself that says he’s the sort that’s longing to go out and kill some Germans. I read him as having a sort of gentle, sweet, good humored and conciliatory personality. Not a single word or action he gives in the episode says he’s the kind of guy who joined out of some sort of thirst for adventure or blood lust or whatever. I think he’s saying the lie that he most thinks the Captain would believe, as the Captain clearly desperately wants to be in the fight himself. He also looks like he feels bad when he leaves at the end of the scene, probably because the Captain looks so obviously sad.

The big question is what exactly is going on underneath their relationship dynamic? The Captain’s feelings for Havers are impossible to miss, but does Havers feel them back? I don’t have a conclusive answer to that question, but two possibilities strike me.

 Both of those possibilities have one thing in common, though: whether Havers had feelings for the Captain or not, he did not want the Captain to admit his own feelings to him. I think in the second scene, in Cap’s office, it was the Captain’s intention to admit his feelings to Havers. And after years of repression and knowing the potential consequences for his actions, the fact that he was at least giving it serious consideration says a lot about just how much the Captain liked Havers.

But... when Havers comes in, he tells the Captain he’s leaving that night (and given how quick that was, it occurs to me that it’s possible Havers didn’t tell the Captain about his transfer request until he’d received the answer on it, possibly at the same time the Fall of France message came, but only told the Captain he’d put in the request in the first scene, and waited until that afternoon to say it was approved, to try to give him a bit of time to get used to the idea and lessen the blow a little- or alternatively, to let him think he still had time to stop Havers when he didn’t). And then when the Captain tries to make the conversation the least bit personal, with the ‘I’ll miss you, Havers,’ Havers’ smile wanes and Cap walks it back, correcting it to a ‘we’ll miss you’ with a safe het-masc sports reference for added camouflage. He tries again to broach the topic as Havers is going out the door, ‘I say, Havers,’ but Havers, who usually has nothing but gentle smiles for the Captain, looks entirely unreceptive, and Cap blinks, gives himself the tinniest little sad headshake, and then walks that back, too, saying that it’s a shame they won’t be able to finish the operation together. Only then, once it’s clear that the Captain isn’t going to say anything that would have been deemed inappropriate for the time does he get that smile. (And Havers did have a really nice smile.) (And also, Ben Willbond and Peter Sandys-Clarke do an excellent job in these two scenes saying things with their little facial expressions that their characters for various reasons aren’t able to.)

It’s also notable Havers starts with ‘I’m afraid I’m leaving you, sir,’ and I don’t think it was an accidentally awkward bit of speech, I think he meant it and that he meant it as a hint to the Captain that he couldn’t continue on like that, with the open infatuation and dependence on him.

 But: were the Captain’s feelings returned by Havers or not?

Option 1: I think unlike most of Cap’s command, Havers actually did like and respect him. Havers seems like a kind man, the sort that would view Cap’s oddities as harmless eccentricities rather than causes for derision, and he was patient and gentle with Cap’s probably much-battered ego, and maybe Cap misinterpreted that rarity as his feelings possibly being returned.

If he didn’t return Cap’s feelings… in this case, I think Havers would actually be leaving to protect the Captain, with the knowledge that the longer he stayed, the more likely it would be that Cap would get to the point where he was too unsubtle to ignore, and liable to be reported by one of their subordinates that clearly weren’t thrilled by the Captain’s command in order to get rid of him, in which case there would be an investigation, and if he let it go long enough that the Captain admitted his feelings to Havers and Havers was asked about it during the investigation, he’d be stuck between the rock and the hard place. Denying it would be lying to a superior officer and given the Captain’s lack of subtlety, place suspicion on Havers possibly returning the Captain’s interests, and telling the truth would end up with the Captain chucked out of the army in disgrace and possibly placed in jail. Leaving the Captain was ultimately for the Captain’s own good.

I think this last part can be backed up with the fact that, after all, if Havers didn’t like or want to protect Cap, he could have let that scenario play out, stick around until it became so obvious that someone else reported the Captain or he’d report the Captain himself, and if it got to the feelings confession state, he could have happily told command that the Captain had propositioned him and then been rid of him, and probably get a much more competent CO in exchange, maybe even a promotion to that position himself.  

 Option 2: for those in favor of thwarted gay romance, rather than unrequited gay crushes, it’s also entirely possible that Havers was gay and did like the Captain back, but considered the battle front a safer option than actually letting Cap confess his feelings and having a relationship with him. Again, the penalty for that if they were caught- and they likely would have been caught, as Cap is the least subtle person in existence about his crushes- would be being chucked out of the military, followed by two years hard labor and/or chemical castration. This in turn would quite probably lead to social death and economic ruin, as ‘spent two years in prison turning big rocks into little rocks as punishment for homosexual acts’ isn’t the sort of thing to put on your CV and expect to be hired in a difficult post-war economy. At least not in the 1940s.

And he couldn’t just let Cap confess his feelings and then tell him he liked him back but that there couldn’t be a relationship between them, because one, that would probably crush Cap, and two, I can’t see Cap letting it go at that. He’s never been shown to easily give up on what he wants- carrying on with Operation-Get-Rid-of-Allison long after the others gave up interest in it, for instance- and if he let his feelings about Havers out of the box, I think he’d have trouble putting them back in- and it’s likely his attempts to convince Havers they could make it work would just make everything more obvious and worse.  

 The second option actually makes me sadder, because it would have put the potential for happiness almost but not quite within Cap’s reach.

 Either way, whether he returned them or not, I think Havers ultimately left in order to protect the Captain (and at least to a certain extent himself) from the societal consequences of his own feelings.

 As for the mysterious ‘William’ envelope: were they actually the plans or were they a love letter? I’ve read some debate whether William was Havers’ first name or William really was the name of their project, but why not both? (It’s even entirely possible that Cap named the project after Havers in yet another incredibly unsubtle gesture of his affection, as a few people have mentioned.) I think that the envelope really was the plans, though. It was a pretty full envelope. I think if Cap had worked up the nerve to write a love letter, it would have been more likely to be a love note, after decades of repressing his feelings, and from the bulk of that envelope, that would have to have been more of a love novella.

I think it was the plans, but Cap was looking at it so hard and pondering it so hard, because Havers’ first name on an envelope gave him the idea that even if Havers was leaving, he didn’t necessarily have to lose him, if he confessed his feelings and Havers responded positively, they could at least maintain a correspondence and then when the war was done there would be other options for them having a real relationship. My guess- just head cannon at the moment- is that was his intention. But again, when he tried to go for it with the ‘I’ll miss you’ and it wasn’t well received, he got cold feet.

When Cap tosses the envelope in with the bomb and buries it looking somewhat regretful, the regret is at not having confessed his feelings, and not being able to have that correspondence accordingly.

 I personally head cannon Havers dies in North Africa and Cap strongly regrets not trying to force him to stay or ever telling him how he feels because of, but that’s mostly just my imagination being cruel. He could have lived through it and just never contacted the Captain again. I like the death bit for two reasons, though. Havers being alive at the end of the war might have given the Captain a little hope for the future, for one (and if you haven’t guessed yet, guys, this isn’t going to end well). A big reason though is because the actor who plays Havers, Peter Sandys-Clarke, is the grandson of Lieutenant Willward Sandys-Clarke, who died fighting on the North African front in WWII. LT Sandys-Clarke was awarded the Victoria Cross for his action, which is the highest decoration for military valor you can be awarded in the UK. I’m just going to quote his citation wholesale, as it’s so impressive:

“During an attack on Guiriat el Atach, in Tunisia, on 23rd April, 1943, Lieutenant Sandys-Clarke's company gained their objective, but were counter-attacked and almost wiped out, he alone surviving of the officers. Although wounded, he gathered together a composite platoon and attacked the position again. The platoon was held up by heavy fire from a machine-gun post, which Lieutenant Sandys-Clarke tackled single-handed and knocked out. After personally dealing in the same way with two more machine-guns posts, he led his platoon to the objective. While they were consolidating there, they came under fire from two sniper posts; without hesitation he again advanced single-handed, and was killed within a few feet of the enemy. His quick grasp of the situation and his brilliant leadership undoubtedly restored the situation, while his outstanding bravery and tenacious devotion to duty were beyond praise.”

I think of it as a bit of homage to the actor’s grandfather, having Havers dying gallantly. It couldn’t have happened in quite the same way, of course, because LT Sandys-Clarke was infantry and Havers was artillery, but I like to think he did something heroic before his exit.

 As a final note from Reddy Weddy: on the subject of burying the bomb, it really is a shame Havers didn’t stick around to help Cap dispose of it, because Havers seemed to have better sense than the Captain and probably would have done something saner than just burying it in the backyard, where anyone could have saw him doing it from a window and dug it up later, or accidentally set it off doing something else later, not knowing it was there. Cap didn’t seem to notify anyone that he had buried a secret bomb prototype in that spot, either, as the military likely would have removed it before returning the house to the Buttons if he had.

The only worse options I can think of for bomb disposal are just chucking it out with the rubbish or locking it in a closet like his sexuality (my poor boy). if he still needed it, he should have either had it locked up in a vault only he knew the combination to, or sent it on to one of those secure military warehouses that existed in droves in those days and if he didn’t need it anymore, he should have burned the plans and then taken it out to an empty field away from the house and done a controlled demolition on it. Or if it was a situation somewhere in between, he could have kept the plans in a vault and destroyed the prototype. But my son, my poor semi-incompetent son, he just buries everything in the back yard.

 Stay tuned for the final part, our downer ending, encompassing both the end of the war and the end of Cap’s life, when I get around to finishing writing it. I’ve passed the 10,000 word mark for the entire analysis, though, so that’s something.  

[naesoonghonors]

Persepolis, remember where -we- women used to be

Persepolis

“Since then, this old and great civilization has been discussed mostly in connection with fundamentalism, fanaticism, and terrorism. As an Iranian who has lived more than half of my life in Iran, I know that this image is far from the truth. This is why writing Persepolis was so important to me. I believe that an entire nation should not be judged by the wrongdoings of a few extremists. I also don’t want those Iranians who lost their lives in prisons defending freedom, who died in the war against Iraq, who suffered under various repressive regimes, or who were forced to leave their families and flee their homeland to be forgotten. One can forgive but one should never forget. “ - Marjane Satrapi

This movie admittedly made me cry. What can I say besides I’m a sap for the concept of change and being unable to return to the way it was before. There is a lot that can be sad about this film. There is biting commentary on class and race throughout. Just due to time constraints I really will not be able to discuss it all. So please watch the movie and read the book. It will be worth it. Regardless, In this autobiographical flick we follow Marjane Satrapi through her childhood and early adult years in Iran during and after the Islamic Revolution.

For now skipping straight to post Islamic revolution, Marjane is forced into a much more restrictive societal role. This is obvious visually with the forcing of the hijab on all women. Even those not Islamic or not believing in the tradition is not spared. This is done for the sake of the good men of the country. So they are not distracted by the women’s bodies. This completely ignoring the fact that the men’s fashion of the time was pants so tight you could see their underwear. While fighting with a professor about this same topic Marjane has a bit of a shocking wake up moments where she finally confronts how much bullshit she has been put through. She is proud to be Iranian. It is the country her family has fought and died for. But the country has turned to a bit of a dictatorship. In her class they take the time to have all of the students sit around and cut the Shahs face and name out of their history books. Hoping to erase the past, perhaps have their country forget about it and more easily submit to their wills. As a woman Marjane is now expected to dress ‘virtuous’. This boils down to nothing being visible in public sans hands and face. And Marjane complies. So one would think that she would be a good woman and would be safe from evil sinful eyes. Wrong, of course. For the audacity she has to be seen in public men seen to throw terrible threats at her with no regard. So even playing by the rule’s women cannot win this game. That is because it is not actually about the attire. It is a symbol of an ideology being forced on the women of a country. Women are depicted as taking them off as soon as they get into their apartments. This is also where they are able to speak freely, mostly of revolution.

Marjane does however learn some rules of the society she has been thrusted into and how to play to win. When women threaten her for dressing like a slut, she breaks down in tears in order to avoid their wrath. This is very out of character for Marjane from my perspective. Never before has she been scared to say what she thinks or wants. So she must fall back on these more womanly tactics. Even so. most of the enforcement of this comes from other women in her community. It begins in schools, the female teacher stating something like ‘To cover is virtuous. Veil is freedom. Those who reveal indulge in sin. Veil honors soldiers.’Perhaps using the older women’s internalized sexism or maybe just looking like more trouble than its worth the women move along. As clever as it was problems of gender, race, or sexuality are society and systematic problems not the product of individual interaction. When she appears in a public place to meet with her boyfriend she is generally hassled/ harassed by man also in the park. Cops appear in the vicinity and Marjane knows if she does not act quickly, she will be in trouble for her, well I guess her existence in general. So she quickly whips up some tears and cry sot the cops about how that man made inappropriate and lewd comments about her. So the man is quickly punished and beaten. This public shaming is simply a product of cops general feeling of superiority and need to protect a weak woman. Because otherwise they are weak sinful women. That is not to imply that women somehow have an easier life. It is more that they are just denied certain rights and gain more restrictions. As frantically explained by Grandma Marjane needs to be more careful with cops. If she gets in trouble, she could also wind up worse than just dead. That is because it is illegal to kill a virgin. In order to get around this it is normal for cops to rape women and then execute them. So women are not even protected. It is no wonder her parents wanted her to leave for Paris for a few years. One wrong move could get her locked up like her uncle.

The hypocrisy can also be highlighted later in the film when Marjane is pulled over by cops for running because it makes her butt jiggle. To which she tells then to stop looking at her ass. She is covered head to tow in black cloth. Truly what else is she supposed to do. Government issued orders to suppress female sexuality and freedom is not a trend that has halted even in the modern day. Even in America the land of the free there is a need to claw rights out of the hands of lawmakers holding then back for selfish gain. Humans have this very gross ability to allow things to happen when they view someone or something as lesser than them. Women being lower class citizens makes it okay to talk to them like children or publicly punish them for not wearing their scarf correctly. Because dehumanizing is exactly what that is. They would rather her butt no shake as opposed to her arrive at school in time for her education. Some cops, professors, and men of power refuse to look her in the eye specifically because she is a woman. How can women get anything done if they cannot even enter and equal conversation with a cop. A cop is meant to be a protector but Marjane is in much more danger being anywhere by them.

What is really important abut this movie is Grandma. She is genuinely the coolest. She is quick on her feet, and ready to play the game, or game the system while also being aware of the larger nature of the situation. Grandma can work to help keep her family safe and instill hope in those around her. And the most touching thing is as Marjane grows she gets her grandmothers beauty mark. Grandma passing down her resilience and spirit is possibly what kept Marjane alive in Paris when she was homeless. People are simply a web of interconnected identities and ideologies wearing a skin suit. If all the young men and women can come together in secret speak easies then clearly the government is not representing the true will of its people. Like grandma all one can do to survive is to keep moving forward and keeping hope. She is a demonstration of how a divorcing of concepts like age and religiosity/ fanaticism can help mentor a better next generation. Women need to be free to divorce their husbands, make their own way in the world, and feel able to contribute to the government and community around them. For a girl to grow up is scary, but we do not have to face the revolution in our times alone.

I feel as though i have not done this movie justice. If you have the time please watch through it yourself. All of these issues are beautifully intertwined and are much better enjoyed in their complete context. So please find a copy of this and check it out.

[qunot]

Lolicon’s Impact on Me

Oh, how I loathe to write this post, but write I must, I don't know if this will sink to the depths of darkness, but I'd like to think that at-least one soul might benefit from it.

I am what society would call a monster or aberration. A being who has no attraction to adults but does have it to kids. Some as young as 9.

Contrary to popular belief, I did not get bored some day and decide, "I am feeling really masochistic today, why don't I do something that is bound to really backfire on me and completely destroy my life, just to spice things up."

No one thinks like that, it is innate. From the very moment you're born to the very moment you die, it is a part of you forever and ever and it sucks. A lot. Having sex? Never. Having a relationship with someone? Never. Looking at porn? Only if you want to go to prison for forty years.

Also contrary to popular belief, I don't have the desire to jump on random people in fits of lust or to seek out sexual encounters just to relieve the pressure. This is similar to how you don't really see hordes of virgin men scouring the streets for every random woman they can forcefully abduct into their homes.

This is not to say that we are completely stable. Societal pressures involved (being called a monster constantly), having nowhere to turn to, etc. conspire to make us a fair bit more unstable than the national average.

I myself am actually fairly well-adjusted compared to many more unfortunate people like me.

Some go insane.

Some just give into temptation and eventually end up in a dark part of the web filled with things which shouldn't be allowed to exist.

Some get all self-loathing and punish themselves every-day to make themselves feel how much of a monster they are.

I on the other-hand manage to stay relatively stable, albeit having to deal with bouts of depression and mood instability. This wasn't always the case, and I attribute much of it to lolicon hentai, which is a sort of cartoon porn.

Unlike real pornography, every character is entirely fictitious and there is no person to horribly traumatize or to soil the reputation of by being associated with naked pictures of kids. Everyone wins. Society gets well-adjusted productive members of society and I get to be sane.

Except, is this really case? You would think that society would rally behind something with such great benefits, right? Sadly, politics is a huge part of anything to do with this, and more often than not, facts are optional.

At this point in the game, not only are the facilities to help support people woefully lacking, but governments have been carrying the flawed mindset that "this is a slippery slope which leads to children getting abused" when every law they pass actually achieves the opposite.

To really understand how this is so however, I am going to have to take you through a little story about myself and how I came to get to the point I'm at now.

Throughout my childhood and teenage years, I never really thought about sex, it was just something which never really crossed my mind. Other kids would mention a thing or two from time to time, but I would be content to leave that be.

That did end up changing, but not in the ways one might expect, I grew more and more curious towards kids who were far under my age, but were all but present. I would sometimes look at fully clothed images on the internet with a weird feeling.

And one day, I saw perhaps one of the youngest people there who looked a fair bit younger than they actually were, although still a fair bit younger than me who I found extremely cute unlike all of the so called "attractive girls" who the other teenagers would always talk about.

She was far, far less developed than them and that was very enticing.

I very awkwardly tried to make friends with her, and while it very slightly worked, my social awkwardness was off the charts and making it difficult to get much further and eventually it crashed and burned like many unrequited loves too.

During this process, I had a slight feeling that something was wrong, especially with the low age involved, but no one seemed to notice a thing as we were all well within the legal boundaries.

Those were the first encounters with this unique sexuality, although certainly not the last.

At some point, I'm not even sure exactly, , but I drifted away from looking at clothed images of real girls and started looking at random anime (cartoons of sorts which are produced in Japan) ones as I found them particularly cute.

I flicked through lots of them, being pulled more and more towards the young ones who I adored and contained the qualities I loved. I even childishly wanted to leave this world behind entirely.

This continued for a number of years, even past school, although I became more and more conscious of cute school kids roaming by. I didn't have any particularly bad intentions for them, but I did find myself looking whenever they happened to be nearby.

I gradually became more and more disillusioned with reality, especially with this taboo attraction which society all but called the devil and eventually all alone in the depths of depression and repressed self-loathing and after the deaths of several loved ones, I decided to deal with it once and for all.

Through a great deal of research, I discovered that sexual desire had a connection to several hormones within the body, so I thought that if I get rid of those, then I can become normal, right? It's not like these desires are good for anything, right?

Unfortunately, the methods to deal with this involved prescription drugs and getting a hold of them would require going through the right medical channels, but I didn't let this stop me.

I knew that if I let the information about me loose to those professional, then I might well be locked up for the rest of my days in some sort of mental hospital, unable to die. This is how deep the stigma regarding this condition runs, even what may be perfectly reasonable professionals in other times will go crazy at the thought, and I could not take this risk.

I managed to get the pills through sketchy yet perfectly legal channels and began to rid myself of this condition, discarding my former self and being reborn as a normal productive member of society... Except, this did not work, even slightly.

It is true that it somewhat reduced my sex drive, but the romantic attractions, protective instincts for them, etc. simply refused to disappear, so I channeled all my willpower to suppress those and tried to seek relationships with normal adults like any other human being.

As the chief symbol of my depravity, I also cut myself off from all cartoon porn and strived to maintain a porn free life as regular porn could do nothing but conjure up feelings of revulsion in me, as part of this, I slowly brainwashed myself into thinking that all sexual thoughts are evil and clamped down on them viciously.

This too failed as my distorted mental state and already irregular sexuality made it impossible to really get anywhere further than permanent friend zone. They eventually left and looked at me with disgust, or so the distorted feelings said.

As the hormones vanished, my body grew weaker and weaker to the point I would easily run out of breath even for short walks, my bones grew rickety, and I found myself staring listlessly at the wall for many hours at a time, my mind an empty void and occasionally thinking about throwing myself off the tallest building and researching the best way of committing suicide.

I also began to hear faint voices which weren't really there whispering and sometimes saying my name, calling for me and I grew steadily more paranoid about people watching me from outside the window or from behind me, even though there was no one there.

I drifted further and further from the world, continuing the courses of pills like a mindless zombie, and when I was out and about, I felt as if everyone around me was looking at me with the utmost disgust. I even ate a bit of bleach, while thinking about just ending it.

At some point, the pills ran out and I couldn't muster up the will to get more of them at that point, so I continued my suppression exercises and my mindset bit by bit still remained in a weird way, almost like that of an alien and yet I pressed forward convinced by that letting my repressed self out would be a terrible idea.

Eventually, a few more friends abandoned me due to my distorted mind, I pleaded with them to stay, but they took the rational choice. I can hardly fault them for that.

Completely distraught and unable to muster up the energy to continue, I ended up looking at the cartoon porn again and bit by bit reconnected with various people and continued trotting along until I learned that several people near me were arrested for doing the same thing and had their lives destroyed for it.

I freaked out and started looking into various laws and regulations and drifted towards the forums of the various sites which produced my favorite content. I pored over each page and even noticed a few people who were somewhat like me there, and even more surprisingly, they didn't seem to be the evil sadistic monsters which society taught me they were.

I ended up talking to them in a slightly liberating experience and learned a number of things. I also branched out into various other communities.

One of the things I learned is that looking at child abuse images is more of an addiction than being a complete sadistic monster, and that safer content is extremely scarce with people having to dig deeper and deeper into the darkness to find more of what they need.

According to them, it can allow one to vent more effectively than anything else, in practice, a lot of the content is so horrible that it ends up driving you to near suicide.

They also commented that it would have been impossible to escape from that content, if not for the fact that they had an alternate outlet to switch to. This reaffirmed my beliefs that an outlet is vital for dealing with your natural urges and to stay away from that horrible yet addictive content.

Fate tends to make fools of us all, however as while browsing, I stumbled upon a couple of blurry images. I looked in closer and each one was a naked child standing on her own completely naked, I was really surprised that something like this could actually exist on the surface web.

It had a stronger sexual attraction than usual and as I had never seen a naked child (of the right sex) before, I looked curiously at their body structure. Shortly after, I dragged myself away from those images, deciding to stay away from them and just focus on cartoon porn instead.

Several weeks later, I stumbled upon an article about the ban in Japan and discovered that those images in particular were commercially produced thirty years ago back when when it was legal, which made sense considering that the quality of the images was fairly poor by today's standards.

After all these events, I sat down and thought about the poor state of information regarding us.

For instance, there is a misconception that mere thoughts lead to cartoon porn which lead to real porn which lead to rape. Or the very common assumption that we are all crazy rapists by default,  I used to think that too after hearing it so many times.

In truth, I have yet to see anyone who has actually abused someone, they seem vanishingly rare and I'm happy for it as-well as I would be very uncomfortable to be in the same space as someone who abused someone against their will.

This led me to think of ways to try to get information out to people that a lot of things have been massively misunderstood and I decided to write a short post. It won't quite be the most effective thing in the world, but every little bit helps in the grand scheme of things.

In the end, even though I am attracted to them and can fantasize about doing all manner of erotic things with them, I wouldn't actually be able to force them to do things against their will, even thinking of it would weigh too heavily on my conscience.

I don't know what you will make of this post, but I hope it's of use to at-least someone.

[absurdfuture]

'How can I complain?'

An essay about mental health by musician James Blake, from It’s Not OK to Feel Blue (And other lies).

James Blake 09 OCTOBER 2019

It’s especially easy to poke fun at the idea that a white man could be depressed. I have done it myself, as a straight white man who was depressed. In fact, I still carry the shame of having been a straight white man who’s depressed and has experienced suicidal thoughts. And still, when discussing it with most people, I will play down or skirt around how desperately sad I have been; instead I emphasize how much happier I am now. I emphasize the work I had to do to get to a better place, and how it was hard work and fruitful work, and how I empowered myself by doing it. I usually focus on how I regained control and an enthusiasm for living (‘Nice one, mate!’), not on how I lost it. That is the last of my defensiveness.

I remember doing an interview with the New York Times where the interviewer asked me why my childhood was painful, and how I got to such a dark place in my late twenties. I told him, ‘You know, other kids, bullying, etc.’ – and instantly regretted my brevity. He said something like, ‘Right, so a pretty standard childhood then.’

Fuck. After all this public talk of depression and anxiety, and many albums of expressed pain, I felt exposed as a fraud, but I was relieved not to have shown my cards and revealed how pathetic and weak I must have been when I was younger. Maybe he was right. He’d probably been through worse and wasn’t complaining about it.

I picked up a resentment towards other people from school. My parents were very loving and supportive and, unusually for my generation, still together. I went to school completely unequipped to deal with certain kids who were taking their fractured and in some cases abusive home lives out on me. I know that now. I was ‘too sensitive’, and I never learned how to act. I was a baby who’d been kept away from germs, and now I was getting ill from anything and everything. (I should say now that I have many happy memories of childhood, especially of my parents and of certain friends who I could count on, and that my inability to focus on those positives probably didn’t help.)

During my school years I spent thousands of hours walking on my own with headphones on or playing piano in the practice rooms, often going there first to cry in private and then occasionally with a mind to play. I was addicted to video games from the age of twelve, rarely going out to socialize. I had a few ‘best’ friends over the years who, looking back, I didn’t know well. But I’m grateful for having had them.

I put girls on pedestals and worshipped them, but only ever remained their friend. I fell in love many times and it was never reciprocated. I had no automatic right to them of course, but they kept me around for years and allowed me to be bullied and humiliated by their friends, accidentally betraying me out of awkwardness. I resented their understandable, youthful inability to know what to do with a sensitive boy who made them laugh and feel good about themselves, but whose body they did not want.

Boys would see my sensitivity as weakness and, while I was sharp and quick-witted, I wasn’t sporty, which was my first mistake with them, I think. Again, I didn’t know how to act. I wondered for years whether I had some behaviour disorder. I still wonder. In any case, year upon year of capricious bullying and humiliation followed.

These feelings of betrayal, persecution and rejection I kept to myself. In the crude gender stereotypes I was aware of at that age, I thought I had the sensitivity of a female but in a male’s body. I joked my way through it and made sure nobody ever saw me cry. I remained a virgin until the age of twenty-two, because I was awkward and unable to be natural around women. I was afraid of the vulnerability of sex after so many embarrassing attempts at it. (The song ‘Assume Form’ is, in part, about finding the ability to feel safe during intimacy.) It seemed to me that it had taken my success as a DJ for women to pursue me, and then I distrusted them for their sudden, transparent interest, so I pushed them all away. Slowly the face of every woman morphed into the faces of the girls who I felt had betrayed and humiliated me. And the face of every man became a bully who would underestimate me and try to kill my spirit.

Becoming relatively famous, my persecution complex turned into a self-serving narcissism, and my obsession with proving my worth to people who’d underestimated me was now being rewarded financially. To those ends, my first emotional language – music – had been the vehicle. I wanted to show everyone what they’d missed out on for all those years.

To some extent I succeeded in that, but I became so self-obsessed and isolated that I wasn’t the success I seemed to be on paper. And so the chasm grew between my alias – the guy with the ‘Pitchfork best new music 8.0+’, with the uncompromising and flourishing career, who seemed in control of everything – and the man-child who for many years was hurting, spiralling, never leaving the house, wasting away in an ego prison, refusing to collaborate, allowing himself to be bled financially and taken advantage of by his friends and their extended family, playing video games and smoking weed fourteen hours a day and not taking any care of himself what-so-ever until he was in a black depression, experiencing daily panic attacks, hallucinations and an existential crisis. I was asking questions like ‘What is the point of me?’ and saying I didn’t want to live. I became afraid of the growing fog of war outside my house because of what I knew people expected of me if I entered it: a normal interaction and, even more impossible, a new album.

I wanted people to know how I felt, but I didn’t have the vocabulary to tell them. I have gone into a bit of detail here not to make anyone feel sorry for me, but to show how a privileged, relatively rich-and-famous-enough-for-zero-pity white man could become depressed, against all societal expectations and allowances. If I can be writing this, clearly it isn’t only oppression that causes depression; for me it was largely repression.

I’m still not sure I fully believe I am entitled to be depressed or sad at all, because I’m white and cisgender and male, and life for people like me is undoubtedly the easiest of any group. But my privilege didn’t make me want to stick around, and it makes me feel even more embarrassed for having let myself go.

When the delusional mental force field of whiteness finally popped (the ‘psychosis’ of whiteness, as Kehinde Andrews puts it, which most white people are still experiencing – I was still able to reap the now obvious benefits of being white, straight and male but without the subconscious ability to ignore my responsibility to the marginalized), I started having the uncomfortable but rational thought that my struggle was actually comparatively tiny, and that any person of colour or member of the LGBTQ+ community could feasibly have been through exactly the same thing and then much, much more on top of that. A plate stacked until it was almost unmanageable. For me it became embarrassing to mention my child’s portion of trauma and sadness.

Combining that thought with the normalized stigmatization of male musicians’ emotional expression in the media, I felt like I must be the ‘Sadboy Prince and the Pea’.

But my girlfriend verbally slapped some sense into me, saying it does not help anybody, least of all oneself, to compare pain. And that was good advice to hear from someone who’d been through what she has. I can only imagine how frustrating it was for this Pakistani woman to watch me – with all my advantages in life – self-sabotage and complain like I have. Fuck.

And then you look at the statistics: according to the Yale Global Health Review, ‘in 2015, the crude suicide rate [in the USA] for white non-Hispanic males aged 40 to 65 was 36.84 per 100,000 people – more than twice the rate in the general American population’. If it wasn’t already clear that we have more than enough representation, we’re huge in suicide too.

Given this, I think it’s worth examining why many privileged white men can end up feeling they have no legitimate claim to pain, and then never deal with what they can’t lay claim to.

Even while writing this I’m visited by the thought ‘Who even cares? There are much bigger problems in the world than white men who feel sad.’ (This is a bloody laughable thing to write your first piece on – get some perspective, arsehole, and put away your tiny violin.) But you know what? I’ll continue because I think we need to advance the conversation around mental health for everyone, and it’s the only experience I feel qualified to talk about.

From systemic toxic masculinity (‘Boys don’t cry’, basically) and an ostensibly homophobic fear of sensitivity being beer-bonged into us by our friends, family and the media from as early as we can remember (‘Chug, chug, chug!’) to the slow realization as we get older that the world is actually stacked towards our success, we end up thinking that our individual psychological decline is shameful.

I believe it is psychologically dangerous for our egos to be built up as much as they are; for the importance of success to be so great; for the world to open its doors more to us than to others (most of us willfully ignore that those advantages exist, though we feel them deep down, and subconsciously know that it is unfair and that we must capitalize on them).

It is dangerous for us to be made to feel we can do anything and be anything, to gain an understanding of women as a resource rather than a lesson in empathy and love – and then find in all our capitalistic and egoistic fervour that we have neglected to take care of that other muscle that enables our survival: the mind.

I for one felt like Donald Trump, starting with $413 million and ending up broke and lying about my tax records. Maybe then it’s no surprise that so many disaffected white men identify so deeply with him. (It should be noted that I absolutely don’t.) That and our shared love of doing anything we want and saying whatever we like without consequence to ourselves.

That shared love has rightly led to a debate about what white males are entitled to say and do. I believe we’re entitled to no more than anybody else, which at this point requires a lot of listening and rebalancing. I also believe everybody is entitled to pain, no matter how perceptibly or relatively small that pain is. I don’t want the shame around depression and anxiety in privileged people to become worse any more than I want it for the marginalized. Because without addressing that pain we end up with more cis-gendered white male egomaniacs who bleed their shit on to everybody (and some of them will write albums about it).

James Blake's essay is from It's Not Ok To Feel Blue (And Other Lies), a collection of writing about mental health, curated by Scarlett Curtis.