#the uneducated aura reeks

[dragynkeep]

zutara fandom, we need to talk.

this past week  —  & honestly before that really  —  there’s been a reoccuring sentiment from people who could honestly just benefit from blocklisting tags & moving on. but much like the antis they say they’re so different to, we have now got a situation where people in these circles are being harmed by radfem rhetoric once more. so, your local kinkijew is gonna speak up.

zutara is a ship important to a lot of people, & people will express that in different ways. make art, amvs, fic & sometimes some of that fic will be sexual. sometimes, some of that sexual fic will be kinky. & sometimes, those kinks will be kinks you don’t like. & that’s fine.

what’s not fine is harming those people. what’s not fine is spreading radfem rhetoric again & again, infantilizing women, harming survivors; all because you don’t like a certain kink. & i’m going to name the kink because there shouldn’t be any shame around this, there shouldn’t be shame around any kink.

if you don’t like cnc; otherwise known as consensual non consent, an umbrella kink that encompasses everything from kidnapping, to bondage, to outright rape scenes, that is fine. that is your right. no one will ever make you feel lesser for not enjoying or even wanting to be around these kinks as that is your right. an age old saying in the kink & bdsm community is “your kink is not my kink, and that’s okay.”

however too many zutara fans have become downright evil in displaying how they don’t like these kinks, even if they themselves have written nsfw fics, kinky fics, drawn nsfw art, etc. it’s a double standard & it’s one absolutely fuelled by anti sex, anti kink & anti feminist radfem rhetoric that is so staple on social media, especially tumblr where there was a notable rise in the 2010′s that never went away. it affected so much of our queer spaces, our nsfw spaces & our kink spaces.

straight up; kink cannot be abuse. see it, repeat it over & over, sear it into your brain. kink cannot be abuse because all kinks require consent. all kinks often have far more verbal consent & communication between partners than vanilla relationships because of the nature of these types of sex. straight up, all relationships will feature some form of “drop” after sex, it is a natural response to the release of endorphins & the body trying to return to it’s natural levels. no, this is not “evidence” that kinky sex is harmful because you experience dom / sub drop afterwards. straight up, you do not get to speak over 62% of women, along with the countless numbers of men, genderqueer, nonbinary & intersex people, about our kinks. you do not get to say heinous things such as “no one wants to be raped” when a generous amount of people who practice these kinks are survivors. you do not get to claim our “coping mechanisms” are “harmful” when a. you are not a psychologist & b. actual psychologists disagree with you. you do not get to generalize trauma, harm, reclamation & sexuality in such vile ways just because you personally do not agree with it.

you do not get to be uneducated & act like an authority. end of story.

some of you really need to look at yourselves & realize that just because you do not like something or don’t understand something, doesn’t mean you get to then force your opinions & thoughts on someone else. you do not get to harass people. you do not get to ignore the actual facts, the science behind these experiences. you do not get to erase peoples voices because you don’t like what we have to say & think you know better.

you do have to act better. before you hurt even more people.

sources for those who wish to be further educated.

https://medium.com/sexography/understanding-consensual-non-consent-8e275053ba54

https://sexwithemily.com/consensual-non-consent/

https://bound-together.net/cnc/

https://cerebral-sexuality.com/2018/04/09/consensual-kinks-arent-unethical/

https://aeon.co/ideas/fantasies-of-forced-sex-are-common-do-they-enable-rape-culture

https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/women-who-stray/202102/consensual-non-consent-exploring-challenging-boundaries

https://domsubliving.com/5-things-about-consensual-non-consent/

https://monomaniacism.com/2017/09/16/safewords-cnc-and-how-we-define-consent/

[bnrobertson1]

BRMR #13: “The Peanut Butter Falcon”

Between its lyrical shots of North Carolina’s Outer Banks and casting of none other than Jake “The Snake” Roberts (!), The Peanut Butter Falcon at times felt conceived in my mind, circa 2003. A Huck Finn-inspired tale of how loss can fertilize some of life’s most profound relationships, the film is heart-warming as it is funny as it is beautifully crafted. This beauty is rooted in the acting, which ranges from genuinely eye-opening (The casting of Zack Gottsagen, who actually has Down’s Syndrome, is no novelty) to the pained restraint of Shia LaBeouf’s Tyler. The cinematogra… wait, fucking Shia LaBeouf?

Yep, Tough Stuff Shia LaBeouf. The same guy who framed himself as an art project after stopping the Trump reign of terror ONCE AND FOR ALL. That VERY INTERESTING artisTE who attempted to force you to respect him by filming himself watching all of his own work. Plus all the drunk shit. Yes, that one.

Before I continue, I should make it explicitly clear that I’m not trying to be critical of Shia or any of his past indiscretions. I was in my 20s too at one point, and it didn’t take billions of dollars in the international box office to make me go though political, artistic, self-obsessed, and intoxicated “phases.”* While I’m not proud of some of the things I did during these chapters**, I still find them to be irreplaceable in my personal development, for better or worse. And although a lot of this was self-imposed for being- and continuing to be- in a very visible profession from a very young age, I think Shia should be allowed his own personal voyage as well. it absolutely sucks for him that he wasn’t allowed to grow up and make mistakes in a less vulnerable, exposing way.

*Many of which continue to continue…

** That said, I never did anything nearly as cool as punching Brad Pitt or Tom Hardy in the face

But, his past- all of it- casts such an unwieldy shadow it distracts from his current work, especially when he is trying to be a unassuming yet charismatic Southerner. In most instances, this recognition that “Oh, there’s Shia LaBeouf, movie star” in a movie just happens. It’s the nature of being known for a living. Some directors, like Quentin Tarantino, know how to use an actor’s reputation- in this case stratospheric celebrity- brilliantly (see: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood), enriching the narrative by using the actor’s real life. Brad Pitt gets away with some pretty gross actions as Cliff Booth because we know its Brad Pitt and Brad Pitt is the man*, especially when he’s smoking a cig with his shirt off.

*Although I still think it’s cool that somebody had the moxie to punch him in the face

Shia’s casting in The Peanut Butter Falcon* has the opposite effect. The ironic thing is the film’s producers seemed to have the right idea at first: Have a remorseful, troubled yet sympathetic hothead play a mournful, troubled yet sympathetic hothead. Slam Dunk, right? And I feel it would have been, if...  

*Remember THAT movie?

[Spoilers Follow]

… if they didn’t introduce the love story into the narrative. Dakota Johnson’s Eleanor is the embodiment of loveliness in the film, the boundless depth of her care coming across so real that she at times shines with angelic aura. Shia’s character is a vagrant who hikes around the North Carolina East Coast, starting shit when he’s not committing felonies. They fall in love. To make this in any way plausible- a River Rat* somehow winning the affection of a woman of otherworldly kindness and beauty- you’d need an actor of world-class charm and subtlety. One that can make us see the light through the murk of his troubled soul. Put another way, for the audience to find this realistic at all, we need to believe that deep down, even though he’s wielding a shotgun and probably reeks like a moldy Natural Light Ice, he has a real goodness down deep, or to quote the film, a “good heart.”

*Or whatever the Ocean equivalent would be. Ocean Opossum?

The problem is that because of his very public past indiscretions, the audience knows Shia “down deep,” and it’s not exactly the gold that would be needed to blind a Dakota Johnson-type to his many surface-level issues. A voyage of any depth into Shia’s life outside acting only spawns bewilderment, the occasional laugh, and, at times, disgust- not exactly the alluring light that would make logic stop. It’s not Shia’s performance, it’s his presence. Again, I’m not criticizing any of Shia’s life choices, but I also wouldn’t call them indicative of some limitless warmth that would make someone like Dakota Johnson’s character bypass how sticky, smelly, uneducated, and dangerous this character would have been. Shia’s character is likable enough, but so charming as to ignore how evolutionary biology works. The obnoxious thing about the Shia/ Dakota relationship is that it is NOT NEEDED for the film to work. At all. In fact, I’d argue the film would have been more powerful had they not fallen in love, as its central points about the bonds loss can create and how misfits can find comfort with one another would have been served much better over some totally implausible love story. As written, I think there are only a handful of actors who could pull the love thing off (Gosling comes to mind). LaBoeuf’s performance is good, but I don’t think anything he could have done would transcend his past indiscretions- if that seems unfair, it probably is, but no more so than the cruel fate millions of actors have had to face that either didn’t star in the Transformers franchise and/ or are ugly.    

BUT I’ll give The Peanut Butter Falcon a little bump because YelaWolf is in it. He plays a character named “Ratboy.” Hell Yes. Grade: B+