Scarcely Can Speak For My Thinking @dia-tribe - Tumblr Blog

husband and I went camping with all our own gear for the 1st time. Self sufficient and got to decide what we wanted to do and when. Cooked a pizza in my own pan on my own stove. Healed.

#The view from the vault toilet 🚽

mteverestaaaaahh

if the airlock (or just any of this) looks inaccurate, excuse me, I’m an idiot

warning: blood, and Grace frying the ever-loving heck out of his arm

#Man ty I was so sad that they left this out of the movie #phm

annabelle--cane

yknow I'm feeling a bit brave so I will venture to say what this blighted essay's pitch actually is: reading project hail mary (novel and film) as a ravishment fantasy. in both main threads of the narrative grace is brought wildly out of his element and pulled into the orbit of a mysterious foreign stranger who is significantly stronger / richer / more powerful than him, forced to accept unsolicited lavish gifts and personal praise despite protests and discomfort, and made to live in isolated locations in extremely close proximity to these people with no say in the matter, all of which are common motifs in ravishment fantasies. on her own, stratt also brings in other common motifs of restraints, drugging, being above the law, multiple kidnappings (I'm doing crazy things with the classical definition of "rape" as in "abduction" and its shared etymology with "rapture" as in "being taken to the heavens"), and the very specific yet still common motif of "otherwise trustworthy partner goes too far and doesn't take 'no' for an answer." rocky on his own brings in the overprotective flavor common to a lot of dark romance novel heroes, i.e. "I make sure you sleep and I like to watch you while you do it, I make sure you eat enough even if you've got baggage about it, I make inhuman displays of strength when you're injured, and as long as I'm around I'll make sure nothing bad ever happens to you ever again."

the issue I was running into with researching this a few weeks ago is that almost all of the scholarly writing on the content of people's forced-sex fantasies focuses solely on women's fantasies and starts with the research question of "why would women enjoy imagining such a horrible misogynistic thing?" despite surveys often showing that men have force-fantasies (where they are the one being forced) at very comparable rates to women. my hypothesis for a bit was "either men's fantasies are exactly the same as women's or they're completely different in [x] way," which was disproven interestingly when I did finally find something about men's force-fantasies: in content they are almost exactly the same as women's fantasies but the emotional motivations are often different in [y] way, which I hadn't expected. and [y] also super applies to my buddy ryland, perhaps even more than my original [x] hypothesis.

my hopes for writing this are twofold: a) to address the question I sometimes see phm audience members come away with of "if grace likes his life by the end and doesn't seem that mad about all of that, is the message supposed to be 'violation of bodily autonomy is good, actually?'", and b) to lightly resist one of the prevailing notions in the study of forced-sex fantasies, that ravishment fantasies are solely abstracted and fantastical and pleasurable and are completely 100% separate from fearful paranoid imaginings of / flashbacks to realistic sexual violence.

annabelle--cane

oh also: the most common interpretation of why people have ravishment fantasies is that it allows the fantasist to disavow a desire they feel ashamed of because, in the fiction of the forcing, they don't *want* it at all, they're being made to do whatever it is and can't be considered at fault. as I allude to in my final paragraph of the original post, I think it's a tad more nuanced, but there's definitely a lot of truth to that. grace can tell stratt that he's not smart or important or capable or brave or selfless enough to do what she wants, but she'll ignore it, make him do it anyway, and kit him out with skilled staff members and expensive lab equipment and coffee just the way he likes it. it's a fantasy of being respected and heroic and good whether he likes it or not.

with rocky, the fantasy is of being forced to be loved and protected. rocky decides to initiate contact, he decides that he's moving into the hail mary, he decides that he's always going to watch grace sleep even if grace says he doesn't need it, he decides to gift grace the fuel to get home even when grace pretends he doesn't want it, and he decides he's not going to let grace die to save him even when grace says he's made his choice. the two scenarios allow grace to experience the rewards of being selfless without needing to be so gauche as to ever say he thinks he's that good of a person AND to experience the rewards of being selfish without saying he thinks he deserves to be cared for.

#Good God finally. Finally.#Finally some delicious fucking literary analysis #Op your changing the woild #You have shed so much light on why I found the story so satisfying and I confess #May have tempted me into a reread earlier than the deluxe edition arrival #Because paying attention to this could be crazy

no man you don't understand, i HAVE to get my opinions verbatim from tumblr text posts! otherwise how will I know that strangers on the internet would agree with me?

sacred-portal

#ME

me: Scribe, write 100,000 words on the depth of this woman's character and struggles and internal conflicts and her capacity for sacrifice and agony for the good of a planet that stands at the ready to punish her for her desperate acts of good

scribe: of course, sire. Are there any other ways I may serve you?

me: put the white man in an unusual queer relationship

#Tonight we are drinking coconut rum in 3 different kinds of mountain dew

i added metamucil to my nightly routine & i am now positive that even consciousness is the experience of a collective

#I'M SORRY MY GUT BACTERIA I WILL NEVER ABANDON YOU AGAIN #WE ARE IN THIS TOGETHER

pharmacy can't get my adderall in

[pounding on the bars of my cage] TRUST NARRATORS TO BE UNRELIABLE WHEN THEY SHOW YOU THEY'RE UNRELIABLE. QUESTION WHAT THE AUTHOR PRESENTS AS TRUTH AND EXAMINE WHY THEY'RE PRESENTING IT TO YOU. PAY ATTENTIONS TO WHAT TROPES ARE EMBRACED AND WHICH ARE SUBVERTED. COMPAIR FICTION TO REAL LIFE. JUST BECAUSE ITS A SMUTTY ROMANCE NOVEL DOESN'T MEAN YOU CAN'T LOOK DEEPER INTO THE TEXT AND LEARN SOMETHING ABOUT YOURSELF+THE WORLD. CHALLENGE YOURSELF.