#am i a bad feminist if i hate a woman? because i hate her
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So, I don't know why I am posting this but I had this in my heart since a long time. So, bear with me.
I read Princess and the Queen and Fire and Blood back in 2019, after GoT ended for more content. And I got to know about The Dance from Tumblr, the awesome artists and fanarts.
When I read those books, I felt for Rhaenyra. No I don't have a step mother but Rhaenyra felt alone, like her mother died and her father remarried, her new step mom was first kind and loving but then after a brother all that changed.
I can't blame book Rhaenyra for not having good relationship with her siblings, she was a child, just like them and the world was trying to replace her with them just as her mother had been replaced. (When my brother was born, I felt the same and we don't have the best relationship even now, but you know whose fault is that? Adults. Adults who love to compare and pity siblings against siblings)
Why Viserys never tried to mend the relationship between his eldest son and daughter? Even Alicent tried. And then Daemon evidently manipulated Rhaenyra more to hate her siblings for his own benefit. He was pushed down in succession. (He should never have been in succession)
Then Rhaenyra grows older, bold and doing as she like, fighting her step mother, beefing with her siblings and people are following her. She is being courted and has freedom in that era.
I liked book Rhaenyra because she seemed ruthless. She wasn't trying to pretend being good, she was ambitious, she was fighting for the throne because her father chose her. Not because of a stupid prophecy. We all know how that ended. She wanted the throne. (I will eat my brother alive if my father chose me for something and not him). She was unhinged.
And I liked that about her. I liked Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen. She was greatly flawed, she offered her brothers for Laenor, she fed a man to her dragon, she hosted a lavish feast in a starving city, she was a woman and let men do the fighting. She was a mother and did everything to protect her children (foolishly though). She faced death with bravery and didn't begged and didn't offered negotiation, didn't ran. A true dragon. Like those menacing cruel dragons?
And then HotD gave us...
1) 'I rather serve as a knight and ride to battle and glory' but she isn't train with swords. If she wants that then why isn't she trained? Was this to appease Arya's fans? Also this message of feminism, 'a woman only cool and worth something when she wants to be like men, Do what men does.' I am not saying this is bad but you are making her a feminist atleast let her appreciate females? Also, again, if she wanted to train with swords then why didn't she? Nobody stopped Visenya and Alyssa, no one would have stopped her.
2) On Aegon's nameday, enough people have said that already, Rhaenyra being mean to her two year old brother and acting like a spoilt child but I want to add this—
Everyone came there for Aegon, hoping Viserys will name him heir. HotD gave us Rhaenyra acting like a brat and then killing a boar and totally projecting her as a protagonist by showing White Hart, and sexy cool asf covered with blood. She could have made alliance, like book Rhaenyra would have mingled with everyone, dressed better than everyone, charming everyone. Not arguing with other ladies and lords.
3) Daemyra. Enough said. I never thought Book Rhaenyra and Book Daemon had any great love story, they were not even written as such. Nah, Rhaenyra desired Criston, tried to seduce him first. Daemon was only using her. He had one healthy relationship in the book and that was with Laena. They both came together because none of them considered Alicent and her children as their family too.
I hate this show for promoting them as some great tragic love. Nah, Rhaenyra needed his protection and Daemon wanted to be closer to the throne. Why didn't they let them be that? How are they going to justify as to why Daemon left Rhaenyra and his son alone to go die along with Aemond?
And if Daemyra is a great tragic love story why they got afraid to show Rhaenyra having Laenor murdered? Because that was the level of her craziness in the books, and that's in the character of Daemyra. That's 'I will do anything to be with you, for you' energy.
Gods, I thought Rhaenyra would be Cersei Lannister level in HotD, cool, snarky, awesome, beautiful, unhinged, fashion icon, doing everything for her children, doing everything for her and not shying away from the person she is, a necessary evil (like feeding Vaemond to Syrax). And incestuous. Of course Jaime x Cersei level of craziness in Daemyra?
In HotD... Emma and Milly did awesome job but their character was bland. Served to us by writers as 'a goody two shoes always right'. 'she can do nothing wrong.'
Why is media afraid of showing what women are? Why can we only be 'goody two shoes, patriarchy bad, I am awesome cause I am not like other girls' in feminist shows? Why can't they women as humans, as grey, ambitious? Why can't woman be anti hero? Rhaenyra is suffering from stereotyped blend of Arya and Dany.
Alicent is a fresh breath in that regard. But I hate the show for stripping away her agency and making her a crybaby. You are showing me that the Queen, who may or not have murdered Viserys, cried for him? That her, who plotted and plotted and led the Greens, crowned her daughter would not want her son to be king?
They even changed the dinner scene, everyone was supposed to make fun of the other party. No heartwarming and Aegon was supposed to fight Jace.
But make two female characters cry over each other, cry over men, abuse them, strip their agency, make the person you are trying to show as protag (she should not even be a protag) blander than water and call it a feminist show.
(HotD should not even be a feminist show, it should have been a family drama show. Imagine my embarrassment when I told my brother that I love Rhaenyra and I am just like her before the show started and by the end I was like ... Wow Aegon Second of His Name, I stan the One True King. Because he, despite they made him a monster is more interesting than Rhaenyra at this point.)
I was robbed. We were robbed of spicy hot pizza and instead given a bland cheese toast.
I refuse to eat bread, give me cake. Cersei, Margaery, Catelyn were cake, Alicent... She is the cookie. (Not adding Sansa because in the end of the show... Book Sansa is pastry.)
At this moment we all most cope. Thank you whoever read this. Also wanted to add, I was Team Woman but I can't stan this Rhaenyra. Nah.
#alicent hightower#rhaenyra targaryen#fire and blood#cersei lannister#anti hotd#book rhaenyra#anti hotd Rhaenyra#this is not feminism#team green#anti daemyra#anti team black
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Edit: as hoshi9zoe pointed out, the original version of this post needlessly berated other transfems like Jennifer Coates, for which I do apologize, and I have toned it down in this edited version. The original version survives in reblogs.
Some months ago, I was searching through this transandrobro blog to see if they posted a callout of me, and i found this reblog, which I couldn't really write about for months, because what do I even write. I recently wayback machined it for posterity, and I guess this is my attempt to write a post about it.
It's saint-dyke himself, the coiner of transandrophobia, saying that the infamous (at least for me) article "I am a transwoman. I'm in the closet. I'm not coming out" is what made him coin the fucking word. It's literally bolded and underlined: "Reading this article is what made me coin “transandrophobia”.
The reason I put off writing this post is that reading that article makes me feel like i'm drinking poison. And it is poison, make no mistake, it's internalized transmisogyny brainworms dripping out of the writer's brain and onto the page.
It's a justification for why the author, known by pseudonym Jennifer Coates, doesn't want to transition, despite knowing she is a trans woman. And it's the exact kind of internalized transmisogyny that keeps trans women in repression and not transitioning. "I'm not going to pass, i'm forever going to be an ugly freak who will at best be humored by other women, the closet is uncomfortable but at least it's safe"
It's the same exact bullshit a lot of represssed trans women tell themselves because it's what society tells us about trans women, that we are freakish parodies of women, that we will never pass, and if we don't pass we have failed and are ugly freaks. It's all to scare us into staying in the closet and make others hate and fear us. Transmisogyny permeates our society, and the majority, maybe all transfems will absorb and internalize some of it.
Coates says that it all is just applicable to her, but again so many transfems believe this shit before transitioning and realizing it's a pack of lies. If this bullshit was in any way valid, a lot of trans women shouldn't transition, because before we actually transition many of us believe it word for word. And "it's only true for me" is how we justify it to ourselves. We tend to be way harsher on ourselves than others. This kind of self-hating transfem tends to think: "Other trans women are beautiful graceful goddesses, earthly manifestations of the divine feminine, always destined to be women, while I'm an ugly forever male ogre who just has a fetish."
It's all bullshit, it's poison, it's internalized transmisogyny.
And the rest of the article is bullshit too. It is not some insightful mediation on gender as some people say, it's the author confusing and mixing up actual transmisogyny with an imagined problem of misandry. She does this because she has gone full repression mode, and decided she has no other choice to live as a man, so her dysphoria and experiences of transmisogyny are actually men's problems.
It's a bad article, excusable because as Coatas points out, it's "essentially a diary entry." that was meant to be a way to "vent frustration" and she "did not intend for anyone else to actually read it." It is clearly not the product of a healthy mind.
I hope the author sometime in the past seven years eventually did transition, and that for whatever reason she didn't want to publicly repudiate her own article. Maybe she lost access to the medium account so she can't delete it.
Far worse than the article itself is the response to it. I've seen it passed around as some insightful commentary on gender by the "feminists are too mean to men, misandry is real" crowd. I have argued against this before. And other people have made insightful comments about it.
And learning that saint-dyke claiming that he was inspired to coin the word "transandrophobia" because of this article is the cherry on top of this shitcake of transmisogyny. For my thoughts on "transandrophobia" theory and how transmisogynistic it is, see here.
Of course, Saint-dyke absolutely could be bullshitting here. Claiming that Coates's article is what inspired him to coin the word might be a lie to claim that transandrophobia theory is not transmisogynistic because it came from listening to trans women.
This is why "listen to trans women" doesn't work. Because TME people will always choose a trans woman who confirms their prejudices. Blair White has made an entire career out of this. And Coates article is popular because it says that misandry is real and trans women's issues are partly caused by it, misgendering herself and other trans women.
And it's popular for another reason. Coates has thoroughly internalized transmisogyny, and thus her article presents a trans woman that is exactly as transmisogynistic patriarchal society wants her to be. She is suffering, but ultimately accepts her assigned role. She truly believes that her biological sex dooms her to forever be male. She literally "manages her dysphoria by means other than transition" as conversion therapy advocates want us to do. She never makes an social claim on womanhood by actually transitioning, so she doesn't invade the sacred women's spaces. Yet she performs the role of woman perfectly by serving men, by defending them from supposed feminist misandry. And she fulfils the ritualistic role that the rhetorical figure of "trans women" sometimes serves in progressive spaces, of giving a blessing to TME people's pre-existing views and actions, all while actual flesh-and-blood trans women are destroyed by those same deeply transmisogynistic spaces. This time it's a blessing for the same "misandry is real" soft-MRA bullshit that has infested the online left and created the transandrophobia crowd.
That is why this article and the positive response makes me sick, makes me feel like i'm drinking poison. This is what its fans want trans women to be like. I'm acutely aware this kind of self-denial is exactly what transmisogyny wants from me and tried to indoctrinate me into doing it. And I want none of it. I want to live, I want to be a woman.
#my writings#transmisogyny#jennifer coates#this is a lot more emotional than i usually am#but i'm so angry and disgusted
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“Arknights/Limbus Company/etc is obviously very political, why are these incels playing it?” Here’s a longer answer if you’re interested.
If you haven’t been watching gacha communities for the past decade this might be confusing to you, but these guys see the games as just apolitical stories with a majority or all-female cast being there to titillate the male viewer. They are for his consumption. It’s why in both eastern and western “gacha game” communities you can see them talking about how these games are better for having “beautiful” anime women versus the hideous hags of western media. I’ve seen so many people asking “how are incels playing a game with so many strong female characters?” They see them not as “strong female” characters but rather “eyecandy made for me”. tbh when it comes down to it I wouldn’t call any of the designs in these games absolutely groundbreaking for the anime genre they’re aiming for. Arknights even follows the standard “fully animal faced-guy” and the female equivalent “small featured anime animal girl with some fur”. This doesn’t mean the designs are bad or you’re foolish for enjoying them of course, there are a lot of fun ones. Anyway, you can see the same sentiment in the majority of anime communities as well. Like do you think that stereotype of an anime nerd who “loves 2D women but hates 3D women” means he’s a feminist because the 2D girl is still female?
To be frank, after some of the actions taken by these companies (ex. the firing of women for posting anything vaguely feminist) can you honestly say an “apolitical game with anime babes” is not the way the games are often enjoyed? The company Yostar who publishes Arknights in Korea literally wrote a statement saying the game is apolitical and calling feminism a dividing force. If the publisher can say something so flippantly like this just to appease their incel fanbase, how can the game be making any meaningful, hardline progressive political statements? I am of course not saying this renders any positive message you get from these games moot nor am I saying it’s impossible for the writers to be passionate about their work, I’m just relaying the thoughts of the incels/“gacha gamers” playing them because there seems to be confusion. What I’m writing here doesn’t mean the worst interpretation of these games are their defining interpretations. I’m trying to explain how the games that many people see as being antithetical to incel beliefs can have these same men as high-spending fans.
Gacha games are unique in the world of consumer media in their extremely close and constant relationship with the consumer. You have to not only love each character’s design (and sometimes story) but also be willing to drop serious gambling money to “buy” them every single month. It’s like merchandizing on steroids. I think the term “whale” has been watered down since younger kids have started playing, but these people spend thousands per patch. Over the years I’ve heard about multiple games like this being sustained by just a couple of high spenders. In 2018 there was even a western news article about a man who had spent $70k+ on FGO. The publisher can’t rock the boat too much to displease the consumer too many times without risking EoS. Every character design and story of a gacha game is affected by this FIRST while any artistic intent comes second.
A Korean woman who had lost her job due to similar “feminist hunting” tactics wrote an article describing the way these incel men think. I posted it here and part of it summarized: the men that play these games see themselves as buying and “owning” the female characters in gacha games, who are often dressed and presented to them in a highly sexualized manner and will obey their commands. In the same way they “own” these 2D women, they also want to own the thoughts of the real live female illustrators who work on the games. Therefore, if these women have expressed ideas that the male gamers find upsetting, they will be angry she doesn’t conform to what they want like the servile 2D girl and do everything to get her fired (this is where she mentions Limbus Company as the most recent example of this happening).
You can argue for some of these games, maybe the girls aren’t dressed super provocatively and give (you) shit instead of being a simpering doll, but in the end it’s not like they can physically walk away or stop speaking to you. For the “waifu” hunter guy it’s just a different type of anime girl to collect.
The stories in these games are generally not what gets targeted as much by incels. In gacha “gamer” communities, especially the Korean incel ones, their main concerns are: how revealing are the summer swimsuits? How many women work for the company designing characters? and related, Are the male characters designed for women or for men and do they “look gay”? If you search through this blog, you can see them directly speaking about these things in regards to their hatred of Genshin Impact and Star Rail. All of these have also been encapsulated in the original Limbus Company incel attack: they hated that the summer female character looked more “clothed” (wearing a skintight suit instead of a bikini) than the male summer character. They thought the collar necklace and open shirt on the male summer character meant he was “a slave” for the female viewers, so obviously it was designed by a woman. When they learned a man designed and illustrated those characters, they searched to find a female illustrator who worked in the game and went after her instead. These guys WERE FANS that played the game beforehand and didn’t think anything in the story was upsetting enough to attack the company about. They were familiar enough with the works of Project Moon to name their little group after an antagonizing force in one of PM’s previous (non-gacha) videogames. And Project Moon saw them as such a significant part of their gacha fanbase that they wrote an immediate apology and fired the artist. How do these actions in reality inform their fiction and the interpretation of it?
Getting this out of the way, they were NOT in any danger, the “fans” were not clamoring to get in their offices or camping outside, they were let in and calmly had a meeting with some employees at the office. You can still find photos of them goofing around, the ridiculous write up they brought with them and a transcript of the conversation. This was not a “guy shows up at Mihoyo’s offices with a knife” situation. In the end it was a financial and moral loss for the studio with many new and longtime fans completely dropping the games and Limbus Company taking one of the biggest financial and D/MAU drops for a gacha I’ve ever seen. You can read more regarding the ramifications of this here, this post is already pretty long for this website anyway.
Again I’m not writing this to shame anyone who plays these games, loves their characters or enjoys their stories. I don’t really care either way, and I obviously find the genre interesting or else I wouldn’t have been monitoring it and the fans for a decade. I just want to shine a light on the thoughts of the more “incel” gamers that play some of these games since I have seen a lot of genuine confusion as to why they would play them. In the future my aim is to write a more in-depth post about these issues, their history and the way antifeminists think.
#Arknights#yostar#hypergryph#project moon#limbus company#Genshin impact#long post#korean incel#incel ideology#gacha#fate grand order#fgo
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all hail her excellent braids
Christians: omg first century Judaism was soooo misogynistic but Jesus was like the first feminist because he treated women like people
Jews: what
Christians: like, Jewish men would cross to the other side of the street to avoid having to be too close to women
Jews: hang on do you think there were, like, sidewalks in first-century Jerusalem?
Christians: and Jewish women weren't supposed to be seen in public
Jews: that's not how--
Christians: and men weren't even supposed to talk to women, but Jesus had female followers <3
Jews: first-century Jewish women owned their own businesses and represented themselves in court and, like, how are you imagining business got done if they weren't allowed to talk?
President Jimmy fucking Carter: first century Jews were basically the Taliban
A bazillion seminary textbooks: yup, the Pharisees were obsessed with ritual purity and viewed women as inherently unclean and Jesus upended all that Pharisaic hatred of women and that's why they wanted him dead
Shlomtzion, aka Salome Alexandra, has entered the chat.
Ahem, let me tell you about the Pharisee Queen.
So back in the day, the Pharisees were a tiny, persecuted movement because the King of Judah, Alexander Jannaeus hated them. He straight-up massacred 6,000 of them when they pelted him with fruit after he mocked them by performing a Sukkot ritual incorrectly, which kicked off a whole civil war. He won the war, and slaughtered the wives and children of 800 of the surviving Pharisees as entertainment at his victory feast before crucifying the men. The remaining Pharisees went into hiding.
Just a charming dude.
Alexander Jannaeus was married to Salome Alexandra (Shlomtzion, in Hebrew).
Her brother was Shimon ben Shetach, the leader of the Pharisees. (If you're getting Esther vibes here, that's probably not accidental.
She doesn't seem to have had much power while Alexander Jannaeus was alive, but she managed to help hide and protect the surviving Pharisees.
This doesn't seem to have negatively impacted her relationship with her husband, because he named her--rather than any of his sons--his heir while he was on his deathbed.
He was in the middle of conducting a siege of Ragaba when he died, so like the incredible badass she was, became queen--and would be both only the second queen regnant of Judah and the last sovereign Jewish monarch--on the battlefield, in the midst of hostilities.
She had to conceal her husband's death until she'd won the day.
As soon as she made his death public, she reached out to the Pharisees to make peace between them and the throne, avoiding a popular uprising at his funeral. The funeral went off smoothly, and she immediately began settling other political disputes and enmities.
She also hung out and studied with the Pharisees. We know this because Josephus, an ardent misogynist, absolutely hated that she did this, just like he absolutely hated that she had ruled Judah, and wrote about it.
Josephus had been a Sadducee (main opposing party to the Pharisees), but switched to the Pharisees later in life for political expediency. He never seemed to actually like them, though.
He tells on himself so much.
"Oh, people love the Pharisees because they are humane and flexible interpreters of the law and practice what they preach and this is a BAD THING!"
Literally, on Shlomtzion: "Woman though she was, she established her authority by her reputation for piety."
Like, everyone respected her and did what she said because she actually gave a shit about ethics and somehow this is a BAD thing.
She averted war with Egypt by buddying up to Cleopatra (I am so headcanoning them as pen pals, writing each other to vent about all the men they have to deal with) and somehow this is a BAD thing.
So she takes the throne and manages to keep things running pretty smoothly in a precarious time because she's good at organizing AND military strategy AND diplomacy and here's Josephus on her relationship with the Pharisees:
"She paid too great heed to them, and they, availing themselves more and more of the simplicity of the woman, ended by becoming the effective rulers of the state... "
Ah yes, FlavJo, she sounds very "simple," what with the incredible military and diplomatic skills.
While she wasn't averse to fighting when she needed to, she mostly averted possible battles by fortifying and provisioning cities so well that neighboring monarchs opted not to attack them, so she was also just slaying at project management. She ended a bunch of the foreign wars her asshole husband started, and scrupulously kept to the terms of any treaties Judah was party to.
Her reign was possibly the most prosperous and peaceful period in Judah's history.
She gave the Sadducees (her husband's party) their own fortified cities so they'd stop feuding with the Pharisees, and took the Pharisees from a small, persecuted populist movement in hiding to one of the major political parties.
She set up a system of universal public education, putting the responsibility for educating the kids on the government, not families, to make sure it wasn't just rich kids getting a solid education. She re-established the Sanhedrin (the Supreme Court, basically) and made sure every town under her rule had access to judges.
And then one of her asshole sons, who apparently took after his asshole dad, decided HE would be a better ruler than she was, and DECLARED WAR ON HIS OWN MOM. She died, apparently of an illness, in her 70s.
She died as the last free Jewish ruler.
So then that asshole son went after the other asshole son, and they turned to the Romans for help.
(You want to get occupied? This is how you get occupied.)
Yes, that's right, they committed one of the classic blunders: inviting the Romans in.
THE ROMANS ARE LIKE VAMPIRES. DO NOT INVITE THEM IN.
Anyway, we all know how THAT turned out.
In rabbinic literature, she's almost a fertility goddess figure, or a personification the land itself, or a monarch beloved by G-d possibly moreso than any other, since the rest of them all screwed up and the Jews got punished with war or exile or famine or disease: legend claims that during her reign, rain only fell on Shabbat, so people didn't have to work in the rain. Grains of wheat grew to the size of kidneys, and lentils were the size of gold denarii. The people knew joy like we've never known since and were healthy and prosperous and at peace.
She was praised by contemporaries such as Josephus as having greater intelligence, political skill, and military acumen than the men around her (although Josephus, an ardent misogynist, later decided that it was inappropriate for her to rule), and the stories of Esther, Judith, and Susanna may have been written (or in the case of Esther, edited and codified) in her honor.
Anyway, the Pharisees' teachings remained especially popular among women, and the person who saved them (and thus, by extension, Judaism, when they were the ones to preserve it in exile) and brought them to power and was their beloved patron was a woman, and maaaaaaybe Christians don't know the first thing about women in first-century Judaea or the Pharisees and women and should shut up, idk.
All hail Shlomtzion and her most excellent braids.
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I have to say this because I am offended as a woman who grew up with Barbie AND He-Man. I don't hate the Barbie movie because it isn't in tuned with my politics. I hate it because it's not really about Barbie at all. It is an imposter. Barbie is feminist, but NOT a radical feminist. She is diplomatic, kind, she loves men and considers them as her equal, and she wants everyone to be confident and kind. As for Ken, he would never turn on her because he is faithful, intelligent, kind and capable. He is not a boob who is under her thumb.
The Barbie movie is not about Barbie. It's about all of the misconceptions we have of Barbie just as I suspected it would. And I have every right to be displeased about that. And you know what else? So does anyone else including men.
If women are allowed to hate Masters of the Universe: Revelations because it is a badly written show that doesn't respect the lore, then men are allowed to not like the Barbie movie for the same reasons especially if those reasons are sound. Yes, I'm sure some of them hate it for sexist reasons, but the majority of men I see hating on the Barbie movie hate it for the same reasons I do and I'm a woman. If anything, I'm glad men respect Barbie enough to see the film is wrong. The problem is that the media is only talking about what the sexist men are saying blatantly ignoring what all the other fans are saying.
But then again, what did we expect? The same thing happened with Netflix She-Ra and Masters of the Universe: Revelations. When fans don’t like a new product because it doesn’t respect the lore and feels like imposter media, we get accused of being bigoted in some way or the other. We are like that lone honest kid who calling out that the Emperor is naked, but is then told to shut up because they’re upsetting everyone. In other words, we live in a time right now where if you ever admit you don’t like something even for the most valid reason, you are either silenced, ignored or made out to be the bad guy.
However, it is all the more reason to keep being honest. And Hollywood knows it because even it can’t run from the truth forever.
And I think it’s reached the phase where it is getting out of breath from trying to.
PS: I don’t want my son to grow up in a society where his free speech, including the freedom to give an opinion on a movie of all things, is either limited or prohibited just because he’s a boy/man while the girl/woman next to him can say anything she wants about anything she chooses.
Like I said before, if women can say what they want about He-Man, men can say what they want about Barbie. Period.
#feminism#the barbie movie#the barbie movie is not about barbie#men have a right to an opinion#imposter media#no more bad writing#free speech#toxic masculinity#honest men#support good men#men and women need each other#it's just a movie#no misogyny#no misandry#good men#we're in this together
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I’m actually really interested in how the qsmp fandom treats its female characters at large versus how the female characters’ fans treat their character of choice. Because there’s a general consensus to Not Be A Dick To Women, because women are awesome (source: I am one.) But then you get to the individual fandoms for each character and you see that either you really aren’t allowed to criticize those characters at all, or all you do is criticize.
(And keep in mind I love both these characters I’m going to talk about and I literally try and watch every stream they’re part of if I have the time.)
For the first category, let’s look at the fandom surrounding qJaiden:
She’s a silly bird girl! She loves Cucurucho, but not the Federation. She’s actively friends with the creatures that have tortured and manipulated and kidnapped her own friends, but that’s fine because she has trauma. She’s a bit of a hypocrite when it comes to keeping and telling secrets sometimes, but that’s fine because she’s just silly!
This is the general qJaiden fandom perspective. If you call her a hypocrite, you have people calling you misogynist. If you say she’s a bit Weird for being besties with the bear that tricked her into thinking her son was alive and forced her on a death march just to laugh in her face and show her that she’s dead, you’re called a misogynist.
You criticize her at all, or you point out her flaws, you’re labeled a misogynist. Because Jaiden is silly! She’s never done anything wrong, actually, you either just hate women or you don’t watch her pov because you clearly don’t understand her character, which is Just A Silly Woman. There’s no nuance to her character past that, and acknowledging the fact that she’s morally gray can be Bad for ‘outsiders’, or even ‘insiders’ if you’re loud enough about it.
On the flip side, let’s look at qBaghera’s fandom:
qBaghera is useless. She needs to stay in her lane. She needs to tell others her personal lore. She needs to give up on running for president. She needs to be president. She needs to hang out with Forever and Bad more. She needs to be more of a revolutionary. She needs to take a step back and stay in her lane.
This is the general qBaghera fandom. Deal. It’s gotten to the point where ccBaghera has asked that people stop criticizing her character because she plays her character very close to her own personality. It’s nonstop people telling her how to play her own character, but they all claim to be ‘fans’. Her character doesn’t have any agency of her own to them, so she’s criticized, or, when she’s hanging out with The Boys she’s criticized for hanging out with The Boys, or she’s not hanging out with The Boys enough. That’s the kicker: she felt the need to stop hanging out with the other two members of Dramatrio because people were demanding she hang out with The Boys while ignoring her own personal lore.
These two examples are very different, but they both show the misogyny hidden beneath a thin layer of on-the-surface feminism. Not being allowed to criticize a female character is Not feminist at all, and criticizing a female character too much is definitely Not feminist.
And the thing is? Neither fandom seems to acknowledge the fact that they’re being Weird about their favorite female characters. Neither are allowing their favs to have any agency: Jaiden is always ‘Silly’ and doesn’t get to have any consequences or criticism, and Baghera can’t do anything without being criticized. But if you say anything about either character in a remotely negative or criticizing way, the individual fandoms will hound you for “being misogynistic” or “favoring male ccs/characters” because the qsmp fandom Is Not A Dick To Women. Because the fandom at large loves its female characters and ccs, the smaller, individual fandoms can get away with some weird shit in the name of “feminism” covering up misogyny within.
#discourse ig#I’ve been thinking about this for a couple of weeks actually#since baghera made her little announcement#it’s genuinely confusing to me yk?#both as a writer and a fan of literary analysis and as a woman
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Even though Harry is completely unjustified in hating Dora as much as he does, I can understand emotionally why he can't help but see her as "the bitch that fucked him."
If I recall correctly, Harry only became a cop because of the influence she had on him. And it was becoming a cop that fucked him. He became a heavy-duty case solving machine, incapable of turning off, incapable of talking normally to people. He started drinking heavily, started coming apart at the seams. Being a cop turned him into a bad person (or worse, if he was already shitty) and made him lose his mind.
Thing is, there was no way Dora could have known that Harry would become the unstable man he became. She was just an average middle class woman, she didn't know how bad working as a detective could be, didn't know that Harry was someone suceptible to coming undone, likely didn't have the political education to understand that All Cops Are Bastards, and that Harry becoming one would make him into a bastard. Even if she did tell him he should become a cop, she can't be blamed for what he turned into. She had every right to leave when things crumbled.
But Harry, in the low point of his life, can't see that. He needs to blame Dora for making her love him, for encouraging him to become the man he became, and leaving him when he hit rock bottom. Because in his mind, its either that, or it's HIS fault, and everything bad that happened is because of him and the pain he did to others. A battle that goes on endlessly between Harry breaking down apologizing to everyone for being such a piece of shit and telling everyone to go fuck themselves for wronging him. A battle that continues because Harry, as a mentally unstable cop, can't concieve of the idea that both he and Dora are just flawed human beings who made mistakes, and that if he has to blame anyone, it should be the system.
It wasn't Dora's fault that Harry became a cop, it was the system's fault for glorifying the police. Both Harry and Dora here had good motives, wanted to make a difference and help people. But the police are just the lackeys of capital. They don't protect or serve anyone but the interests of the government and of each other. Police are given power over the people and encouraged to abuse it so long as they and their bosses get what they want. And Harry persisted, maybe because he still thought he was doing good work, maybe because he didn't want to let Dora down, or maybe because he just loved having power. And at the end of the day, the experience warped him into a broken man. And when Dora left him, all he had was his detective work, and some fading memories. It pushed him to drink himself to the point he forgot everything. And what thoughts can pop into his mind as soon as he wakes up?
"Officer? Am I millitary personnel?"
"Who would let me be an officer of the law?"
"I don't wanna be a cop anymore."
"Please come take me home. I don't want to be here anymore."
Free from (most of) the baggage, Harry can't fathom the idea that HE of all people is a cop. He wants to leave. He has to ask questions even if he doesn't want to. Harrier Du Bois is at war with the cop inside him. The thing that happens during the game is the process by which Harry rebecomes the thing which was killing him.
It was the Moralintern that fucked Harry. He could have been a real person. A revolutionary, a feminist, a father. But because of the Moralintern and general pro-police propaganda, he became a detective, lost everything, and slowly rotted into the unhinged bastard we know and... love..?????
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Workplace Connections
Romance short. A junior secretary makes a friend at work, and some more besides.
10k, rated M, F/F. A young woman makes friends with one of the only male secretaries in her workplace. 1960s Manhattan, featuring lavender marriages, period queerness, misogyny, etc. Light-hearted age gap cheeriness.
Read on Patreon / / Read on Medium.
---
Elsa had considered herself lucky to work in an office like this one. A lot of the girls she went to college with went on to get fancy jobs in the city, but hers is almost certainly the fanciest – she works up so high in a Manhattan skyscraper, after all, and because the company trades in a lot of different materials, she gets nice perks on top of her pay packet.
Silk scarves, in May – she has different ones for every day of the week, made to match her different dresses; she likes to match her earrings to her hairpins, too, and colour them altogether.
It’s sort of expected of you in an office like this, to be well put together, to not just be capable and adept at typing, but… pretty. And Elsa might not be the prettiest girl in the world, but she’s pretty enough, especially the way she dresses, the way she puts her face on.
Some of the girls even ask her for fashion advice from time to time in the office, which is nice – not because she’s particularly on trend, but because she’s got such a good eye for colour and detail. A lot of them are trying to find husbands, want to get married to one of the executives or to a client, at this office or another.
There are handsome men in the office, she supposes – Elsa doesn’t know she’s ever had much of an eye for handsome men before seeing the details in their faces, their clothes.
Her boss, Mr Lockwood, would perhaps be handsome if he weren’t so cold and miserable all the time, was perhaps more handsome when he was a younger man – in any case, even the least attractive men in the office are balanced out by their secretaries. This is a sales office, after all: it’s all about marketability, at its core. She knows no one would want to hear all that feminist talk, but it’s about the status symbol of a beautiful woman on your desk, representing you – you’re selling her and she’s selling you, almost, an additional tactic.
Most of the men in the office have beautiful secretaries, anyway – Mr Garvey doesn’t. He’s a red-faced, unpleasant man, cold, and he disapproves of women so much you’d almost think he cared about the feminist angle too, but really, he just hated them, Elsa thought.
He’s never had a woman for his secretary, the girls say, and he absolutely won’t have one – his secretary is called Jasper, and he’s one of the only male secretaries Elsa knows. They’re more common in some industries than others, she’s heard.
Jasper is handsome, but in a plain, forgettable way – he has dark hair, thin pink lips that naturally turn to a frown when his face is resting, brown eyes. His eyelashes are lighter than the chestnut of his hair and eyebrows, and the golden tint in them catches the light at times.
He’s not a pretty face or a sweet voice or the phone, and some clients and coworkers are actually disappointed to work with his boss, make playful comments about how they’re missing out when they meet him instead of “one of the girls”. People mistake him for one of the executives, at times, which he shrugs off.
The other girls don’t always know how to deal with him, the rest of the secretarial pool. He’s one of the more senior and experienced of them, knows a few tricks of the trade, is extraordinarily capable – and if one of them asks for his voice, if they’re in a hurry and want to avoid flirting, or if they need to make a call and know that a woman calling won’t be taken seriously, Jasper will call up on their behalf, even read off a card if they want him to.
Not every day – not every week, even – but sometimes, he’ll do it.
“Happy to,” he always says. “What else am I for?”
Elsa’s having a bad day when she comes into the kitchenette frazzled and exhausted, sweating in her Wednesday dress and with a tear on the cuff of her blouse that her hands are shaking too much to fix – maybe from lack of sleep, or from too much coffee, or just anxiety.
Mr Lockwood’s been riding her hard today. He’s going to lose an account, he thinks, and he’s taking it out on her, keeps changing his mind about how he wants letters written, what tone to use, what calls to make. He’d just slammed his hand onto the desk beside her typewriter, demanding he get one in a different font set, and she’s got to go and get another before he comes back from lunch.
Jasper is sitting alone at the table, smoking a cigarette and idly paging through a magazine. It’s a woman’s magazine. All the magazines in the secretaries’ kitchenette are women’s magazines, and he never complains.
It’s a bit odd. He’s a bit off. Some of the girls think he might be wrong, somehow. Why else would a man take a job like this in an office like this one?
“Just you?” she asks. Her voice sounds thick from crying, and she stifles a sniffle, feels the snot thick in her nose.
“Anita’s birthday – most of the girls on the floor went out with her to Kiplings’. I expect you can still catch them up.”
She doesn’t say anything, pouring tea.
“Are you going to repair that tear?” he asks. He has a sort of cold, quiet voice – most of the men in the office are either warm and flirty, charismatic, or they bark and bluster. All of them are louder than Jasper is. He only ever puts more volume in his voice when he’s on the phone – ordinarily he speaks very quietly, deliberately.
She doesn’t know why, but him asking that is the straw that breaks the camel’s proverbial back – she bursts into tears, letting out a wail, burying her face in her hands.
“Oh, dear,” says Jasper in that toneless, detached way of his, and stubs out his cigarette.
Elsa’s grateful that Mr Lockwood had gone out to lunch with two of his partners, that there’s no chance of him coming to find her until at least three o’clock.
Jasper takes her gently, his palms gripping her upper arms, and guides her to sit. She watches powerlessly as he finishes pouring tea for her, putting in the sweetener she uses before she asks, and as she tries desperately to pull herself together, he opens up another drawer and pulls out the sewing kit.
It’s the communal one, and all the threads are put away messily, the needles shoved into one little cushion that’s smaller than a golf ball and splitting apart at the seams.
“My mother would tell you there’s never much point in crying over a man,” Jasper tells her as he scoots his chair closer and sinks down into it. She’s in parallel to him now, and she sniffles as he pushes the hem of her cuff up, sliding the needle through the fabric and smoothly beginning to sew it neatly together with surgical confidence.
“Have you done this before?” she asks.
“I take dictation and read fashion magazines,” he says mildly. “Is it such a stretch of the imagination that I also know how to sew open a tear in a woman’s sleeve?”
After a pause, because every retort she can think to that is too rude, she says, “I’m not crying over a man.”
“I suppose Mr Lockwood isn’t much of one,” says Jasper, and she laughs and cries at the same time, a shudder going through her.
“He thinks he’s going to lose the Sachs account.”
“He is. Roux Gold’s new brother-in-law owns a sawmill – family trumps a business connection every time.”
She hadn’t known that, and she stares into space as Jasper finishes sewing up the tear with a neat flourish of his wrist, trimming off the excess thread and then putting the needle back. She can barely see where he’s sewn it, the white thread matched to the fabric colour.
Mr Lockwood has been muttering angrily about deals and prices and inventory and logistics, and he’s never once mentioned that Roux Gold’s gotten married, or that it might impact his situation.
“He can’t keep it?” she asks.
“Not unless he marries into the family as well, no, but he has to appear to try. Just let it wash over you, Elsa. Let the man tantrum as he pleases.”
“It’s not a tantrum,” she manages to say, wiping her eyes, and Jasper nudges her tea toward her and she picks it up, drinking from it. It’s too hot. She swallows. “He’s stressed.”
Jasper stares at her blankly as he relights his cigarette. He can make his eyes go so dead, when he wants to.
“Don’t cry over a man, Elsabeth Lorne,” says Jasper quietly, “but don’t you go making excuses for one either. Least of all a substandard boss.”
“He isn’t—”
“Yes, he is. He’ll be gone by September anyway – the Sachs account is his third loss this quarter. I shouldn’t be surprised if he loses a few more in the meantime.”
“But it’s not his fault,” she hears herself say almost reflexively.
“The Sachs account isn’t, I’ll grant you,” says Jasper, tapping the butt of his cigarette and sprinkling ash into the tray. He has pretty hands, pale, with manicured fingernails with pink beds. “The others were. Weather the storm, as I told you. Once he’s gone, Eva will move you onto someone better – your work is very good, and Anja on Paul Vine’s desk is getting married in August. It might line up nicely that you take over his desk.”
“Mr Vine’s?” she asks. “But he’s so much higher up than Mr Lockwood.”
“And you’re a good secretary,” Jasper tells her in blunt, even tones, as if he’s irritated she would doubt it, or show any sort of modesty for her skill or position. “You’re neat, well-organised, keen. You’re very adept and highly adaptable – flexible.”
“But today I—”
“You’re crying today because you’ve been asked, I’m guessing very unreasonably, to do the impossible,” says Jasper. “When the impossible is expected of you, it’s hardly up to you to meet expectations. Understandable, as well, to have a bit of a cry.”
She looks down at her lap. “Why are you here?” she asks. “Why do you work here?”
“Is this your coy way of asking how much more money I make than you?”
“What? No!”
He chuckles softly, and she feels her cheeks burn as she stares at him, indignant, as if she’d ask that. As if she would.
“Why are you a secretary, I meant,” she mutters. “And part of the pool here. When you could be like one of the men.”
“Am I not one of the men?” he asks. His voice is very deliberate, just like everything about him is deliberate, but more so in this moment even than usual. Suddenly she feels very ashamed.
“I didn’t mean—”
“Of course you did.” He takes a drag from his cigarette, and offers her one from his case, which is made of brass and has roses carved into the metal. She shakes her head, and he clicks it shut. “It’s a sensible question. Why would I be a secretary when secretaries make so much less money than the men they serve? Why would I do women’s work when to do so is to invite mockery? Why would I drop myself in the midst of women rather than doing serious, men’s work?”
There’s something sardonic about how he says it, the words blistering with irony. She doesn’t know anyone alive who talks with such disdain for men as Jasper Hackett is right now – and it’s for them, Elsa thinks. He’s not angry at her for asking, just hates the question, hates the world that makes her ask it.
“I lack the stomach for masculinity,” he says, gesturing with one graceful hand, his cigarette a moving glow. “I don’t well-digest red meat, either.”
“You don’t like other men.”
“I suppose not.”
“Not even Mr Garvey?”
Jasper smiles at her.
Mr Garvey is the Chief of Accounts and one of the senior partners. He’s terrifying, so square it’s like they made him at the canning factory before they tailored his suits for him. Some of the girls joke that he wouldn’t let women in the building at all if he could.
“No one at all likes Mr Garvey, young lady,” says Jasper mildly. “Barring his wife, perhaps, and even her affections can’t be taken as given. But I do appreciate his severity, I suppose – one knows where one stands, no politics, no nonsense. No masculine posturing.”
Elsa is quiet, reaching up and touching the new stitching on her sleeve.
“Might I ask you a question now, or is this a one-sided interview?” Jasper asks, and she feels her brow furrow, her nose wrinkling slightly as she looks warily across the table at him. “Have you eaten?”
“Not yet.”
“Have you brought something?”
“A salad.”
“Good.” The way he says it, it’s less like praise and more like a verbal check mark – he says it in the same tone he does after receiving an affirmative in a meeting. Brisk, business-like, in-motion.
“How did you tear your sleeve?”
“I caught it.”
“Obviously. On what?”
“One of the shelves in the stationery cupboard. There’s a loose nail.”
Jasper frowns, and as she watches, he takes a notebook out of his suit pocket and makes a note, probably to tell the janitor. “Are you certain you don’t want to catch the girls up to join them?” he asks as he writes it down.
“I’ll just cry more,” says Elsa. “It’ll embarrass me. Maybe later. Why don’t you go?”
“I’m not man enough for the men in this building,” Jasper says with a shrug. “But I’m too much of a man for a girls’ lunch.”
Elsa’s instinct is to argue with him, for some reason, or try to somehow comfort him, although she doesn’t really know what he needs comforting for. She doesn’t know what he means exactly by that, about not being man enough. He’s the one who’s become a secretary, who wants to sit outside the boardrooms and take dictation rather than be inside them making presentations, or going out to dinner with his coworkers, with the other men.
Maybe it’s the culture.
Some men don’t like it, she knows, the “culture” – they don’t like to drink or go out with girls because they’re already married, or shy, or disinterested. The men get to opt out of it, or go home to their wives, and leave.
She doesn’t get to opt out. None of them do, really.
She hates the way they look at her sometimes, the men in the office, hates the hungry stares and the up-and-down flickering looks, the hands on her back, her waist, touching her cheeks, her neck, playing with her hair. It’s not as if it’s just the men in the office – it’s the men in the world. She just works here.
She’s not Mr Lockwood’s type, and it feels, sometimes—
Well.
Sometimes, the way he snaps at her, the precise way he raises his voice, it feels like he’s angry at her for not being what he likes, for not being pretty in the way he enjoys, the way he would enjoy. It feels like he’s angry that he doesn’t want her, and blames her for it.
She goes on dates, sometimes. Some of the girls live for it, the dates with clients or with copywriters, with the accounts execs, with the accountants. They talk about it like it’s a game – she feels less like a player and more like a poker chip, bet and played on the table.
Jasper is one of the only men her age in the office – well, he’s a bit older, thirty-something, but not forty or fifty – where talking to him doesn’t feel like it might turn around on her, like it might become a date.
That’s why the girls think he’s off, maybe. It feels dishonest, like there’s a trap there, somehow.
“Does it make you—” Elsa starts, and then she stops herself, not wanting to speak out of turn, not when she already feels like she’s made things mortifying for herself, when Jasper’s seen her cry, and now that’s what he’ll think of her whenever he sees her, sees her work.
“Hmm?” he prompts her.
“Did you eat lunch?” she asks.
They say he doesn’t, sometimes. She’s heard the girls gossiping about it in the break room or in the corridors, that he’s just like them in some ways. That he skips meals, that he likes to keep trim – and he is that. He’s got sharp cheekbones, and you can tell when he’s been more stressed out than usual, because he eats fewer meals, because the hollows show more in his cheeks.
He smokes more. Eats less.
“Mr Garvey is in one of his moods,” says Jasper.
It’s not that she doesn’t get the connotation – she hears that it’s negative, just that Garvey has so many negative moods that it’s hard to narrow down the estimation.
“Do you ever cry at work?” she asks. It’s half a joke, but his smile is wry when he shows it.
“Not anymore,” he says evenly, seriously. “When I was young, I did, now and then. Younger than you, I mean – at twenty, twenty-one. When I started.”
“Right out of college?”
“Yes.”
“Did you go to a woman’s college, too?” She winces at the words as they come out of her mouth, but he laughs again, doesn’t seem offended. She likes his laugh – it’s throaty and has a hoarse quality to it, maybe from the cigarettes. It’s not as deep as some men’s, but it’s not high either. No one would ever mistake him for a woman on the phone.
“I went to a secretarial school, yes.”
“Was your class all girls?”
“Mostly.”
“Does Mr Garvey treat you like he’d treat a woman?”
“Spit on me and tell me not to spike my heels into his carpet? Only when I find him in a jubilant mood.”
It shocks a laugh out of her, one of her hands over her mouth. He’s starting another cigarette, tapping it on his case before lighting the cigarettes head to head.
“You’re terrible,” she says.
“I am,” Jasper agrees, catty and just a little smug. “And I don’t know. Mr Garvey is a passionate misogynist but his hatred of women is more to do with his religious nature. Men have sex with women – ergo, men see women, and think of sex. In Mr Garvey’s mind, the mere presence of a woman stirs men to distraction. He doesn’t want people to think of sex in the office.”
“Well, I don’t want people to think of sex in the office,” she mutters, and she lowers her voice as she says the word, almost whispers it. She looks behind her shoulder to see if anyone else is there, but it’s just them. She doesn’t know that she should engage him on these terms at all. He speaks bluntly about the subject in a way that makes her nervous.
“No,” Jasper agrees. “Nor I, really. But Mr Garvey’s methods aren’t fantastic, and in any case, without revealing myself as a feminist, Elsa, women are more than a reminder of sex on legs.” He trails off, gesturing broadly with his cigarette, and then says, “He doesn’t treat me like many of the other men treat you girls, no. He doesn’t pat me on the backside or flirt with me, or fuss over my appearance – doesn’t scream at me in the same way some people do their secretaries, or nitpick my work so. Kimberley says I’m one of our best clerks, but honestly, I’m middling.
“They might not like my company, Elsabeth, but because I’m a man, our esteemed coworkers assume I must be better at my job, particularly my figures and so forth. And because I’m a man, my work isn’t constantly interrupted with male attention and attempts at my seduction – or just the distraction of someone staring at me while I’m trying to get things done.”
She sips at her tea, digesting that for a moment. “I never thought about that,” she admits. “All the time it takes up. Obviously, I know it… But I never thought about it in terms of minutes.”
It’s a lot, in the day. It’s more than minutes, in the day – it’s an hour, at least. Multiple, probably.
“I’m relatively invisible, of course,” he adds. “Being noticed, observed, in one thing in small doses, but a stressor when constant.”
She doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t ask, “Do you ever feel like a zoo animal, or perhaps a farm animal up on the butcher’s block?” because, she supposes, he knows enough that he doesn’t have to.
“I wish I could be invisible,” she says. She’s astonished by the weight of the envy in her voice.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’d hide you if I could.” He taps a little more ash from the head of his cigarette. “What made you choose secretarial work as your profession?”
She thinks about the question for a moment, wonders how honest she should be. That’s the thing about working in an office like this one. You’re meant to be honest, but not too honest.
When people ask, “How are you?” they don’t really want to know – you’re meant to make the right small talk, and talk about things without really talking about things, talking around them instead. It’s the same thing about who you are. What you’re meant to say, how you’re meant to behave.
Dressing as neatly as she does, as perfectly, is as close to being invisible as she can get – because she never has a detail out of place, and because she keeps her clothes in uniform, men don’t have anything new to comment on. She feels an additional surge of gratitude for Jasper fixing her sleeve.
“You can be honest,” Jasper says.
People usually mean it as a trap when they say a thing like that in this building – no one can really be honest in sales, unless the honesty is cover for a lie. Somehow, it feels different with him. She feels a sort of kinship with him.
“I could make more money here than in a factory,” she says. “Much more.” It’s true, and she regularly says it, and often it makes people laugh, but Jasper doesn’t. He nods his head in understanding.
“Much more,” he echoes.
“I took a typing course in high school. My English teacher said I’d be good, streamlined the process for me.”
“That was why you went?”
“I think so,” she says quietly. “I just didn’t really know what to do. More school was easy – I was good at school. And then I came out east with a girl from home, we got a place together. I work here – she works across town.”
“In sales?”
“In insurance. She says it’s a better office to find a husband in, that the men are less flighty, more reliable.”
“One can count on an insurance man to be risk-aware and sensible with his investments, I suppose.”
“How will you find a wife?” she asks, and he glances up from where he was looking at the tabletop, his eyebrows raising slightly. “I mean, would you— would you marry another secretary? Meet someone here at work, like we do? Or…?”
“You don’t listen to the office gossip, do you?” he asks. “Or you do, but you don’t understand it, exactly. Not sure why it matters, nor where it comes from, what spurs it on, what turns those wheels. Why ever does it matter so much, what they talk about? Why do they treat it with such gravity, these little faux pas, the arguments, the seemingly insignificant remarks?”
Her stomach flips, and she’s aware that her expression has crumpled.
“Oh, don’t worry,” he says softly, getting to his feet. “It’s not my intention to bait you or to be cruel to you. I’m not looking for a wife, young lady.”
“You’re, um…” She trails off. She’s heard people joke about it. Laugh about it. Not about Jasper, just— Just in general.
“You’re that way?” she ends up asking.
“I’m already married,” says Jasper. Her gaze drops to his hands, looking for a wedding ring she knows isn’t there. In response to her dropping eyes, he pulls out a chain from under his shirt, a ring shining on it, and says, “I don’t wear a wrist watch either.”
She swallows hard around the lump in her throat, suddenly so embarrassed she feels she could burst into tears, and he pulls his shirt forward by the tie, dropping the chain and ring back under his collar.
“Oh,” she says. “I’m— I’m so sorry, Mr Hackett, for, for saying—”
Jasper smiles at her, and steps out of the room.
* * *
Elsa doesn’t understand why he’s never mentioned it to the girls. She’s heard them say it, heard them call him a single man or joke about what he’d be looking for in a wife. Anja had once joked that he was probably hoping some man will mistake him for a girl and take him home as a bride.
All the girls had laughed and then gone hushed and quiet, but some of them had giggled for ages afterward, kept nudging each other and tittering when he went by.
“It’s illegal for a reason,” Joanie Eames had said at the bar. “Like having sex with farm animals.”
Elsa doesn’t know that it’s exactly the same, but she knows it’s wrong, that it’s a depravity of the worst sort, that those sorts of people are dangerous, ugly inside. She feels bad for thinking Jasper might be one of them, for letting herself assume, for saying it. She’s lucky he was so unmoved by it, that he just found it funny.
They used to tease her at school about it, for being the way she is – too literal, too naïve. “Don’t you know anything?” used to ring in her ears on the walk home, she’d heard it so often.
“He’s married, you know,” she says the next time Anja says it after Jasper had come into the break room to pin a note about typewriter repair policy on the board, her talking about how lightly he walked in his loafers.
He wears Oxfords, anyway, not loafers.
“What?”
The girls all go quiet, staring at her, and Anja felt like she’d been spot lit – she was normally in the background, in amongst the crowd of them, not looked at or stared at like she’s being stared at now.
“Jasper Hackett,” she says. “He’s married. He just wears his ring on a chain.”
“Why would he do that?” demands Anja, looking suddenly angry, little pink marks appearing at the tops of her cheeks, because she never has a full blush. “How do you know?”
“Oh, he just mentioned it,” says Elsa, trying to sound casual. “He doesn’t wear a watch, either.”
She wonders if she shouldn’t have said anything, because at the end of the day when Jasper comes out of Mr Garvey’s office and there’s six of them all crowded together, Anja calls him out.
“Hey, Jasper!” she says in that sweet, bubbly voice she has.
“Something I can help you with, dear?” asks Jasper in an even sweeter voice than hers is, so fine and cutting you could probably use it like those wires they cut ham with.
Anja falters, blinking. “I just wanted to ask,” she says. “What’s your wife called?”
Jasper smiles, and it’s a very polite smile, his eyes flittering over the group of them. His gaze locks with Elsa’s for a second, and she almost mouths, “Sorry,” but doesn’t.
“Linda,” he says lightly.
“You don’t have a picture of her on your desk,” Anja says.
“I don’t, I’ve never cared for cluttering a workspace,” Jasper says. “In any case, I well recall what she looks like, I don’t need a reminder. I see her very often.”
Anja doesn’t seem to know what to say to that, so Joanie asks, “What’s she like?”
“She’s tall, two inches taller than me, in fact. She has a beautiful head of hair, a lovely chestnut shade – not like mine, it’s got a shine to it, a bit more red. She’s a very impassioned speaker, an academic. She’s a research assistant over at City College.”
He waits for a few seconds, his expression anticipant, one eyebrow raised, until Joanie says – sort of impotently, “She sounds lovely.”
Jasper says, “She is! Night night, girls,” and moves off down the corridor.
“He walks like a woman,” Anja remarks once he’s out of earshot.
Elsa doesn’t know that he does, but he does walk gracefully, with a kind of flow. Maybe he is light in his Oxfords. She isn’t sure exactly what that means.
* * *
Jasper, some weeks later, comes by Elsa’s desk just before lunchtime, and says, “Would you like to join my wife and I for dinner this evening?”
She stares up at him, her fingers hovering over her keyboard.
“She keeps a kosher kitchen, if that makes the offer more appealing.”
“I haven’t been keeping kosher since I left home,” she admits guiltily. “But that sounds nice. Should I bring anything?”
“Just your fine self and a smile. The smile isn’t even mandatory, if it’s hard to keep up.”
She’s in a bad mood by the end of the day, feeling maudlin and sorry for herself – Mr Lockwood had actually shouted at her, had screamed so loudly that the walls had rattled, and only because she’d asked which Mr Smith he wanted something sending to, because he hadn’t been clear.
All the girls have been so nice to her all day, have been a bit gentler than usual and more sympathetic – several of them regularly refer to Mr Lockwood as a short straw, and they say she’s good to be so patient with him.
Jasper is just covering his typewriter as she goes up to his desk, and Mr Garvey steps out of his office, where Jasper stands to help him on with his coat.
Mr Garvey gives Elsa an ireful look, and she’s in such a poor mood she just stares back at him.
It’s beginning to rain outside, and Mr Garvey surprises Elsa by asking Jasper in gruff tones, “Do you want me to drive you two to the station?”
“No, thank you, Mr Garvey, I have an umbrella. Safe home.”
Garvey mutters something incomprehensible and stalks out.
“Come,” Jasper tells her as he pulls on his own coat and belts it shut over his suit. “I’m only a few stops away, on the same line, and it’s not too much of a walk.”
“Do we have to pick anything up?”
“There’s a bakery across the street from us, but that’s more a siren call than anything.”
“It must be hard,” Elsa says as they step into the lift. “With both of you working – to get groceries and so on.”
“Lina works four days a week, which does help,” Jasper says. “But yes, we’re often reliant on friends to fit some things into the schedule.”
He calls the lift operator by name when they leave, who bids them good night, and Elsa walks beside him into the street and follows his lead toward the subway.
“How long have you been married?”
“Ten years next November.”
“Ten years… You got married young?”
“Twenty-seven isn’t so young.”
“You’re thirty-seven!?”
Jasper blinks, and she looks away, because not only was he surprised, but several people had looked over.
“I thought you were— Well. I didn’t know you were so old.”
“So old,” Jasper repeats, huffing out a soft laugh. “Kind of you to say.”
“Sorry.”
“I’ve made my peace with my youthful features – I looked damn neat pre-pubescent in my early twenties. You’re twenty-two?”
“Twenty-three next month. I feel old.”
“Do you indeed? Why’s that?”
“All the girls are right out of school.”
“Ah. Not world-weariness, just comparison.”
She doesn’t normally ride this line of the subway, and she sits beside Jasper and looks at all the different people, careful not to keep her gaze on anybody for too long. She wants to look without being looked at, without being talked to. No one talks to her – at one point, a man glances over at her and she shifts immediately, wondering if he’s going to come over as his glance becomes a stare and he keeps concentrated on her.
She can feel the weight of his eyes on her face, feel them come down to her body, and in her periphery she sees him shift on his feet—
Jasper leans toward her and starts talking about something Jackie Kennedy said on the radio as if resuming a conversation, and she’s so surprised she doesn’t even realise the man has got up and left until they’re at their stop and they both stand to their feet.
“How do you know to do that?” she asks as they walk up the steps and into the street again. There’s no line at the bakery, and Jasper points out some pastries, buys them and a loaf of bread as well.
“Do what?” he asks.
“You do it with the girls at work sometimes too,” she says. “One of the guys will be flirting with her, and you’ll distract him, or ask if she’ll go and do something for you. Or you’ll just stand in the way and he just… won’t.”
“Men respect other men in a way they don’t women,” says Jasper. “My experience of that is diluted for the sort of man I am, granted, but I’m still a man. Linda and I met in a similar situation – we rode the same train, men were always bothering her. I started standing in the way.”
“So you could marry her instead,” she says with a slight challenge in her voice, and he laughs as he takes the package from the baker, thanking him in Yiddish – the whole conversation was. It’s been a while. She never hears it at work, maybe the occasional “oy”, but nothing else.
It’s not classy enough for the men in the office, the big clients.
“Believe it or not, we knew each other three years before all that. We talked on the train sometimes, and then she used to invite me to parties, and I’d go along with her. One morning, she said she was tired of her roommates bickering with her. She said we should get married.”
Elsabeth stares at him, at the faint smile on his face as they cross the street.
“She did?”
“Oh, yes. I thought she was joking, but she had a whole presentation prepared and she laid it out. A very strong public speaker, my wife, even when her public amounts to one easily convinced man.”
“So you got married then?”
“A few months after our discussion. We’ve been living her since, and we have two cats together. You’re not allergic, are you?”
“No, no. What about children?”
“Oh, we haven’t got room for that,” Jasper says casually. “My mother-in-law gifted us a bassinet, but it doesn’t go unused. Ido and Noam barely share it already without fighting an infant for space as well.”
Elsa thinks about this for a moment. She’s never really imagined being nearly forty and not having children at all. It’s always felt like there’s a sort of ticking clock on her life, until she has to give it over to a man’s children – children that have to be hers as well, but they never really feel like that in her head.
“You don’t want any?”
“Not particularly, no. Parenthood isn’t for everybody.”
“Isn’t it?” she almost asks, but he’s leading her inside, and the question evaporates on her tongue as they step into the house and he eases off his shoes before he takes off his coat, so she copies him.
Linda isn’t home yet, the two of them alone in the house together.
She feels kind of stiff and uncertain, keeping her distance from Jasper as they hang up their hats and coats, as he steps through the living room and into the kitchen, beginning to wash his hands.
Ido and Noam are sitting either end of a shelf with their tails hanging down like bookends, peering at her.
“Where’s your wife?” Elsa asks, hearing the slight quaver in her voice as she walks toward the cats and reaches out her hand to one, letting it sniff her fingers. They’re both huge, fierce-looking animals, muscular with dark, shaggy coats and strong facial features. They’re almost dog-sized really, and she’s surprised the shelf doesn’t creak under their weight.
“On her way home, I’d hope,” Jasper calls from the kitchen. “Linda is less punctual than I am, I’m afraid – timeliness is not one of her virtues.”
She wonders if she’s made a mistake, coming to Jasper Hackett’s apartment, to a man’s apartment, alone with him. No one even knows she’s here except for the cats, and maybe Mr Garvey, and Mr Garvey hates women – would he even care if something happened to her? Would he even notice? It could be his wife doesn’t even know. It could be that he doesn’t even have a wife, that Linda’s made up and she’s here, in a man’s flat, alone, just them.
Her heart is beating faster in her chest.
She turns to look around the rest of the flat, and she feels a bit more nervous when she looks and looks and doesn’t see photographs of the two of them together, just art on the walls, and a lot of books.
Her mouth is dry as she steps into the middle of the living room to look into the kitchen without stepping closer. As she looks, she sees that Jasper has stripped off his suit jacket and rolled up his sleeves, that he’s chopping vegetables.
Elsa’s never seen a man cook before outside of a restaurant, and the knife moves fast, his movements neat and easy, well-practised and at-home with what he’s doing. She feels sick about it, the grip he has on the knife, the fact that he’s not even looking at her.
“Um,” she starts, her mouth dry. She feels a little faint. “Mr Hackett?”
“Goodness, girl, don’t call me that. Jasper is fine. Sorry, would you like a drink? There’s tea and coffee, a few cordials – let me get this mise-en-place finished, and I can make up some lemonade for you.” The wooden noises of the knife on the block keep sounding, and she wrings her hands in front of her belly, rehearsing excuses to leave on her tongue.
And then the door opens behind her and she lets out the breath she was holding, feels her body sag.
It tightens up again when the woman in question walks in, nudging the door closed behind her with her hip so she doesn’t have to put her bags down, and Elsa realises that Jasper Hackett is married to the most beautiful woman she’s ever seen.
Linda Hackett is an Amazon – when Jasper said she was tall, she hadn’t taken into account the idea that she would still wear high heels. Jasper is just under six feet tall, but Linda is past that. In her heels, she must be six feet and two. She has thick cascades of gently curling chestnut hair, warm in colour with golden red undertones and a healthy shine, deep red lips, dark eyes. She wears pants, yellow-beige plaid with her sleeveless blouse tucked into them, a cardigan around her shoulders and held in place with a chain.
“Ah,” she says when she lays eyes on Elsa. “You’re here, good.”
Elsabeth’s tongue feels frozen in her mouth, and she can’t make it work, can’t make herself say anything.
“You said she was shy,” Linda remarks to Jasper, and presses a bag of groceries into Elsa’s arms. “Unpack these.”
For some reason, Elsa’s cheeks blossom in a blush, and she obediently takes the bag, stumbling into the kitchen and setting it down on the counter. It’s a small kitchen, so she ends up back to back with Jasper as she unpacks it – some frozen things, some fruit, rather than things they’re eating tonight.
“How was work?” asks Jasper.
“I’m thinking of murdering one of the adjunct professors,” says Linda casually, leaning in so that Jasper can kiss her cheek, which he does without looking away from the vegetables he’s chopping.
“Only one?” Jasper asks in reply, and Elsa looks at the two of them side by side, at how Linda leans back against the kitchen counter and stands beside him as he chops, swiping a piece of bell pepper to chew and swallow. They look incredible, side-by-side like this – Jasper looks far more handsome, beside his wife, than he does on his own right. They sort of complement each other. “Elsabeth Lorne, meet Linda Hackett,” says Jasper.
“Hi,” Elsa croaks out, her voice breaking on the word.
Linda’s laugh is low and deep – her voice isn’t hoarse, but it has a resonance a lot of women’s don’t have, and it’s naturally far louder than her husband’s is.
“How was work for you?” asks Linda. Her shoulder gently nudges against Jasper’s, but her gaze is locked with Elsa’s. Her arms are crossed under her chest, and it’s— distracting.
“Sam is on a new blood pressure medication. He’s nervous about it – it’s making him quite antsy.”
“Taking it out on you?”
“No more than usual. He offered us a lift, actually, but I declined. I didn’t want poor Elsa here to receive the full force of his personality in such a small space.”
“Mr Garvey?” asks Elsa.
“He can be really lovely outside of the office,” says Linda.
“Really?”
“No.” She smiles as she says it, shifting her arms. She hasn’t got a low neckline, her blouse buttoned up to the neck, but even under the cardigan, Elsa can see how significant her chest is, how big her breasts are. It makes sense, with what a big woman she is, her broad shoulders and her tall frame, that her chest should be in proportion, but…
She feels like some sort of pervert for noticing, her lips quivering, the tops of her ears feeling hot as well as her cheeks.
Linda is lighting a cigarette, and before she takes a drag of it, she holds it to Jasper’s lips, letting him take a drag as he keeps prepping.
“He’s a prickly personality, even in the home,” says Linda. Her fingernails aren’t painted, but they’re beautifully manicured and buffed to a pink shine like Jasper’s are – she’s got quite short fingernails for a woman, doesn’t wear lacquer or have pointed nails. She probably types a lot herself at work. “God knows we’ve had our share of furious arguments over dinner here, Sam and I. But he means well, which is more than most.”
“What do you argue over?” Elsa asks.
Before Linda can answer, Jasper says, “Those two fight over everything. If Linda said the sky was blue, Sam Garvey would be about ready to insist it was green.”
“He’s an awful prick,” says Linda, then chuckles. “I miss him when I don’t see him for a while.”
Elsa’s laugh is breathless, nervous. She doesn’t know any women like Linda, she doesn’t think. Women who smoke like she does, or are so tall, or who call people pricks so easily and so confidently like it’s nothing at all.
“How do you find the work?” she asks Elsa. “Jasper says you two have been chatting recently, that your boss is a bit of an ass?”
“Mr Lockwood,” says Elsa quietly, folding up one of the brown paper bags. “He’s, um… He’s an angry man. He loses his temper a lot.”
“Some men would be happy typing their own letters,” Linda says dryly, tapping her cigarette into an ashtray. “But then they wouldn’t have a secretary as a punching bag. Do you like the work, your boss aside?”
“I like typewriters,” says Elsa.
“Oh?”
“My father is a watchmaker,” Elsa says. “He repairs them back home – watches, clocks. When I started typing at school, he bought some to take apart, to learn to repair, so he could show me. He wanted to make sure I knew how.”
“Oh, that’s sweet,” says Linda softly. Her lips are beautiful when she pouts them out. “So, you can repair them?”
“Yeah, actually, I can repair them okay,” says Elsa. “Especially older models, you know, ones from the forties and earlier – my school actually had a bunch of different models in case people were working at small businesses. The ones at work are newer models, and they’re more accessible for small repairs, less so for deeper mechanical work. Typewriters these days are made to be transported more, so the casements are heavier and more fixed, but that makes their guts less accessible too.”
“Are you excited about the new typewriter ball?” asks Jasper, and Elsa laughs, nodding her head.
“What’s that?” asks Linda, raising her eyebrows and leaning back to look at Jasper. As he swipes the vegetables from the chopping board into a roasting tin, he turns to Elsa can see his face too.
“IBM have released this new typewriter with a ball that all the letters are embossed on,” Jasper says, gesturing with his hands. “Instead of having individual hammers that strike the ribbon, you know, with those layers of bars and hammers like an organ, the ball rotates and moves to be struck by one hammer instead.”
“You can take out the whole ball to clean it at once,” says Elsa, “and that means one typewriter can easily have a bunch of typefaces, because you can just swap out the ball.”
“Oh, look at that smile,” says Linda softly. Her lips are shifted into a smile of her own. She’d been walking closer to get the chicken out of the fridge, and as Elsa stands there Linda holds her cigarette between her lips and reaches out to brush her knuckles over the side of Elsa’s cheek. It’s only a delicate touch, but it’s such a rush Elsa feels dizzy with it.
Once the chicken’s in the oven, Linda and Elsa go into the living room while Jasper makes lemonade, and when Elsa sits down on the sofa, Ido and Noam come over to sniff at her legs and then hop up to sit with her. They’re both heavy, dense animals, and they purr like engines.
“Hi, baby,” says Linda, gripping the larger of the two – Ido – and lifting him up into her lap. Elsa stares at the way he goes limp in her arms, letting her hold him like a baby and rock him in her arms, her thumb rubbing against his thick, tufted chest.
“So, um, Jasper says you’re a research assistant?”
“That’s right, I work in biochemistry – I study metabolism, effectively, the ways in which people digest different things, how quickly, and so on.”
“That’s interesting,” says Elsa, which must ring false, because Linda chuckles.
“It is to me,” she says, rocking Ido, who is looking up at her lovingly, his eyes half-closed. Noam has his big face mashed into Elsa’s belly, and is kneading at the blankets either side of them. “I love my work, I just wish it wasn’t… Ah, you know.”
“It’s hard?”
“I work with men.”
Elsa sighs, and nods her head. “I, um… On the train, Jasper stopped a man from talking to me. Like, he noticed, before he said anything or came over.”
“He’s good at that,” says Linda. “Men like Jasper are a real relief.”
“There are other men like him?”
“There’s a few knocking about.”
“Maybe I should try to find one,” Elsa says quietly, and Linda tilts her head as she looks at her, easing Ido down in her arms. He stays laid on his back, his back legs together like a bunny’s, pressing up on the underside of one of Linda’s boobs, which makes her laugh.
“I hate it when he does that, he knows it,” she says, rubbing the thick fur on his belly. “He just likes to push on it, I think – Noam’s worse, he’ll pad up to me and use his forehead to push one of them up as if he’ll find treasure underneath. It’s a bit like lifting weights for him, I suppose.”
Elsa giggles, covering her mouth, and she shakes her head, scratching Noam under his ears.
“Do you find Jasper handsome?” Linda asks.
“Sure,” says Elsa.
“No, I mean…” Linda starts, and then exhales, smiling at her kindly. “Physically, is he the sort of man you like?”
“Well, most men look the same, really,” says Elsa, and when Linda raises her eyebrows, she wonders if it’s the wrong thing to have said, if it’s not right. “Um. Sorry. I don’t mean anything bad by it. I just mean— Men aren’t like women, right? We all look different.”
“We do,” Linda allows.
“I just— All the men in the office, they get their hair cut at the same places, they wear the same suits, have similar coats. They try to look the same – we all try to look different. Beautiful.”
“You don’t think men can be beautiful?”
“Handsome, maybe,” says Elsa. “I’m not— I’m not saying I… Sorry. I think I’ve said something odd.”
“You haven’t,” says Linda. “Sometimes girls at work will talk about men, Paul Newman, Steve McQueen. It feels like they’re speaking a foreign language sometimes.”
Elsa rubs the top of Noam’s head, between his ears.
“Fools, all of them,” says Jasper as he comes back into the room. “It’s like they don’t even see Marlon Brando.”
“The man looks like a thumb,” says Linda, and Jasper scoffs.
“With lips like peaches,” he says.
Elsa feels herself blink, and she stares at the three glasses as Jasper starts pouring fresh lemonade for them, the ice clinking in each one.
“You think he has nice lips?”
“Jasper thinks Marlon Brando has nice everything,” says Linda.
Elsa doesn’t know what to make of it, exactly, because at the same time, Linda reaches out with one foot and rubs against the side of Jasper’s ankle, making him jump and shove his wife in the arm, laughing. “Horrid woman,” he calls her.
“We were just discussing what Elsabeth here might like in a husband,” Linda says, and Elsa looks at Jasper as he leans back in one of the armchairs, crossing one ankle over the other.
“We can introduce you to some people,” says Jasper.
“Men like you,” says Elsa, haltingly.
Jasper looks at her over his glass, wearing his face in that blank, neutral way he does. “Men like Marlon Brando,” he says evenly. “So the rumours say.”
Elsa looks between the two of them, tries to get a handle on it, tries to understand, really understand. “Really?”
“One hears whispers.”
“So you’re— You two are…” She looks to Linda. “You married him so that people wouldn’t know? And you know that people are— Is that why you know how women feel? Because you, because you’re… Are you and Mr Garvey—”
“Slow down,” Jasper says when Linda hiccups. “Take a breath.” He breathes in demonstratively, inhaling very slowly, and Elsa copies him automatically before taking a few gulps of her lemonade.
“It’s alright,” Linda murmurs, and she strokes over the back of Elsa’s neck, making her shudder. It’s… Nice, though. It’s nice.
“Mr Garvey is not of my inclination, no,” says Jasper. “His father was – it’s made him astonishingly liberal in this area and this one alone.”
“Why would you tell me? Isn’t it illegal? What if I told somebody?” She feels nervous, uncertain, overwhelmed by it, by the weight of the knowledge.
“What if you did?” asks Jasper, raising his eyebrows. “What evidence do you have?”
Noam puts his front paws up on Jasper’s knees, and Jasper picks him up under the armpits, cradling him against his chest so that Noam can shove his face into Jasper’s neck and purr loudly there.
“Why would I want to marry a man like you?” asks Elsa.
Jasper shrugs. “For the same reasons Linda did, I suppose. A man is a useful shield, if you want one – you’re still young, though. I wouldn’t worry about it just yet, if it’s not a priority for you.”
“A husband, a cooperative one, can mean more independence,” says Linda. “Less harassment, albeit only slightly.”
Elsa looks at her, at her beautiful hair, at the cat sprawled in her lap. “Only slightly?”
“He wears his ring on a chain – I wear mine very obviously,” says Linda, waving one hand and showing its glint. “They still come sniffing around, inviting me places, wanting to put their hands on me.”
Jasper sighs longingly, blinking his pretty eyelashes and looking jokingly wistful, and then breaks into laughter when Linda kicks him in the shin.
“No, it’s awful,” he agrees abruptly, dropping the joking expression. “Would that you could have an all-female chemistry department.”
It’s now Linda’s turn to sigh wistfully, and Jasper affectionately pats her knee. They really look a picture like this, across from each other, both of them with their matching cats. They match one another, they really do.
“Why would you trust me?” Elsa asks.
“Why wouldn’t I?” asks Jasper. “You’re a sweet girl, Elsabeth. Kind, caring.”
“Isn’t it wrong?” she asks.
Jasper shrugs his shoulders. “Isn’t everything about the world we live in?”
Elsa hesitates, uncertain what to say.
“Would you like to play cards?” asks Linda.
That’s what they do.
* * *
It’s astoundingly easy to play with the two of them, to relax into the experience and just chat over cards and the cats. She doesn’t play cards much – the girls always want to just drink and talk and sing and dance, and that’s nice in its own way, but different to this.
She wonders if he’s ignoring it, what these people are, if that makes her awful, for ignoring it, except she isn’t, exactly. The idea of it, of Jasper being… that way. The fact that the girls were right all along, joking about it, thinking about it, knowing it.
They knew what he was just by looking at him, talking to him – is that why Jasper was so unaffected by it when she’d asked outright, even though a lot of men would be furious to be asked, would go into a rage at even the implication.
Shouldn’t she hate it? Shouldn’t she be angry, or disgusted? People say it’s disgusting, that it’s awful, but Jasper is the same now as he has been. He’s witty, gentle, soft-spoken. She wonders what he’s like, when he’s with men who are like him, if he’s the same, or somehow different.
“Let me go check on the chicken,” Jasper says, getting to his feet – both of the cats must know that word, because they follow after him with their tails up high and straight, cheerful, and he laughs as they weave around and through his ankles.
“Do you sleep in the same bed?” asks Elsa. Her voice comes out very quiet, in little more than a whisper.
“We do,” Linda says. “It’s lovely in winter – he gives off heat like a furnace.”
“What’s it… like? The— I’ve never…”
“Had sex?” asks Linda.
Elsa nods. “I’ve never even kissed a boy,” she breathes out. She’s thought about it. She’s heard people talk about it in movies, she’s heard the girls talk about it, about the actual act, and it’s never seemed… She doesn’t know that she likes the idea of being so intimate.
It’s like when the girls talk about men who are attractive, when they talk about Paul Newman and how handsome he is, when they talk about kissing men. Anita was talking about how it makes her feel when her fiancé puts his hand on her waist, how it makes her heart flutter.
Elsa’s never felt that.
“We don’t,” says Linda. “Jasper and I. We’re quite comfortable with each other’s bodies, we see each other naked, help each other dress. Jasper broke his leg a few years ago, and I helped him in the shower a lot, so we’re used to bathing together.”
“I can’t imagine it,” says Elsa. “Being close to a man like that.”
“And to a woman?” Linda asks.
Elsa’s breath arrests in her throat. “Did, um— Did your husband bring me home… for you?”
Linda slowly shakes her head. “He thought you might be like us, had his suspicions,” she says. “But we have friends, Elsa – I was serious when I said I could find someone like him to match you up with. A man inclined like Jasper, if you’re inclined… like me.”
“How do I know?” asks Elsa. “That I am?”
Linda looks at her with her dark eyes, and then she slides closer on the sofa, until their knees brush against each other, and Elsa hears a little noise come out of her own mouth, a shock running through her.
“May I?” asks Linda, and Elsa doesn’t know what she means exactly, is hypnotised by the gesture of one of Linda’s hands, so she just dumbly nods her head, dizzied, drawn in.
Linda cleans closer, and Elsa breathes in the scent of her perfume.
It’s far, far subtler than anything they wear at work – she finds it too sickly sometimes, the scents the other girls wear, too overwhelming, but this is nice. It’s sweet, but there’s a muskiness to it, a depth.
Then Linda is kissing her, and Elsa feels like she might die.
Linda’s lips are plump and soft and so, so warm against hers, the movement gentle, and Elsa feels full up with her – with the scent of her perfume and her shampoo too, with the warmth of her mouth and the lemonade taste lingering on her lips, Linda’s fingers delicately resting on her thigh. Linda’s chest is brushing against hers, and Elsa can feel the weight of them, the weight of—
“Oh, God,” she whispers, almost whimpers, and Linda’s laugh as a curl of smoke through it, so that Elsa feels hot and burning all over.
“Would—” Linda starts, and Elsa feels horribly rude because she cuts her off, but she just craves more, crushes their lips together in another hungry kiss, and this time Linda opens her mouth and they kiss each other more deeply, their tongues sliding against each other, and ohGodit’sthebestthingintheworld—
Linda cups her cheek, tilting her head to kiss her deeper, controlling it, and Elsa’s hands scramble for her, to grab at her – she squeezes one of Linda’s thighs, her head spinning with how muscular they are, how strong she must be. She’s got broad shoulders and strong arms and strong legs, and Elsa’s head spins with questions, wondering if she cycles, or if she rides horses, or if she does archery, somehow, and is some sort of warrior goddess like Wonder Woman, and—
Their lips make a smacking noise when Linda draws back.
“Is that what it feels like?” Elsa asks urgently. “When people kiss men?”
Linda laughs at her, stroking her cheek with her thumb. “It’s what Jasper feels, maybe. I’ve never enjoyed it much.”
Elsa is breathing heavily, sweat on her skin under her clothes, burning on the back of her neck. She wonders if she’s as red all over as she feels – if she’s as red as all that, she must be glowing like a beacon.
“Can I, um,” she starts, her hands trembling with anticipation. “Can I touch them?”
“Touch what?”
“Your… bosoms?”
Linda sniggers, and Elsa laughs helplessly, at herself, at the absurdity of the situation, at the intensity of her own swirling emotions, the feeling that she’s balanced on the head of a pin with a storm swirling around her. Linda takes her gently by the wrists and puts her hands on her breasts, and they’re so, so warm, and so soft, and so big, and—
“They’re magnificent, aren’t they?” Jasper asks. “A wonderful pillow my wife makes, too.”
“I’m so glad I make good furniture for you,” snarks Linda witheringly, and Elsa slowly cups her chest from underneath, feeling how heavy her breasts are – Linda’s brassiere is made of a more reinforced fabric than hers, she thinks. Maybe that’s why she’s so muscular, just so that the weight doesn’t hurt her back as much. She knows some of the girls have difficulty getting a brassiere that supports them well, that if you have a big chest, it can hurt your posture, your neck, your shoulders.
“The cat pushes these up?” she asks, weighing them between her palms like she’s two halves of a scale, and even knowing that some of the weight is being taken by Linda’s bra, they’re heavy.
“They’re very strong boys,” says Linda.
“Wow,” Elsa whispers.
“You love them now,” says Jasper mildly. “Wait until one of them smacks you in the face in the heat of the moment.”
Elsa does think about that for a second, feeling like her brain is short-circuiting somehow, that there must be steam or perhaps smoke rising up from her ears. What’s Linda’s skin like, underneath her cardigan, her blouse, her bra? Her— Her nipples?
“You are just cute as a button,” Linda murmurs. “Jasper, do you mind if we…?”
Elsa looks over when Linda trails off – Jasper is already pulling his coat on. Elsa keeps struggling to remember that he’s there. “The timer is set for an hour,” he says mildly. “I’ll drop in on Evan for forty-five minutes or so. You two… explore.”
“Sorry,” says Elsa reflexively.
“Sorry?” repeats Linda, raising her eyebrows. “Don’t be sorry.”
“Darling, what would you even have to be sorry for? Look at that smile on your face.” Jasper puts one hand on his hip, looking over at the two of them. “I did know this was a possibility.”
Elsa bites the inside of her lip, looking at Linda’s amused expression, at the affection in it. She feels searingly hot on the inside, and warm – not just between her legs, but also in the core of her, a spiritual warmth, beyond the physical. It feels, somehow, like something inside her has slotted into place, has become complete where it wasn’t before. She is smiling, she realises, her lips curved naturally into the crescent of it.
“Only forty-five minutes?” she asks, and Linda and Jasper both laugh.
“Only to take the chicken out,” says Jasper over his shoulder as he goes to the door. He’s wearing a pocket watch, she realises – no wrist watch, still. “I know from experience that Linda won’t hear the alarm.”
“Not all of us can be domestic goddesses,” Linda says dryly.
“Happy to play the Parvati to your Shiva, my dear,” he says, and winks before he closes the door behind him.
“Is it okay?” Elsa asks as the door shuts closed. “I don’t want you to think that I, that I’m treating you like a man would.”
“Oh, sweetheart,” Linda murmurs, “I’m not remotely worried about that. Why don’t we kiss again, hm? Slower this ti—”
Elsa cuts her off again, and she swallows Linda’s answering laughter as the older woman curls her fingers through her hair and pulls her closer for more.
(They don’t hear the timer. Jasper teases them about it for weeks.)
FIN.
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Hey guys, I am posting Jessica Nigri and I am not entirely sure why other than some days I guess you're just in the mood for blonde with big boobs? Like, maybe it's as simple as that, she's hot, she wears nice costumes, that's enough. I don't post her often, in part cause her legal team is famous for take downs, even though all of this is from her instagram so I am not really hurting her sales of anything, but also I don't have a ton to say about her in general. I remember one of the first times I posted her one of my followers (who it hurts me to say but I am glad is off of tumblr cause he was annoying and weirdly needy but also had some really problematic views that came from a place of just being convinced he was life's biggest victim) said he was surprised I hadn't addressed how "controversial she was". I told him I was unaware of any controversy even though I damn well knew what he was talking about, I just wanted to make him say publicly what it was, which was that some people think she's a fake nerd. In my opinion this does not make her controversial, it just exposes the fact that "real nerds" hate women. Real Nerds of course are white men who don't have a lot of luck in social spheres and boy I would like to say I feel bad coming down on the nerds but the truth is I never do. I grew up with you guys and it was toxic, racist, homophobic, and mystification and nerds were the worst bullies I ever met. I often think about that scene in the Social Network when Rooney Mara tells Jesse Eisenberg he tells himself people don't like him because he's smart but they actually don't like him because he's an asshole. I know some people were picked on and no one brought that on themselves but the truth is most adult nerds I have known who swear the world is against them tend to be deeply unpleasant and entitled people. Which is the real reason Jessica Nigri was and is "controversial" in increasingly small and isolated internet communities. Is she a real nerd or not? I dunno. I am inclined to think she must sort of like the stuff she dresses up as cause she could just be a hot girl and charge money for hot girl pictures. Either way I don't care much because I know the real issue here and that is that she and other cosplayers have flipped a misogynistic dynamic on it's head. Objectifying a woman is supposed to diminish her, you get to leer and she gets to be made less than she was before. She is soiled and loses power. But once cosplayers started making money from their work the same voices online that fucking hated them were forking out money for pictures of them and only saw themselves diminishing in their own eyes while the cosplayer got richer. It wasn't how it was supposed to work and it made those people angry. Which is why I don't have a lot to say about Jessica Nirgi cause she's just someone who puts on a costume. I don't think it's a great feminist moment or some moment of deep shame. It just is. But she's hot. Today I want to fuck Jessica Nigri.
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I've been a very staunch supporter of trans ppl for years. I have learned to swallow my discomfort around some of the things said in those circles. When they said it was transphobic for lesbians to not like dick, I bit my tongue. I told myself, "this is just the loud minority" and to be fair I do think that is the minority but still ... as a lesbian I wasn't even able to talk about people who argued that because "it never happens. No one says that. That sounds like a transphobic lie." And I hate the constant assertions that gender is real, innate, and that everyone feels it. I can't describe my own experiences with growing up as a woman without someone telling me that maybe I'm nonbinary ... no thanks I tried that for a while. I respect everyone's gender, or I want to, but apparently doing that also requires me to put that oppressive structure onto myself and act like it's liberating.
The final snapping point for me was a trans woman telling me that I'm privileged for being a cis woman because I've never experienced dysphoria ... except I have. I grew up with intense thoughts about my body and hating my vagina and breasts. It was never that bad but I would often imagine mutilating. I'm in a better place now but I still feel some discomfort over my body sometimes. And when I expressed this to her, she asked me if I was really cis or was still questioning ...
They act like misogyny doesn't exist or something. I just ... I disagree with a lot of radical feminists beliefs or at least I think I do. But for years I have felt like radfems were the only ones even talking about misogyny anymore so idk
Anyway what I wanted to say is that I really like your posts and perspectives and thanks for this blog. I want to learn more and question more and your blog has become a helpful resource to help me start thinking critically about some things
Hey :) thanks for writing to me and sorry for the late answer.
And yeah, you are totally right. I have also spent such a long time justifying gender ideology because I really wanted it to be right. I’ve excused so much weird behaviour with weird mental gymnastics because I didn’t want to accept that I had been wrong for such a long time.
The entire “that never happens” thing - and then you show them an occasion where it happened, and they say “well, it doesn’t happen that much”. And yeah, people have suggested me being non-binary as well. I mean, by strict gender definitions I am non-binary because I don’t identify as a woman lmao. Just as the “you’re uncomfortable in your body?? what about fucking cutting it up??!!!!” thing.
And for disagreeing with feminist beliefs, the thing is that being a feminist is not a package deal. You are not being some sort of heretic if you disagree with certain things, and I know that I am most probably wrong on a lot of stuff myself. If I wasn’t, I would be the first person who is always right in human history. And yes, even in feminist spaces, there is sometimes some sort of imperative to follow every single belief or you are not a “real feminist”. But being a feminist is not an identity, it is an action. It is an action towards yourself, in the workplace, in interaction with other women and men, in your consumption, in your voting, in how you support women in your personal life and how you do political action.
So yeah, I would say that it is less important whether you follow every rule of the radical feminist catechism and more important to support women in your life (which includes yourself). At least, that’s my opinion.
So if you want to learn more, you can look into literally anything Julie Bindel says on Youtube, I really like her perspective. And cool that you’re here!
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Am I the only person who doesn’t like Wonder Woman and thinks she is, in fact, a Mary Sue? I haven’t read or watched much with her in it so maybe I’m just basing my opinions on one Wonder Woman book I read where I thought she was written poorly.
But I don’t know. She’s literally everything a modern woman is supposed to be (sexy, strong, righteous, soft, etc.) and she never struggles. She’s always right, she never makes mistakes, and she’s very boring to me as a result. I haven’t seen the recent film, but I dislike the fact that they made her love babies. A lot of pressure is put on women to love babies/children and/or want one of their own, and if a woman doesn’t like or want them then she’s seen as a cold, callous bitch. So to me, that part seems like the writers put it in thinking ‘see she’s not an evil man hating feminist you guys, she loves babies!’
Idk. I know she’s seen as THE role model for women and girls but I just can’t understand her appeal. What exactly do you like about her?
Hello there!
As someone who grew up with a lot of Wonder Woman content, I have to personally disagree!
Like any major superhero, Wonder Woman gets a lot of good content and plenty of bad content, too.
Yes, she's idealized - but almost all superheroes are idealized. Superman is literally a mirror of the philosophical concept of the "Ubermensch," a term coined by Nietzsche meaning "superman" and describing an ideal human being. By this standard, he could also be described as a Mary Sue!
But just being beautiful, powerful, and good does not a Mary Sue make. These idyllic superheroes work well when they're put in circumstances that challenge them. It's fascinating to see characters that seemingly embody the highest reaches of human potential pushed to their limits, when we see that they too have flaws and weaknesses that they can overcome through perseverance.
You say that she "never struggles," but a good Wonder Woman writer knows that she NEEDS to struggle to be interesting. In shows like the animated Justice League and Justice League Unlimited, she and all the other major heroes are put in situations that challenge them on every level - physical (like fighting literal gods) and emotional (being banished from her home for bringing men to the island).
And also funny scenarios that put them at disadvantages, like being turned into children or a pig that then must be chased through the city by Batman (yes, both real episodes) that humanize them and show that they're not invulnerable.
For the more recent, live action movies, I liked the first Wonder Woman but not the second. I personally liked the fact that she was excited to see a baby, especially in the context that there were no babies on her island, because women are often expected to reject feminine characteristics to be strong.
I see your point, but I also have a different view regarding children: I think a lot of the oppression experienced by women is also experienced by children, and children are frequently dehumanized.
Not everyone who says they don't like kids is a bad person - I know plenty of great people who say they don't like kids - but I'm not really comfortable with the concept of disliking an entire group of human beings. Children have such varied personalities, just like any other group.
Granted, most people who say they don't like kids don't mean they dislike ALL kids, but it's still a sentiment I don't really like from a cultural standpoint.
As for women who don't WANT kids, I agree - it's deeply messed up that many people don't see women as complete or fulfilled unless they have kids. But (though it's been a while since I've seen it) I don't recall Wonder Woman in the 2017 movies planning to have children of her own. Plenty of women like children without intending to have them, myself included.
Again, though, I do see your point that the writers may have been trying to soften Wonder Woman in the eyes of the audience by having her love babies.
I still prefer that over the original Joss Whedon script, where a little girl at one point asks her to get a cat down from a tree (I think. Perhaps it was a lost toy) and Wonder Woman callously tells her to get it herself. To me, that plays into a sexist stereotype that women must reject all feminine attributes in order to be strong.
The sequel film, on the other hand, really embodies how NOT to write Wonder Woman in every way: largely exempt from moral criticism, inherently better than those around her, and with few meaningful challenges that aren't solved through plot convenience. She isn't "always right," however, because another flaw in that film's plot is the fact that she's learning a vague and contrived lesson of not cheating to get what she wants, though that's never explored in any way that feels human or applicable.
To conclude, I'll reiterate -- and this is just my opinion -- Wonder Woman is done GREAT when written by someone who understands the appeal of the character. Her idyllic characteristics apply to most superheroes, and can work great if the person writing her knows how to challenge her. I don't mind when she has feminine characteristics, and I love when all superheroes love kids, male and female. And last but not least, Justice League and Justice League unlimited reign supreme in terms of superhero content.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to ramble and spill my potentially controversial opinions!
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Honestly I am more sad and disappointed about the Ariana Grande thing(s) than anything else. Because Ariana is a celebrity that I really wish I could like. There's this TikTok where a white guy says he doesn't revel in the fact that Nicki Minaj is a bad person because he used to love her and defend her in middle school. And that's exactly how I feel about Ariana. I never "stanned" her nor was I ever a big fan of her(Melanie Martinez, Marina and the Diamonds, and Halsey were more my speed growing up), but I used to really admire her a lot for the feminist stances in her music(such as God is a Woman/Bang Bang/Don't Call Me Angel) and in real life(like that one makeup vs cell phone interview she had) and how outspoken she was about them. And also her body positivity because she was proud of her sexuality while also being very slender and not having any curves, and as someone who is also flat and curveless it made me happy to see that. But when I found out that she was a race chameleon all of that flew out the window, and now she is also an adulteress and even wrote an entire song about how she doesn't accept criticism for her actions and is proud of what she did.
Also back when I admired her for the reasons listed above i thought she was a brown Latina, meaning in addition to all of the above I embraced her as a woman of color like me. But really she's just white and racefishing. It infuriates me that people continue to give her the benefit of the doubt to this day just because they like her songs or because she has an amazingly beautiful voice, or because she has an "innocent" girl vibe(which just reeks of "white women are inherently innocent while woc aren't", because no one ever says this shit about women of color). And I hate how rancid and hostile her cult of personality is. Like seriously, girlypops. Do better. There are so many better and more talented female singers that you could be stanning instead. Just go listen to them instead of Miss Yes, And? Aside from how terribly she was treated/sexualized under D*n Schn*ider, I have no sympathy for her. 🙅🏾♀️
I agree with everything you said. I was a big fan of her first album and I still listen to it. But after she started to do brown face and copying other black artists songs and looks, I started to dislike her. It just reminds of those white artists like Christina and Miley who take black culture and aesthetics just to rebel against their innocence image. When they are done with that, they go back to their old image. Which is exactly what Ariana did. She has blonde hair and no tan now. Which is funny because her stans were yelling that she was dark because she’s Italian (which never made sense because she was always pale). 
The homewreaking she did was enough to turn most of the public against her and that trash ass song she wrote just shows us how vile she is. Of course her stans will defend her no matter what. They defended her when she licked those donuts and defended her changing her race every year. They will also go after anyone who is critical of her. They are just like Nicki stans.
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Hi @menalez, you know I thought I was being courteous by keeping quiet about my grievances with you and not airing them publicly but I guess that isn't mutual, if you really wanted to have a conversation with me you could've talked to me on discord, you're not blocked there.
when October 7th first happened I was unwell tbh and very confused, I thought the world went mad when a massacre against the Jewish state and Israelis (both Jewish and Arab but the majority were Jews and they were targeted for being Jewish) somehow made them hateful against Jewish people, even the diaspora, I was also very confused when the "feminists" of the world even the radical feminists remained silent on the mass rape used as a weapon against Israeli women or tried to deny and minimize it. This is gonna sound dramatic but I haven't been the same person ever since because I lost my trust in people, I don't trust anyone who has no sympathy for others based on their ethnicity and nationality.
and when I went to tumblr I saw that you were also sharing content from antisemites, although you tried to distance yourself from it, sure Hamas did kill babies and rape women, but it wasn't as bad as the media is making it out to be, as if there is a number of raped women and murdered babies that needs to be met before we recognize this as a genocidal act by Hamas? I tried to read what you shared and honestly the people you tried to refute (badly) made more sense to me.
I spent a huge portion of my time watching content about the conflict even when I am working, reading about it, talking to my friend about it, I sought out another friend of mine who is retired professor who has visited Israel multiple times to learn from her, I listened to Jewish people and Israelis and also to Palestinians, I shared articles from Palestinian authors and a Muslim woman about the war, I am reading a book by Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of one of Hamas' founders, I didn't listen to the ones who cheered on October 7th which is fair, terrorists and their supporters don't have integrity. so even though you said I "admitted I don't know shit" and I am "willfully ignorant" I am really not, I am not an expert, I wish I could read and learn more than what I am already doing but I work full-time on 5-6 hours of sleep then travel on the weekends to see my girlfriend, so I am sorry I didn't know much about Christian Zionists? I'd rather not run on my mouth over something I don't know much about, it doesn't make all of my other opinions invalid somehow. I've always been the type of person who tries to do at least some research before forming an opinion and being outspoken about it.
you also said I am brainwashed by my country's antisemitism and I am "rebelling" (which is so fucking condescending I am not a child trying to prove a point) but actually I never agreed that the holocaust was good and that Hitler was a hero like the majority of people around me did, even if I had problematic beliefs I would never agree with genocide. it's also interesting that you refer to this rightfully as propaganda but do you know which news channel was funneling this and playing in my house? it was Aljazeera, and you share from them all the time without a hint of scrutiny, of course anything Israel says must be met with scrutiny but anything coming out of Hamas and Qatar is trustworthy even though both are islamofascist that don't allow any freedom of press, very interesting.
so mena, as an Arabic speaker why don't you look into Aljazeera's Arabic websites and articles where they don't sugarcoat the antisemitism for the western audience and share them with your followers? or anything from Hamas' leaders? are you intentionally misleading them or just lazy? not sure which is worse.
I do have sympathy for middle eastern women and that includes Israeli women! Which is why I'll never support an Islamic state, they are the worst for women. There is more going on in the middle east than just western imperialism, not everything is the west's fault and even if it was we should have more accountability and not just overlook terrorism and other problems we have, prophet Mohammad didn't need Zionism or western imperialism to massacre the Jews of Banu Qurayza, which was so horrific I decided to fully become an ex-muslim after reading about it and I was questioning my faith for two years at that time.
You accused me of supporting genocide which is..... wow there is a lot to say about that, but I won't get into it now, you said this isn't in character for me as an "empathetic and intelligent woman" you're right, maybe the genocide accusation against Israel is blood libel and unfounded, because why would I support genocide? have you tried to read anything besides Qatar and Hamas approved propaganda? have you listened to other opinions in good faith without plugging your ears calling them Zionists (as if it's a bad thing to want self-determination and not be a dhimmi anymore) and blocking them?
I don't know where you get the audacity to say that I am ignorant and should do the "decent thing" and shut up, do you have any Jewish loved ones? do you worry about them on a daily basis because of antisemitism and how antisemitic hate crimes have increased to an insane level? I can't go a day without seeing new incidents reported, which you have ignored of course, because the only good Jew to you is a Jewish person who just affirms your beliefs so you can delude yourself into thinking you're a good person, but after that you don't really care, do you think antisemites ask Jewish people if they're Zionists before they harass and assault them? get off your fucking high horse, I don't owe you shit and you have no right to judge me, if anyone should shut up it's you, the rhetoric and the blood libels you share is the same fucking rhetoric inciting the increase in hate crimes, sincerely fuck off :)
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I was introduced to Berserk by a guy/(boy) I was involved with last year. He - attempting to grow his manga collection last summer - regretfully, turned out to be complete scum. How telling that he ended up becoming bored with the story after the Golden Age. After reading Berserk myself…what a red flag lol. ANYWAY - at least for me, a straight woman - Guts is the quintessential, most perfect and exemplary man written for the “female gaze”. His general disposition, unwavering love for Casca, fiercely masculine nature (both protective and healthy) and tenacity are exquisitely woven together. This behavior extends beyond Cacsa too - in due respect to Farese, Schierke, Flora, Danaan…even just in modeling proper masculinity to Isidro.
I officially committed to Berserk in June. (Context: The beginning of 2022 was the first time I began seriously exploring anime in general, and since have started reading manga.) But I ,as a woman who has always loved any escapist story with depth, have never come across a character like Guts - aside from one other male character. Prior to discovery of Berserk, Jamie Fraser from Outlander was the exemplar of perfection in this category. However, upon diving into this manga - albeit a series whose readership is mostly comprised of by men - Guts is superior above all men I have come across in literature.
Additionally, I will add that the men in this fandom (with exception to the bad apple I mentioned) who vocally idolize Guts, as well as ALSO consider Berserk a love story - give me hope that good men do exist. Thank you, Kentaro Miura.
I posted this on Reddit and got backlash, I did not write this to say he is the most perfect character….I am saying he is perfectly written FOR THE FEMALE GAZE. Please look up the ‘female gaze’ because there have been a few useless comments by people who missed the point of what I said. Even more confusing are the comments by some people who completely missed the point of the entire story Miura wrote too???????
Feminists love to bring up how he choked Casca. Respectfully, here are my thoughts.
First, he literally choked her during Golden Age. Casca’s resolution and grace towards that assault is universally praised and yet people talk about her acceptance of him/his trauma as if it would be an isolated incident???????
Second, the beast of darkness emerging in that moment in the later arc is to serve for Guts to realize, and be horrified/fearful of the evil within him. Casca is the most precious thing to him - so for him to assault her in that moment is (in my view) a device to establish how serious the darkness in him is.
There are two reasons I hate when this is brought up to me. As a woman, if I raise concern about it regardless of context and ignore the numerous merits Guts has - it’d be written off that I don’t understand his depth of character. On the opposite side - if I don’t bring it up, or even better, others think they need to remind me….then I’m something of an SA apologist if I lack concern. It that suggests that women can’t and/or choose not to recognize complex male characters. Something of a catch 22
Genuinely, I wasn't sure whether to answer this. I don't really understand what it is about me or any G/G type person that inspires Gutsca fans/Casca fans to write us these long lectures about opinions you must know we're not going to agree with, and I'm not sure I want to encourage that. And also because any argument that Guts sexually assaulting Casca just proves how important she is to him makes me want to die, and I do find the refernece to "feminists" to be a little strange.
That said, I guess I do want to address this attempt to counter the idea that Guts trying to kill and rape Casca is perhaps bad for their relationship.
First of all, there is a difference between the strangling in the meadow scene during the Golden Age and the one where he's trying to kill her after having a chat with the Beast over the campfire. Specifically, the Golden Age incident was a ptsd/trauma flashback that involved him lashing out at a hallucination that brought out his rape trauma, whereas the second incident is him literally trying to kill her because he's frustrated that she holds him back from chasing Griffith.
This is literally what is happening. It's enabled by the possession, yes, but Guts himself acknowledges that the feelings/impulses come from within himself. They are motivated by his exhaustion, his frustration, the fact that while he cares about her, he also resents her because he'd rather go chase Griffith around like he had been doing before Conviction.
This is not a PTSD flashback that she gets caught in, it's him venting his anger at her. That doesn't mean he doesn't care about her or that he actually wants her dead, but it is an impulse that exists inside him, and he's struggling to contain it under the circumstances.
Second, the sexual assault is again literally and explicitly him reenacting the Eclipse rape in an attempt to get closer to/more enmeshed with Griffith like the words are right there on the page, that's what he's doing.
Which brings me to the two-pointed root of this disagreement:
Casca isn't the most precious thing to him, Griffith is. I'm sorry, this comes up a lot. The Beast of Darkness tells him that he's carrying her around just so he won't heal and be forced to move on from Griffith. It also lumps her in with the rest of his current companions as fragile flames that he uses to sustain himself until he can chase Griffith, "the true light that burns (him)." The Beast is, let's remember, just Guts' subconscious/dark side. It's not some outside entity trying to lead him astray, it's the dark feelings he tries not to acknowledge.
It also comes up in interviews, e.g. Miura stating directly that Griffith is the one that gives Guts his motivation to live.
When she runs off alone, Guts' first instinct isn't even to go look for her - he only decides to do that after sitting in the dark moping about the Hawks, and he directly refers to her as abandoning the Band of the Hawk itself. In fact, every time he commits to staying with her and protecting her, it's directly in the wake of him being reminded/reminding himself that when he abandoned Griffith and the Hawks it resulted in him losing everything he cared about without even realizing it. And even then, the entire time he kept promising himself that he wouldn't abandon her, he also kept vacillating - should he find her a safe place and leave her there and go back to what he was doing, or should he try to make himself stay?
When Griffith takes off with her, he literally doesn't think about her even once. And to be clear, I do think if Miura hadn't passed away he would have shown more concern about her. But that doesn't change the fact that when Miura relayed what was most important about this situation to Mori (who said he wouldn't make up or flesh out anything but would just put down what Miura told him), apparently what he said was something to the effect of "Griffith kidnaps Casca, Guts has a meltdown about being unable to hit Griffith." All the people saying he's melting down because he couldn't save Casca are living on Cope, I'm sorry there's no other way to put it. He's melting down because after all his years of growing stronger and obsessing over getting to Griffith when he finally got there he was completely powerless to do what he intended to do, which was fight Griffith on something like equal footing. While yes, this ended up resulting in his being unable to save Casca, it's just extremely evident from reading the book that what he's most bothered by is his inability to land a single hit on the man who he has, in a lot of ways, lived solely to try and catch up to ever since Promrose. Thus the callback to the first duel, when Griffith overwhelmed him, and he became "Griffith's."
Which brings me to
Casca's importance to Guts is very complicated, and I'm not here to say he doesn't care about her or love her as a person or that he didn't have legitimate romantic feelings for her, or that he isn't motivated in large part by his self-imposed duty to protect her. But I *am* here to say a lot of what motivates him is that Casca is his path to redemption.
Casca may be the woman he had intended to be with, but what she is more than anything else, is the embodiment of the Band of the Hawk - he literally refers to abandoning her in the cave as abandoning the Band of the Hawk itself, and the idea that she has come to represent the lost army is emphasized during the Eclipse itself when Judeau and Pippin declare that if she, their current leader, survives it means the Hawks are still alive in some form.
With Guts, his decision to dedicate himself to protecting her is a direct result of his bad choices in the past: he abandoned Griffith, and it resulted in Griffith being imprisoned and broken, plus the Hawks being killed... and ultimately led to the Eclipse. He abandoned Casca and Rickert and Casca ended up running around loose without any protection (that he knew of). Hell even Godot died while Guts was off doing something else, and he didn't even bother to say goodbye. Guts' tendency to chase a goal at the expense of the people he cares about and how it results in him losing them before he understands what he's doing is a repeated theme in his character, and it ultimately resolves (for the most part) on the Hill of Swords when Griffith abandons him. This puts him on the receiving end of his own callousness for the first time - he realizes he hates it, and decides he has to change his approach.
His decision to protect her, to dedicate himself to protecting her, is not a grand romantic gesture, though there is romance in it. It's his attempt to stop making the same mistake and make up for what he's done in the only way he can: by not letting it happen again.
#ask#anonymous#ariel talks about berserk#...this might be one of the people who sent me anti-griffith essays#not sure#but the spacing and writing style are very similar
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I find the women as victims so fascinating, it’s definitely not only a Got or Hotd issue, I read an essay in college(I hope to have a link) about this topic, it was something like giving the misogyny in our society men writers and general audience have problems to write or identify with female characters unless they make them suffer or being abused so then they can give them power and agency as a prize,that was the gist of the essay, and I think that’s exactly the problem with Sansa,Alicent,etc they had to make Alicent an abused bride child so them and the audience can sympathized with her when she wanted to gain some power at Rhaenyra’s wedding for example.
I also find this topic fascinating and the entire discourse over House of the Dragon really got me thinking hard on this.
Women as victims is a very fine line. Generally, as a whole, me personally, I really really dislike watching sexual violence in cinema or television. I don't like it, period. I think it is mainly torture porn and there are very few instances when I don't consider it one. That's why I had such a big problem with the Handmaid's Tale and I never watched it, for that very reason : seeing women in such horrendous circumstances being raped and beaten and victimised continuously in order to provoke feelings of horror and disgust to the audience is not my thing. It is not nuanced at all, and I hate that. I don't see anything empowering in that. I don't feel more feminist, I just feel broken. But ok that's the topic of the Handmaid's Tale, it's not for everyone.
Now let's go to more controversial adaptations. Alicent and Sansa are two women who weren't raped in the books. In the show they were. I don't understand why people like that, and what is so exceptionally feminist in drowning in despair at the thought of it. All these tumblrinas that are obsessed with Alicent wouldn't be so obsessed if she wasn't a ChiLD BriDe (she wasn't) and maritally raped by a reaaaally old Viserys with a rotting body. But being a victim of sexual abuse is not a personality trait. That's my problem here. This is not real life. This is fiction. In fiction, a character needs to have a purpose and an impact in the storyline and they should be judged for that impact. If a character is reduced to being a victim, they have no impact anymore. I don't care about them, respectfully. The writers really reduced Alicent to being a child bride and a rape victim, and now any chance of assessing her character and her choices is gone. She's a victim, plain and simple. How can you talk about a victim? How can you judge a victim? How can you think critically about a victim? You can't. The only thing you can do is cry at the thought of her being victimised and scream at everyone who tries to attack her, which is essentially what her stans do. This is very, very, VERY bad media. This is not nuance, this is the opposite. Since the very moment you present one woman as a victim and nothing more, she's not a person anymore. She has lost the quality of a person (in the philosophical sense), she's just an abused woman ( I repeat that this is not real life, we're talking about fictional characters here).
It's the very opposite of a female-centric narrative. It actually annihilates women by reducing them to their victimised womanhood. Dany was sexually assaulted too, but that's not the focus of her story. Nobody likes Dany because she was sexually assaulted. Being a woman or a rape victim is not a personality trait. Women are people, not symbols of martyrdom.
I do believe the choice of making Alicent and Sansa rape victims in the show is a misogynistic choice for the fact that it debases the characters, and ends all possible debate on a character's actual personality and choices, which is the very reason why I'm watching this medium, to see characters act and make choices. (Again I don't believe real life rape victims are debased, or have no value, people, I am talking about fiction here). Especially in Alicent's case the consequences are very damaging : the big antagonist of the show being reduced to a rape victim, the protagonist of the show who wasn't a rape victim suddenly doesn't feel very justified in what she wants. She's spoiled, she's entitled, she's a whore. Why?
'Cause this one wasn't raped.
Imagine the implications of that thesis. Do I need to spell them out? Don't we see them everyday in the tags? Alicent didn't choose this, she was raped, she was forced. Rhaenyra chose to have sex that wasn't allowed. She deserves to die. She is judged for simply having a personality. She is judged for being a real character instead of a moving hologram for Tumblrinas wallowing in self pity. How can you win this argument? There is no argument to be made here. One was raped, the other wasn't, so the one who was raped is in the right. The other can burn in hell because she wasn't raped so she's a self serving whore.
That's a really really nice female-centric and feminist narrative. Congratulations to the whole team.
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Barbie: An essay. Accepting Hyperfeminity
A Film Beyond Feminism
✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*✧
Yesterday I had the biggest privilege to watch Barbie and it really got me thinking that I do indeed have a lot of things to say about it. This purely how I feel and all of my emotions that I am pouring into the screen, some may agree some may not and that is okay.
Phase one : Feminism, Love & War
The theme of the film is indeed feminism but what a lot of people are not talking enough about or overlooking is the fact what a huge impact being girly had been over the years, since the 90's to 2000's the whole plot of girly being associated with being a bimbo really made a lot of women hate or look down upon being a girly girl. To this day even after the release of the film I do feel sorry to say but there are still a lot of people especially women who feel uncomfortable to be girly, they are afraid of being judged for being not smart enough or not being able to be taken seriously.
This whole hate has extended even towards disney princessess. So many parenting books, videos and even women themselves hating on disney princess just because a man saved them when as a matter of fact disney characters go way beyond man saviour. Cinderella just wanted to go to ball and enjoy, despite being in an abusive household she still loved and appreciated people around her she didn't let bad things influence her, if someone says this is toxic positivity then I have to disagree because she genuinely didn't seem delusional. She was smart, witty, cracked jokes, used sarcasm and found peace in talking to animals. This to me at least is mentally strong not toxic positivity. Ariel just wanted to see the human world but she just happened to fall in love along the way, Belle loved the beast because she taught him how to be free from his own demons, she saw, she taught, she gave him the warmth and love he was lacking.
Other thing is people always look down upon love, my question is why shouldn't there be love? One can be independent and yet still be in love. One can dream and still be in love. People these days are so heartbroken and bitter they have shut themselves off of the whole love scene but might I say that love is more than just romantic feelings, love can be between parents and a kid, love can be between you and your dreams/passion/goals, love can be between you and your pet, love can be between you and the stuffed animal toy you have had since you were a baby, love can even be with knowing when you come home everything is same as it was and it can even be when it comes to changes.
I do believe and hope that after the impact of this film people especially women aren't afraid to be girly because a woman who is girly, love shopping, getting nails done, lives for colour pink, does makeup is just as much of a feminist as a woman who opposes the girly girl spectrum.
Phase two: I Kennot even
Ken was one of the most well written second lead character, I cannot stress on this enough. How I see the film is that in the beginning Barbie land was actually never really equal per say because the playout of it was so co dependent, yes, I understand that was the intention but I would love to dive deeper. Barbie land is the opposite of real world so just like in the real world the power disbalance was so real. I was really reminded of those days when all men did was work and women weren't allowed to do anything so they just longed for their husbands ro return from work. They dresses up for them, made plans for them and practically lived for them. I loved this scene so much because it really showed that Greta knows about feminism because indeed feminism means women and men are equal and either disbalance can really cause a huge harm and we saw that when kens were constantly fighting for all barbie's approvals and lived life through their partners.
When ken went to real world, he was exposed to patriarchy and for once when he saw men being valued he ran with it, the whole reason he even did patriarchy to Barbie land was just to get Barbie's attention when he said "it doesn't feel nice does it" and "when I came to know patriarchy wasn't about horses I instantly lost all interest" shows that he did all of that just so Barbie notices him.
In a way, well like my opinion I see both Barbie and Ken as victims.
Barbie has been shammed by extremist over the years because people think Barbie has unreleastic body but no one see the fact that barbies were created to give girls hope, Barbie has all the careers and can be huge inspiration to little girls everywhere that a girl can be beauty and brains. Barbie was never about making little girls feel bad they were meant to see as "bad" all because of extremists.
Ken was indeed just created to be Barbie's boyfriend and indeed lives up to the name "just Ken" but this film really made us feel his importance too! Towards the end when kens finally have a job assigned by president they have somewhere to start and have their own identity. They will be more than just kens and partners.
Phase three: Conclusion
Both of them had their own journey of self discovery, both of them also had break downs, gave up and kens made bad decisions but they didn't know any better but along the way they really grew up and mentally became mature.
Greta really knows what she did and really captured the prefect ambiance of what needs to be showed. She really gave both characters such depth and love, she really is very talented and I love her for making a film that goes beyond feminism, it is much more than women empowerment. This film not only showed us strong woman power but also showed that patriarchy is taught never learned, people don't know any better, power of influence and accepting women for wanting traditional life as well as accepting who opposes.
I will forever be in favour for this brilliant film. Much love to Greta, cast and behind the scenes cast and of course the colour pink.
#barbie#barbie movie#margot robbie#ryan gosling#ken#greta gerwig#cinephile#sanrio#kpop#jpop#film recommendations#film#movies#cinema#feminist#feminism#disney#Cinderella#ariel#belle
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