Still Figuring Stuff Out

THE BEAR wins the Best Comedy Series Award

75th Emmy Awards (January 15, 2024)

ayo's face😭

Reverse werewolf where the real horror is becoming human. Animal now has to question their morality- they never had that before- and ponders their life. They never had to ponder before. Werewolf Horror except the in-between is no longer beast and man, but beast becoming man. Where do they start and the sapience end? There is no going back to what they were before. They can only try to pretend in both directions. Human-based werewolves have the luxury of pretending. Werehumans have no room to pretend. They are no longer animal. They were never human. Why do they feel bad for their prey? Why should they feel bad?

They never hunted with regret before.

What is crying? Why do they cry? They Know. But the Knowing makes it worse.

What is crying? Why

do they cry? They Know. But the

Knowing makes it worse.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

I was yesterday years old when I found out Jesus had as many as if not more than 6 siblings

man if I was rich, like million billions of dollars rich, i wouldn't be hoarding money and living in a fucking beige box with my pristine white furniture. i would be buying every single antique i could get my dirty little hands on and be living in my old victorian home with my 53 cats paying fuck you amounts of money to every artist i adored to create fanart of my characters and funding indie game studios

god what a mood

so women are supposed to grin and bear the books, the comics, the movies, the plays, the tv shows, the stories, the sci-fi, the translated ancient poems, the fucking millennia of men writing about their self inserts torturing women and it being declared as High Art by other men, we’re supposed to read it in our free time, study it in classrooms, include their styles in our own writing, accept their cultural influence as natural, watch it in the cinema, write about it, talk about it, accept it, aspire it, but men can’t tolerate three seconds of female wish fulfilment of a woman snapping the wrist of a creep without feeling personally kicked in the balls.

This reminds me of something I observed in college while I was doing my honors thesis on women in modern horror films. I watched a LOT of horror during that time as part of my research, and sometimes that was done with my family around.

And my dad and brothers? Were deeply disturbed by the movie Jennifer’s Body. I was flabbergasted. It’s not scary! It’s not even that gory. But they were horrified by it. These men who grew up on 70s slashers were legitimately shook by 90 minutes of Megan Fox eating a few teenage boys, mostly off-screen.

Similarly, my all-male reading panel for my thesis? Were so disturbed by my synopsis of the film Teeth that they couldn’t even talk about it. One of them said he couldn’t look at his wife for a week after reading it.

Again, grown-ass men who study and teach media for a living. Who definitely watch and enjoy horror movies. One of whom was a huge Tarantino buff. We watched and read worse in his intro to mass media class! But one movie about a girl whose vag could bite was enough to haunt him.

Then of course you have things like the Gone Girl backlash–men yelling that Amy Dunne is evil and women clamoring to assure everyone that they know she is not someone to emulate–the backlash against Carol Danvers, and, more recently, the griping from MRAs against the upcoming film Hustlers, which is about strippers scamming their Wall Street clients.

My conclusion? Most men–at least most straight, cisgender men, who are both my sample population and most of the ones whining that Carol is a “villain”–are perfectly fine with, and desensitized to, media where men do violence to women (horror movies), or men do violence to men (horror and action movies). They’re even sort of fine when women do violence to women (“ooooo cat fight!”).

But they get intensely uncomfortable when women are depicted doing any kind of violence to men, especially in films that tilt the balance of power to the other side of the m/f gender binary beyond a single moment or scene.

So woman as flesh-eating monster with men as her preferred cuisine? Woman who responds to unwanted sexual contact by biting it off? Woman who frames her cheating husband for murder? Woman whose response to harassment–behavior that many of the loudest whiners know is both creepy and reflective of their own thoughts/actions–is to break something?

Too scary. Unacceptable. Disturbing. These men hate being presented with the idea, even in fiction, that their position of power is socially constructed, that it could easily be flipped the other way. It terrifies them.

In feeling that terror, they experience a tiny modicum of what living, existing, moving, being perceived as a woman in the world is like.

And they flinch every time.

Here have a newspaper comic from 1993

I still can’t get over how many teenage boys and adult men thought that the protagonist of Hard Candy was the antagonist and that it was a horror movie instead of a power fantasy. It was extremely telling how many men found that movie terrifying, while women and teen girls pretty much universally found that movie empowering and the ending relieving.

I literally haven’t posted in ages but someone mentioned Hard Candy so HERE THE FUCK I AM. It is my favorite movie. Of all time. It is a brilliant piece of filmmaking. The acting, the writing, the direction, the cinematography, it’s all stunning.

I first watched it when I was a fourteen year old girl, the same age as Elliot Page’s character in the film, and I was disturbed certainly, it’s a disturbing story, but it’s also the story that most single handedly made me a feminist.

I, like a lot of girls at the time, eschewed the label of “feminist.”

“Oh I believe in rights for women but I’m not a feminist.”

Like it was a dirty word. We were taught culturally that it was a dirty word . Feminists were crossing a line. They were annoying. They were queer. They were gender nonconformist. They lived outside of the expectations for girls and women. They did not play the game of wanting to be wanted by men, of existing for male excitement. Feminists weren’t hot. And even as a young teenager I knew that to be a woman and not be hot, not be wanted by men, was to live in absence of a very specific kind of power and acceptance.

I watched Hard Candy on a whim. I had just seen Elliot Page in Juno and I was crazy gay for him (though denying this at the time) and picked up Hard Candy at a local dvd resale store because I saw he was in it.

And it changed my life.

For context, I grew up on Law and Order SVU — SVU specifically. From an inappropriately young age it was one of my favorite shows. And as much as I think SVU can get the trauma of rape and assault right, being a child aware of what a constant threat sexual violence against women and girls was fucked me up. Rape has been one of my biggest fears from the time I was ten. It still is.

And here was this movie that put the power in the hands of the teenage girl who was so at risk for abuse. The movie starts out and you think you know where it’s going. Man lures young girl he met online to coffee shop. Man makes girl feel older and mature. Man takes girl home to his apartment.

Sitting there, a high school freshman in my living room on a Saturday night, I was waiting for the turn, for the teenage girl to become the teenage victim. Then when the turn finally came it was like I could suddenly breathe again. A grown man exposed for his indecency by underestimating a teenage girl, that girl lecturing a grown man on his predatory behaviors, a teenage girl refusing to be played with or manipulated, one who takes matters into her own hands because no one else has.

So many moments in that movie were utterly formative for me.

And almost every man in my life who watched it could not understand the poignance of it. They absolutely felt Elliot Page played the villain. Sure, Jeff did some bad things, but he didn’t deserve what he got! That girl was psycho! She’s crazy! And I played along with this, talking at great lengths about how the ambiguous morality of the film was ground breaking and how it was really about vigilante justice. I wanted so badly to prove it was the art I knew it was. Why wasn’t it being heralded as a seminal psychological thriller like Memento and Se7en? It impacted me more than either of those films.

It’s not even a particularly violent film! There isn’t any gore! There are some blurry shots of a surgery, but no real blood, no graphic brutality. David Slade, who frankly should be a more acclaimed director than he is, intentionally shot close ups of the actors faces during these intense and disturbing scenes. He focused on the emotion and the performance. He didn’t want to show the violence of it, but rather the mental game and the psychological impact of that violence. And yet men cannot get through this movie without wanting to throw up.

Do you know how many horrific and lengthy rape scenes I’ve watched? How many dead women with mutilated bodies I’ve seen larger than life on movie screens? Horror and mystery are my favorite genres. I have to look up the content warnings for every fucking horror film I wanna watch to prepare myself for potential triggers. And cis white men, self proclaimed film aficionados, can’t handle the SUGGESTION of serious violence being done to another cis white man on screen. Then it becomes too out there. Too gratuitous. Too fringe to be anything but a controversial indie flick relegated to the bargain bin at second hand dvd shops.

The refusal to acknowledge the brilliance of Hard Candy as both a work of art and a cinematic statement infuriates me. I sigh everytime someone asks me what my favorite movie is, waiting for the uncomfortable look I’ll get. Hard Candy is a disturbing movie because of its subject matter and it’s frank discussion of pedophilia and sexual abuse. But the character of Hayley Stark, a 14 year old girl who takes back symbolic agency for women and young girls as a whole, who gets revenge on a sexually violent predator, is 100% a sympathetic character. She is a part of me. I feel her rage and I feel her unspoken motivations. I get it. I get her. And I’ve long since grown tired of trying to make it a movie “film buff” dudebros will respect.

It’s not for them. It is not about them. And they can’t stand it.

If Liam Neeson indiscriminately tortures and murders people to save his daughter from being sold into sexual slavery, he’s a badass. A hero.

So why is Hayley Stark a monster?

“I am every little girl you ever watched, touched, hurt, screwed, killed,” she says toward the end of the film.

And she absolutely fucking is.

Tags @msbadatnamingthings

anybody else going through life feeling like a dog that wasn't socialized enough as a puppy

a 12 year old girl would make a pact with a demon just to have two different colored eyes. why did spn never touch on this

From twt. My thoughts exactly

today on science twitter.......

an article about the incident. michael eisen is jewish and has israeli family and they fired him for "siding" with palestine

the flesh is unwilling and honestly, the spirit isn't too keen on the idea either

Blue Tube Quilt - optical Illusion 

Montse Forcadell Biasco

Cambrils Tarragona Spain

Spanish Patchwork Association Show.

The fact that this joke is from the very first episode (which aired in January 1997) is messing with me.

Yes. I even have a few favourites I re-play every now and again.

vader: who tore the warning sign off of this wampa cage?? storm trooper: security footage shows it was removed by a golden protocol droid vader: LOL

Vader in RotJ: wait the Alderaan princess is my daughter?? don’t know how to feel about that.

Luke: she strangled Jabba the Hutt to death with a chain.

Vader: OH HELL YEAH

why would you hide this in the tags that’s hilarious

this is it. this is the funniest scooby doo clip

Welcome to the Protestant Work Ethic where if you are not working for 16 hours a day you are a Sinner that will Burn In Hell. Unless of course you are rich in which case you are Blessed by God and can go to Heaven without lifting a finger.

heard a story on a podcast that some Christian missionaries showed these rural Cambodian farmers how to double their crop yields. the missionaries came back a year later and were surprised the Cambodians had grown basically the same amount of crops but the farmers were like “yeah this is great, we got everything we need for the year and only had to do half as much work”

and if that doesn't tell you everything you need to know about the current North American work environment I don't know what will