every artist who has ever attempted to satirize masculinity i am so sorry
you could name a movie Portrait of a delusional abuser ruining his own life in pursuit of a fictional standard of manhood and 89% of its fanbase would still be like "Fuck yeah man it was so cool when Shit Cumdick gave that badass speech about how pushing everyone away and never letting yourself feel emotions is actually a good idea for your life. fuckin dope flick"
My boyfriend is going back to school to become a preschool teacher and he just found this misprint on indeed:
*sidles up to you at the bar* would you like to hear my wise aphorism
only if it's actually wise. the last guy who asked me this had a pretty foolish aphorism tbh
oh… uhuh… *really should have prepared this ahead of time* never ignore… the melody of time… when your shoe’s untied?
*considers this aphorism sagely, sipping my horrible and bitter potion*
yes. there is wisdom in this. he whose shoes are untied must carefully mind the rhythm of his steps. bartender, another Wretched Potion, for my comrade here
*to self* holy shit… my aphorism… it’s wise!
I were inspired
Flirting with dog girl is easy u just gotta
Mad that she cant afford botox really innit
you will never escape the labyrinth
More people should abandon Internet discourse and get into observing/engaging with local politics. I say this not because local politics often offers more meaningful opportunities for effective praxis (although it does), but because local politics often offers just as much highly toxic and entertaining petty drama.
I highly recommend city council meetings. You might make yourself an informed voter and active community member or something. You also might get to watch an ongoing soap opera of old men ready to murder one another over trash collection ordinances, and unlike the Internet, none of them can effectually tell one another to kill themselves no matter how hard and how clearly they are thinking it.
The Barbie Movie is confused -- and it is confused on purpose, because it can't actually acknowledge the role that capitalism and white supremacy play in the patriarchal system that it wants to give itself credit for acknowledging. And so the film introduces patriarchy as a force almost with no agent or systematic driving force behind it.
Ken, an oafish goof is able to find the concept of patriarchy and transmit it to the entirety of his society simply by learning about it and speaking about it to his fellow Kens. There is no use of force, no political organizing (notably, the Kens try to take over the political system after they have already taken hold of the culture), no real persuasion even -- simply by hearing about patriarchy the women in Barbieworld somehow become brainwashed by it.
This means we never have to really see the Kens as genuine antagonists, we can still laugh at their bizarrely crammed-together multiple dance numbers and forgive them when they, like the women, are freed of the patriarchy that they wanted simply by women speaking about the fact that sexism is exists. Both the origins of patriarchy and the solution to it is as simple as an individual person telling their story.
The CEOs that run Mattel in the Real World are similarly cartoonish and devoid of real agency. They're even portrayed as generically interested in the idea of Barbie being inspiring to girls. The movie can't even acknowledge their profit motive, and it can't make any of the men running the company look too powerful or even too morally suspect -- but the film does still want to have Barbie encounter sexism in the real world and grapple with the harm "she" (the consumer product, and not the social forces and human beings that created her) has supposedly done.
And so Barbie is depicted as both sexism's victim and sexism's fault. She's dropped into a patriarchal world that the film acknowledges has a menacing, condescending quality -- but the film can't even have an underlying working theory of where this danger comes from, and who had the power to create this patriarchy in the first place, because that would require being critical of Mattel and capitalism.
And so the guys at Mattel aren't responsible for Barbie being a sexist caricature, Barbie's existence is responsible for giving women and girls unrealistic ideas (but also Barbie lives in a world filled with diversity and this Barbie only aligns with sexist stereotypes because she's stereotypical Barbie...so where did those stereotypes come from, and by which mechanism have they remained the norm?) Sexism isn't caused by political & economic systems exerting power over women, it's caused by men sharing weird ideas with other men, and it can be fought via women sharing their experiences with other women!
And ultimately the real world with all its flaws and losses and injustices is still preferable to Barbieworld, because you get to have such depth of feeling and experience and you get a vagina, so how bad could really be? And hey, when you think about it, the Barbieworld is just an inversion of the real world, isn't it? A world with women in power is just reverse sexist, so it was justifiable for the Kens to want to take over, and what does it say that all things being equal Barbie still would prefer to leave behind her matriarchy and join the patriarchal capitalist world?
It's not that I'm surprised the film's a clarion call for personal choice white feminism and consumer capitalism. I just expected the call to be a little more seductive or in any way coherent. I wanted to have frothy fun, and instead I was more horrified by the transparency of its manipulation than I was by even the most unsettling moments in Oppenheimer.
Last week I accidentally took an edible at 10x my usual dose. I say “accidentally” but it was really more of a “my friend held it out to my face and I impulsively swallowed it like a python”, which was technically on purpose but still an accident in that my squamate instincts acted faster than my ability to assess the situation and ask myself if I really wanted to get Atreides high or not.
Anyway. I was painting the wall when it hit. My friend heard me make a noise and asked what was wrong—I explained that I had just fallen through several portals. I realized that painting the wall fulfilled my entire hierarchy of needs, and was absolutely sure that I was on track to escaping the cycle of samsara if I just kept at it a little longer. I was thwarted on my journey towards nirvana only by the fact that I ran out of paint.
Seeking a surrogate act of humble service through which I might be redeemed and made human, I turned to unwashed dishes in the sink and took up the holy weapon of the sponge. I was partway through cleaning the blender when it REALLY hit.
You ever clean a blender? It’s a shockingly intimate act. They are complex tools. One of the most complicated denizens of the kitchen. Glass and steel and rubber and plastic. Fuck! They’ve got gaskets. You can’t just scrub ‘em and rinse them down like any other piece of shit dish. You’ve got to dissemble them piece by piece, groove by sensitive groove, taking care to lavish the spinning blades with cautious attention. There’s something sensual about it. Something strangely vulnerable.
As I stood there, turning the pieces over in my hands, I thought about all the things we ask of blenders. They don’t have an easy job. They are hard laborers taking on a thankless task. I have used them so roughly in my haste for high-density smoothies, pushing them to their limits and occasionally breaking them. I remembered the smell of acrid smoke and decaying rubber that filled the kitchen in the break room the last time I tried to make a smoothie at work—the motor overtaxed and melted, the gasket cracked and brittle. Strawberry slurry leaked out of it like the blood of a slain animal.
Was this blender built to last? Or was it doomed to an early grave in some distant landfill by the genetic disorder of planned obsolescence? I didn’t know, and was far too high to make an educated guess. But I knew that whatever care and tenderness and empathy I put into it, the more respect for the partnership of man and machine, the better it would perform for me.
This thought filled me with a surge of affection. However long its lifespan, I wanted it to be filled with dignity and love and understanding. I thought: I bet no one has hugged this blender before. And so I lifted it from its base.
A blender is roughly the size and shape of a human baby. Cradling one in your arms satisfies a primal need. A month ago I was permitted to hold an infant for the first time in my life, an experience which was physically and psychologically healing. I felt an echo of that satisfaction holding my friend the blender, and the thought of parting with it felt even more ridiculous than bringing it with me to hang out on my friend’s bed.
Strange that it never occured to me. There are times I've been so upset that I've stamped around while cussing, that I've lain flat on the floor and groaned for as long as I had breath, that I've ranted my frustration aloud in an unhinged monologue, that I've swung my limbs about in a fury. All until I'd vented enough to just ... resume my normal life.
And if I'd had not the privacy of my home, I'd either have had to bottle that all up ... or open it all up where the public could scrutinize my every move. It really is a privilege to not be constantly on display like that.
[ID: tweet by Lydia Kiesling @ lydiakiesling, "Housed people have the privilege of having their worst moments in private; unhoused people don't. That gives some people the mistaken impression that the person they see acting belligerent on the street is and will be that person every single moment of their life."]
Also consider how you must look every time you're sick for any reason. Everyone gets delirious with fever now and then, everyone gets stomach cramps where they're doubled over moaning in pain, now imagine how much more often that happens to people with no clean facilities. I can't count how often I've heard or seen someone complain about a homeless "druggie" and the behavior they're describing is significantly more likely to come from food poisoning than drug withdrawals.
Not that drug addiction isn't also a medical condition that warrants medical care, but the fact is a large number of people will attribute literally all of an unhoused person's displays of pain, exhaustion or discomfort up to drugs and alcohol.
Alison Bechdel is definitely such a classy queen of us lesbians
Finding out that Elon Musk was forced out as CEO of PayPal in favor of noted vampire Peter Thiel bc Elon Musk was adamant they keep it named "X dot com" instead of Paypal unlocks so much. His space company, his literal child, and now Twitter: it's the world's most inane Rosebud. He actually bought back the URL, like a cherished childhood sled (owning the right to name a website the letter "X")
Some people told him it made more sense to have their banking company have a indicative name instead of generically being called "X" with vague allusions to being The Site For Everything, and he'll prove those fools WRONG by getting the same things yelled at him over a different website's name twenty years later
For twenty two years he's been stewing about people telling him PayPal was a better name for a payment site than X. He was so invested in X dot com at the time they waited to hold the vote until he was on vacation. He has been furious over people saying "it's better for our site to have a name that tells you what it is instead of a letter" since before 9/11. This is his entire life
Pictured above: the only moment Elon Musk has ever been happy, before it turned to all-consuming rage and envy over a single letter
Apparently the official name of SpaceX is the "Space Exploration Technologies Corporation" and they originally wanted to abbreviate it S.E.T. but he decided on SpaceX. He loves X
I'm guessing Tesla was spared the X-ening by dint of the fact Elon Musk didn't found Tesla (he became the largest shareholder the year after its founding and sued to get retroactively added on as a "co-founder") and also bc comparing himself to Tesla flatters him, since when I look at someone who bought someone else's company and sued to get the credit for creating it, the turn of the century inventor I think of is Nikola Tesla
