REBLOG BAD APE FOR GOOD LUCK

SCHOOL OF ROCK(2003) dir. Richard Linklater

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Do you guys remember how kidnap fantasies were popular on wattpad because young girls and queer teens were both made to feel shame at the thought of their own sexualities, so the fantasy of being kidnapped totally against their will was a way for them to engage with a romantic or sexual fantasy without feeling morally in the wrong for doing so? Added bonus that the fantasy involved being whisked away from repressive environments like home or school, right?

Finding out that Bram Stoker was in a sexless marriage and that scholars believe that he very likely was closeted gay puts the entire book into perspective as to WHY it reads EXACTLY like a self insert wattpad Dracula kidnap fic:

“I TOTALLY love my wife and would never do anything that an upstanding Good Straight Working Man wouldn’t do but oh nooo, big strong man with broad back and strong enough arms to carry me back to bed like a princess trapped me and claimed me as his, completely against my will 👉👈 But he protects me against the bad evil sexual women (who I assure you, I am TOTALLY sexually attracted to, as any straight man with a choice would be) but trust me, I do NOT want ANY of this. What’s that? The Count is not capable of feeling love? Would be a shame if I had the special ability to change tha-”

This is also the fantasy behind all those old bodice-ripper romances that people today like to mock or call problematic, by the way.

“Oh, my next forty years are going to consist of nothing but washing dishes and keeping house and bearing children for the disdainful man I married right out of high school because my parents said college was for men and I had no other obvious life path open to me? What if a pirate captain thought I was worth stealing away from it all? [what if I ran away but no-one could blame me for leaving]?”

#I read an article a long time ago about a woman who was raised in an incredibly repressive conservative christian community#where all that mattered was purity and virginity etc #She talked about how for a long time rape fantasies were the only way she could derive any pleasure from sex #because she couldn’t feel safe exploring the idea of wanting sex #it wasn’t really ABOUT rape or eroticizing assault or whatever #it was about creating a scenario where she was free from the shame associated with wanting #i think this is true of a lot of icky-seeming stuff in romance and erotica #it’s an imaginary scenario where nothing you don’t really want actually happens #but you can’t be blamed or feel guilty for it #you didn’t do anything wrong#anyway that article changed my perspective a lot #i think there’s also something to be said for people who have felt ugly and undesirable their whole lives #enjoying fictional scenarios where a hot alpha werewolf or whatever is so attracted to them he ‘cant help himself’ or whatever #because it can also be really shameful to want to be desired #when you feel like youre ugly and gross ( @headspace-hotel )

#i had recently similar realization when stumbling into pit of y/n x character stories about “your dad’s handsome best friend”#it immediately introduces age gap where the man (usually) is middle aged and generally experienced#and y/n is a young adult at best but always exploring their sexuality for the first time#of course part of why this trope is popular is that teens tend to have crushes on adults#but I kept wondering why it has to be dad’s best friend until it hit me: it’s about safety#person who is your parents friend is a person who isn’t scum bc otherwise your parents would be friends with them#they’re safe and not a predator preying on young and impressionable like a groomer might#they’re your parents friend so they care about you too#which makes the fantasy at the same time spicy (age difference) and safe (dad’s bestie can’t hurt you)#idk it’s just interested how sometimes our brains try to justify things to us

@thirstyforred i hope you don’t mind me pulling up your tags because you’ve made a GREAT point which I think is also echoed in the following tropes:

While irl age gap relationships very much have the potential to be predatory, it is worth recognising why some people consider them attractive in fiction and what these fantasies help them explore.

I’m sorry to bring up HP, but let’s take Snape, for example, since I remember him being a massive hot commodity back on 2012 Deviantart. I heavily doubt that most tweens girls who had a crush on Snape would actually want to get on with their teacher - it was just a fictional crush which allowed them to explore their likes and dislikes in a safe environment (and also let this man move on from his high school crush, which is also fair because let’s be honest he NEEDS to let go of it.)

So yeah, this post does put a lot of tropes and kinks into perspective, which I think is important because one’s squick is another’s fantasy, and neither of these people are inherently more/less virtuous/problematic for liking or disliking it. Fiction is fiction. Real life is real life. What is cool in a book isn’t necessarily what you’d like to experience irl and vice versa, and it’s good to bear in mind that people’s experiences are different than yours and their takeaway from a piece of media might be different from yours.

This reminds me of that deep dive post about the Labyrinth and how it came out in a time when girls weren’t supposed to like anything to do with sex. Yet here is an attractive older gent offering to give you everything and be your slave if you say yes and run away from your crappy family

a flip side of “one person’s squick is another person’s fantasy and it doesn’t say much about their RL values” is that there are other subsets of rape fantasy whose focus is squarely on experiencing violence, unwillingness, violation, coercion, distress, etc - it’s quite common in whump and hurt/comfort fanfiction, for example. there can be elements of martyrdom involved, or of having one’s pain validated and projected into larger-than-life form, or other explicable kinds of emotional payoff, but tbh the common denominator in a lot of taboo fantasies seems to boil down to the human brain being really good at both “wow, wouldn’t it be fucked-up if–” and “wow, that sure is a high-voltage psychological hot button you’ve got there! wonder what would happen if someone eroticized it.”

this doesn’t mean the bodice-ripper phenomenon isn’t significant and worthy of attention, of course; i just get twitchy when discussion of it veers towards “well ackshually rape/kidnapping/abuse fantasies are okay because zero women really fantasize about the bad parts - all the violence in fantasies of sexual violence is just an instrumental way to defuse the shame of wanting sex. in fact maybe we should rename them all to ‘ravishment’ or ‘reluctance’ or 'forcefulness’ fantasies, and claim true rape fantasies can’t exist and are a contradiction in terms!”

which is an overreach and a misdirection because:

1. i can assure you that lots of people are there for the “not wanting it” part itself and the bad parts in general (and, incidentally, that tons of teens and tweens do in fact have horny teacher crushes, regardless of their opinions on whether that’d be a good idea to pursue IRL)

2. it’s not because they secretly want to be raped either; it’s because what the “you” who’s the POV character of a fantasy wants, what the “you” who’s in control of the narrative wants to run fantasy scenarios about, your actual desires, and your RL choices of what to do/pursue/agree to can all be distinct, often with opaque and paradoxical relationships between them.

3. the shame-avoidance motivation is a super interesting part of bodice-ripper fantasies’ appeal, and goes a long way towards making that appeal understandable to people who aren’t into it, but it is not what grants them some magical ethical-acceptability hall pass. treating it like it is throws a lot of people under the bus for having other mechanisms behind their fantasies, a disproportionate number of whom are people whose damage about rape culture just emerges in a slightly different form.

(there is a parallel temptation among “what if ✨terrible things✨ happened to my fantasy avatar” types to treat more romantic flavors of coercion fantasy as ethically dubious, for sugarcoating abuse or promoting warped understandings of consent and predation or somesuch. and while there are discussions to be had there re: society-wide failures in education on sex and consent, a lot of this reaction also seems to be rooted in squick and desire to distinguish between “virtuous thing i seek out for valid cathartic reasons” and “dastardly, inferior thing that may fall under similar labels but i want to avoid it because it makes my entire psyche break out in hives.” which… are not great conditions for having those conversations.)

anyway, yeah, it can be really hard to pin down what even one person is getting out of a story, let alone generalizing about what everyone who likes an entire subgenre is there for, let alone jumping to ironclad conclusions about its relationship to their values and beliefs. let’s keep that attitude extended to the ~problematic~ fantasies the ravishment stuff tends to get distinguished from when it’s explicated, because they do exist, and often have similarly compelling internal logic of their own.

People in the tags be like: "Wow I remember this from my childhood!" Me who had a job, car payments, and full-blown depression when this came out:

Black is Beautiful by Kehinde Oyafajo

The agonising feel when a character tag is full of shipping that you Simply Do Not Vibe With. The solution is, naturally, to keep scrolling. But the wince, the WINCE.

#ship what you want #but my god #the STRENGTH I must have #anyway go forth and bless what brings you joy #(but also you are wrong about it)

i feel this on a regular basis tbh

"I support everyone's right to ship whatever!" I say aloud, while hissing like a cat at some of the things that cross my dash.

Chocolate kitty 🍫😻

what im learning is that you cannot avoid your way into a life you enjoy

So initially I'm watching without audio, cause "oh cool, some pole dancing". But turn the fucking audio on

Do you know how hard it is to do this while standing still.

Do you know how hard it is to do this while doing something incredibly physically demanding.

Sound on.

So shook that I recognized them! That's Khadija Mbowe, a brilliant video essayist on youtube. Here's a link to their channel. They're brilliant and compassionate. Go check them out!

Do they have seven lungs oh my GOD

Wait is this true?? We’ve just been actively lied to by anatomical diagrams this whole time?

this is true of pretty much all internal anatomy, because the real situation is sort of like if you stuffed a bunch of water balloons of different shapes, connected by tubes, into a bag, itd be really hard to tell whats going on! so you make things more orderly when you represent them, and the connections and lengths and stuff are correct. like the former image is what you get if you cut it out of someone's body and arrange it neatly (and also, if their system wasnt aberrant somehow, but most people's bodies are aberrant somehow. so what they show you is more of like an average of everyone's weird aberrations)

Reblog to change someone's perception