despair (2020)

kaveh akbar, 'calling a wolf a wolf' // doc luben, 'love letters or suicide notes' // @/nutnoce, tumblr // 'my body's made of crushed little stars', mitski // @/ojibwa, tumblr // 'spring', mary oliver

there's a lot to be said about the tragedy of the loss of low-budget campy fantasy shows in western media bc unless they're like high-budget, overly-produced and stripped of any filler they get cancelled after one season of 8 episodes but truly one of the biggest defense in favor of them and why we need them is the malec wedding kiss in shadowhunters

I JUST CHECKED THIS IS REAL IM SCREAMING

When you’ve spent 92 years on this earth with the name “Dick Van Dyke” and you’re only just now hearing the dumbest possible joke about it.

rip dean winchester you would've loved to be allowed to be bisexual on tv like those firefighters

[COVERED IN BLOOD] Perhaps the world is slightly brighter having me in it.

Burning your father

Burning your mother

Burning your friend

And burning the love of your life

"Biden is funding a literal genocide!"

Yeah - and so will Trump. Like, if you don't vote for Biden, Trump will win, and he will continue to send aid to Israel - in fact, he will likely send MORE aid to Israel. That's the reality of the world we live in.

And, to be honest, any US president will support Israel. Because the USA is Israel's ally. That's how foreign policy works.

So who do you prefer?

Biden, who has helped lgbtq rights, reproductive rights, infrastructure, the environment, lowered medication costs, supported unions, and done MANY good, progressive things,

Or Trump, who we already know is awful. Who we already know will destroy any human rights Biden managed to gain. Who will not help the environment. Who will not help trans people, or immigrants, or women.

Because those are your two choices. And if you think they're the same, you are dangerous to all marginalized people.

There has never been a point in any of our lifetimes where the US wasn't contributing to some atrocity or war crime or SOMETHING somewhere in the world. There just hasn't been.

The president isn't a king, and can't unilaterally impose his will on the country. There is not - and will never be - a candidate who can just wave their hand and only make the Good and Morally Pure Things you want to happen happen. That is not the system we have.

But things can get better, and things can get so much worse.

There is no scenario where refusing to vote and letting Trump win causes FEWER marginalized people to die.

fleabag-natural 10/?

are we at the point where spn is a parody of itself bc it feels like at this point spn is a parody of itself

Once upon a time…

I really wish the overused sentence “You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” was less relevant but here we are

Some kid named Dylan put his name in by mistake and we all worked together to make this ominous message

13.03 Patience

today’s date is the 3rd? what’s next, the 4th? the 5th? the minor fall, the major lift? 

#a couple then

this awesome puppy cut the flan

It’s time to bring an end to the Rape Anthem Masquerading As Christmas Carol

Hi there! Former English nerd/teacher here. Also a big fan of jazz of the 30s and 40s. 

So. Here’s the thing. Given a cursory glance and applying today’s worldview to the song, yes, you’re right, it absolutely *sounds* like a rape anthem. 

BUT! Let’s look closer! 

“Hey what’s in this drink” was a stock joke at the time, and the punchline was invariably that there’s actually pretty much nothing in the drink, not even a significant amount of alcohol.

See, this woman is staying late, unchaperoned, at a dude’s house. In the 1940’s, that’s the kind of thing Good Girls aren’t supposed to do — and she wants people to think she’s a good girl. The woman in the song says outright, multiple times, that what other people will think of her staying is what she’s really concerned about: “the neighbors might think,” “my maiden aunt’s mind is vicious,” “there’s bound to be talk tomorrow.” But she’s having a really good time, and she wants to stay, and so she is excusing her uncharacteristically bold behavior (either to the guy or to herself) by blaming it on the drink — unaware that the drink is actually really weak, maybe not even alcoholic at all. That’s the joke. That is the standard joke that’s going on when a woman in media from the early-to-mid 20th century says “hey, what’s in this drink?” It is not a joke about how she’s drunk and about to be raped. It’s a joke about how she’s perfectly sober and about to have awesome consensual sex and use the drink for plausible deniability because she’s living in a society where women aren’t supposed to have sexual agency.

Basically, the song only makes sense in the context of a society in which women are expected to reject men’s advances whether they actually want to or not, and therefore it’s normal and expected for a lady’s gentleman companion to pressure her despite her protests, because he knows she would have to say that whether or not she meant it, and if she really wants to stay she won’t be able to justify doing so unless he offers her an excuse other than “I’m staying because I want to.” (That’s the main theme of the man’s lines in the song, suggesting excuses she can use when people ask later why she spent the night at his house: it was so cold out, there were no cabs available, he simply insisted because he was concerned about my safety in such awful weather, it was perfectly innocent and definitely not about sex at all!) In this particular case, he’s pretty clearly right, because the woman has a voice, and she’s using it to give all the culturally-understood signals that she actually does want to stay but can’t say so. She states explicitly that she’s resisting because she’s supposed to, not because she wants to: “I ought to say no no no…” She states explicitly that she’s just putting up a token resistance so she’ll be able to claim later that she did what’s expected of a decent woman in this situation: “at least I’m gonna say that I tried.” And at the end of the song they’re singing together, in harmony, because they’re both on the same page and they have been all along.

So it’s not actually a song about rape - in fact it’s a song about a woman finding a way to exercise sexual agency in a patriarchal society designed to stop her from doing so. But it’s also, at the same time, one of the best illustrations of rape culture that pop culture has ever produced. It’s a song about a society where women aren’t allowed to say yes…which happens to mean it’s also a society where women don’t have a clear and unambiguous way to say no.

remember loves: context is everything. and personal opinion matters. If you still find this song to be a problem, that’s fine. But please don’t make it into something it’s not because it’s been stripped of cultural context.

This is actually really interesting. I’ve never known a lot of the background to this song.

Every year I have to explain this song to a younger person who can’t believe a “date rape” song is so popular. Thank you for this. Just gonna print it out and start handing it to people.

Context is fucking key.