The Hamburger Helper

Reblog blog. Side blog for haru-dipthong. Not a minor. 🏳️‍⚧️

[vfeioa]

[kuttithevangu]

Every work of art says things the creator hasn’t considered, but if you’ve really thought about what you’re trying to say then generally the additional dimensions you didn’t know it had are in alignment with your purpose, whereas if you think you’re making no cultural comment at all you are actually making a LOT of cultural comments, most of which will be unflattering to you

[kuttithevangu]

Porn is one of the most culturally rich types of media imaginable so the answer is: you cannot do this

[toroidalearthtruther]

"less is more" is a lie perpetuated by big small to sell more less

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

This phrase has already entered my vocabulary re: media criticism where like. The viewer has a concrete view of what they expect a story to be based on the tropes and cliches they're used to seeing together, and when that doesn't happen, they judge it as a failed depiction of what they assumed it was going to be instead of judging it as what it actually is.

"This show is problematic because the hero didn't kill the villain at the end": When does he steal the bread?

"These two characters who were close friends throughout the series don't kiss at the end! What the fuck?": When does he steal the bread?

"This feels like it's missing a conclusion! Like, the protagonist does bad stuff and because of a critical decision he makes as a result of his major character flaws, meets tragedy in the end! Where's the part where he learns better and brings is love back from the dead and becomes a good guy and gets a happy ending?": When does he steal the fucking bread??

[thetetra]

I heard this out as "When criticizing something, you must judge it for what it is, not what it isn't"

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

#this is why so many of us urge people to get a wider diet of stories

[dogpuppy]

[hometoursandotherstuff]

[tanadrin]

probably for the first time in American history the biden admin explicitly pursued a policy of full employment and the reaction of everyone—from the right to the left—was “this fucking sucks.” now, for some people this was because their doordash didn’t remain perpetually cheap; for others it was because this did not fix literally every single problem in the american economy overnight. but I am willing to go on record and say actually yeah I think pursuing full employment is good, more governments should do that, this policy did in fact meaningfully reverse trends in inequality, and if we’re going to relentlessly undercut policies we nominally support because they don’t fix absolutely everything immediately, we are rapidly going to make those policies unviable. i do not in fact want to make progressive and lefty economic policy unviable!

and the trouble with economic stuff is that it’s a hive of low-trust sentiment that gets reflexively applied based on affective criteria—“full employment rules actually” becomes seen as an endorsement of Biden as a person or a politician. cynicism and bitterness become an in-group marker for online lefty politics. I get why affect and boundary maintenance are important in politics, but I care about policy, about hard nosed material reality, and if we are going to let affect and cynicism overrule policy we will never in fact make the world any different.

[rudin-understander]

It is unfortunate that most of the left perspective Biden administration postmortems don't discuss his serious economic gains. I still hold that Bidenomics would have been a stronger platform for Democrats if they had anyone in the administration who was able and willing to reach American people wrt the economy (excluding maybe Lina Khan).

[tanadrin]

I mean absolutely fault them for having a lousy communications strategy but we must also place some of the blame on the sort of people who insist the Biden economy was terrible and when people responded by posting graphs of data that showed it wasn’t responded with death threats. like. There is a real strain of antintellectualism and social media toxicity in the discourse here you cannot lay at the feet of the White House’s communications strategy.

[reach-one-moment]

I may be remembering the timeline wrong, but ‘23 and ‘24 were worse than ‘21 and ‘22 economically, and I was mad at economists for not understanding that.

the fed trying fight inflation popped the pandemic WFH boom economy but didn’t slow the degree to which it felt like prices were climbing, even on non-luxury categories like basic groceries, rent, etc.

that said, the Biden years weren’t too bad in the big scheme of things, and it was truly bizarre to me how bad they were at getting the word out. 24 hour cable news cycle of Democratic Party / centrist-liberal leaning people and my coworkers were learning about this or that Biden policy from fringe weirdos on twitter rather via me sharing stuff I’d read, rather than from TV

what was Rachel Maddow doing for that 4 years?

[tanadrin]

real median household income 2019: 83,260 2020: 81,580 2021: 81,270 2022: 79,500 2023: 82,690 2024: 83,730 cpi 2019: 1.81 2020: 1.23 2021: 4.70 2022: 8.00 2023: 4.12 prime age employment to population ratio: 2019: rises slowly from 79.8 to 80.4 2020: peaks at 80.6 in Jan, bottoms out at 69.6 in April 2021: rises steadily to 79.2 2022: around 80 most of the year, ends at 80.2 in dec 2023: around 81 most of the year, ends at 80.5 in dec 2024: around 80.5 most of the year (where it has roughly stayed since) real personal consumption: 2019: 13,948 2020: 13,597 2021: 14,792 2022: 15,237 2023: 15,628 2024: 16,089 (for all of these i googled "FRED" + the statistic in question, if you want to check my numbers)

the beef i have with "‘23 and ‘24 were worse than ‘21 and ‘22 economically, and I was mad at economists for not understanding that" is that the core of the vibecession discourse is that almost every single economic measure showed that 23 and 24 were in fact way better than 21 and 22! the numbers bear this out! most measures you would ordinarily look at to check how most people were doing in the economy was way better in 23 and 24 than it was in 21 and 22.

and--not to relitigate the whole thing!--but these measures are in fact useful. and AIUIhistorically they are roughly correlated with economic sentiment. in 23 and 24, they became uncoupled entirely. this is weird! this requires an explanation! some explanations are "well, by some metrics the economy was not better in 23 and 24; household savings rates, housing affordability, and the poverty rate (especially post-expanded CTC expiry) were worse. price levels were certainly worse." but this is also a claim that requires a historical anomaly. historically these indicators do not track economic sentiment at all. so even if they explain the shift in economic sentiment, we have to explain why they became relevant suddenly in 2023, when historically they have not been very relevant.

is it 1) republican economic sentiment has always been quite sensitive to who is in power, and democratic economic sentiment was unusually underperforming in those years? is it 2) a social media effect catalyzed by people who really were still struggling in those years and other people noticing and it shaping their view of the economy, making previously unimportant economic indicators suddenly more salient? is it perhaps 3) mostly a social media effect moderated by cynicism enhanced by the fact that nobody really personally liked biden, and it was convenient to blame him for whatever was annoying you at the time?

maybe! but for all those explanations i would say the label "vibecession" is roughly appropriate, and the claim that "the economy really was worse in 23 and 24" is not, when applied generally, actually true. it was certainly worse for people dependent on the expanded CTC! is that enough to explain the general decline in sentiment, or the fact that people tended to report in surveys that they personally were doing fine (even their state was doing fine) but that the american economy in general was doing poorly, according to their perception? i am open to this explanation, but i will confess i am very skeptical, and i don't think people who advocate for this explanation have the data to really back that claim up!

[jadagul]

So there's a theory I've seen bouncing around that I feel like I really should go poke at data and think about

But e.g. this post by Mike Konczal argues that the prices of essentials and housing have gone up faster than inflation, and those are a bigger share of expenditures (and stress!) for people toward the bottom of the distribution; so even if "inflation"-adjusted wages have gone up, they might be under more pressure because their basket of goods has had its price go up faster than inflation.

And every time I've heard this suggestion, my first reaction has been skepticism, because I'm pretty sure I remember reading analyses that if you break out baskets of goods for different income levels, inflation has been lower than average for the bottom quartile or so, meaning that they've been doing better than "real wages" make it look.

(This is possible if luxury goods are rising faster than inflation; the "average basket" goes up by 3%, but the cheap stuff only goes up by 2% while the expensive stuff goes up by 4%.)

But of course I remember reading this a while ago, like before the pandemic. And if that's true, but Konczal's post is true, that would explain a lot, right? The explanation would go something like

In the 2010s, wages in the bottom quartile weren't rising faster than inflation. But they were rising faster than the expenses people in the bottom quartile actually had, so their experienced living standards were improving. After covid, wages in the bottom quartile have risen faster than average inflation, but the prices of things people in the bottom quartile [need to] buy have risen even faster, so their experience living standards have fallen.

I don't know if this is true, and it would require doing some detailed data analysis that I'm realistically not going to do. Idea free to an econ grad student looking for a paper idea.

[tanadrin]

I mean isn’t one reason expenditure on housing has gone up because Americans in general want bigger, nicer single family homes? Like if you look at the data there are specific metro areas that are spectacularly unaffordable (hello bay area), but also the square footage of housing has been steadily climbing—this is on the one hand not necessarily an intractable problem, especially if we build a ton more housing, and it is good if people can afford better and nicer homes, especially as a result of having less of their income eaten up by other things. But esp outside specific metros with a housing shortage it’s kind of a complicated picture wrt why housing prices are rising in the way that they are.

[ms-newvegas]

Have to post this favorite of mine

[mortalityplays]

there is no single argument against including trans women in sports that doesn't boil down to "women aren't supposed to be good at this" and it's fucking insane to me that every woman in the world isn't up in arms about the way this issue has laid institutional misogyny bare to the bone

[mortalityplays]

then again it has also revealed how many misogynistic cis women believe in their own exceptionalism to the point they feel they benefit from "women aren't supposed to be good at this" and will use every tool in the white imperial torture kit to ensure the acceptable categories of 'woman' and 'good' remain shallow and narrow enough for them to force themselves into a position of supremacy.

[sapphling]

no carceral sentiment or raised minimum sentence or punisher-logo-adjacent slogan or mob enacted justice could lower abuse rates 1% as well as just providing all people of all ages the financial and legal ability to separate themself from any living situation, regardless of familial or marital status, with ease and with the security of knowing they'll still be housed and fed

[emperorundying]

glory girl cosplay test :)

[ot3]

i wish people were more capable of articulating critiques about exploitative conveniences like doordash without implying that the exploitation and the convenience are both equally objectionable.

[immigrant]

i kinda think it is because u cant rlly have one without the other

[ot3]

well see now i don't think that's true. its entirely possible to adequately compensate people to do stuff like "pick up and deliver food or other objects to someone's house," or any other kind of situation where you're paying someone else to do a task for you. it's the desire for third party entities to extract as much money as possible out of these interactions that causes the exploitation. like, having a neightborhood mailmain isn't exploitative just because there's a world where people could pick up their own mail at the post office because the mailman gets stuff like health insurance and paid leave and overtime.

[mtxyqmpsfqklt]

The image about straight woman yaoi (exaggerated hands, slender frames, soft features) vs gay man yaoi (exaggerated chests, stomachs, upper arms, detailed musculature, mature facial features) is really interesting as a sort of "received sensory homunculous". You could also apply it to hentai made by and for straight guys where the girls all have immense breasts. The features that the target audience notices get expanded as if under a microscope, everything else disappears into the background. It's not just desire but also detail, if your audience wants hands you have to put a lot of detail into hands, and that means drawing hands bigger much of the time. If your audience is going to distinguish between hunks and bears you need to draw a lot of shirtless upper body shots and get complex about body composition because someone is going to notice. It's like a visualization of the sexualizing gaze.

[themainspoon]

I agree, but would like to expand by talking about the trope of "hentai anatomy" and "bad anatomy" more generally. Both through how it expresses sensation, and how it reflects ideas about gender and sexuality.

Honestly I've been of the opinion that "hentai anatomy" isn't so much "inaccurate" as it is an attempt to communicate sensation through a visual medium for a while now. Artists do not draw anatomy and bodily functions inaccurately because they don't understand anatomy or bodily functions, but intentionally for the sake of communicating sensations to their audiance. "Anime Breast Physics" and other examples are not like that because artists haven't seen real boobs, but because they are more preoccupied with trying to convey a sense of what it would feel like to touch them to the audience.

A lot of "bad anatomy" mistakes that people love to point out are in fact not about misunderstanding anatomy insomuch as they are reflections and exaggerations of pre-existing ideas about sex.

I'm going to give an example here, stick with me, I want to lay the groundwork first: Think about the centrality of penetration as a part of sex for straight guys, think about the ideas of strength and dominance associated with the phallus (the gendered and cultural meanings given to and associated with the penis), think about the masculine status attached to the size of the penis, think about the importance of being dominant and how that ties into size and penetration.

In her book "Dude, You're a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School" Feminist Theorist C.J. Pascoe talks about how she saw teenage boys talk about their (overwhelmingly made up and/or extremely exaggerated) sexual encounters with women. To quote her: “None of these stories were about sexual desire or how attractive the girls were; rather, they were quite gross, about farts, feces, and blood. These stories were about what boys could make girls’ bodies do. That is, the sexual tall tales these boys told when they were together were not so much about indicating sexual desire as about proving their capacity to exercise control on the world around them, primarily through women’s bodies by making them bleed, pass gas, or defecate. These stories also highlighted femininity (much like the fag) as an abject identity. Girls had out-of-control bodies, whereas boys exhibited mastery not only over their own bodies but over girls’ bodies as well. These sorts of girl-getting rituals and storytelling practices constitute “compulsive heterosexuality.” While on the surface they appear to be boys-will-be-boys locker-room talk in which boys objectify girls through bragging about sexual exploits or procuring a kiss, a closer look indicates that they are also about demonstrating the ability to impose a sexualized dominance.” – Page 80

Now, considering all this, does the much beloathed "penetrating the cervix" trope start to make more sense? This is not a defence of the trope (hopefully nobody thought that was the goal here, but if you needed me to tell you that it isn't, I'm glad I did), because it is stupid as fuck, and it does suck. In many places sex education is still really poor, and focused solely on consent and safe sex (which are not bad topics to cover, and they do need to be taught) without any mention of pleasure. This means that a lot of people are still getting ideas about things from porn (which isn't good), meaning that there are people who do think that penetrating the cervix would be cool, good, and pleasurable instead of horrific and painful.

In terms of the origin of the trope though, it isn't really about the act itself, it's a heterosexual masculine power fantasy about being masculine enough and having the level of control over women's bodies that would allow one to penetrate that deeply. I think understanding this sort of "bad anatomy" not as the result of stupidity or ignorance, but through understanding the cultural and gendered forces that influence our sexual desires and practices and how people construct and "do" gender through sexual practices and depictions of them, is vastly more insightful and constructive.

All media says things about the socio-cultural context within which it was made. But often porn doesn't just say things, it yaps incessantly and refuses to shut the fuck up.

[xanaxfarts]

[luvrthirl]

um…. guys…. I don’t think you want this…. I went to the websites and…..

like okay yeah this seems sweet but…

this is the 1 harm each day website on there??? wtfisthisshit

[xanaxfarts]

yes. even better. this or i don't want it.

[tpwrtrmnky]

Analyzing the politics of a work that's meant to be apolitical is actually a really interesting exercise because it asks you to critically examine what the creator considers to be "political" in the first place. Which ideas are just How Things Are, and which ones are Political, and how is that influenced by the creator's beliefs?

[takashi0]

Usually this just ends up with you looking like a moron btw

[tpwrtrmnky]

Angrily lashing out at the suggestion that it's possible to do basic media analysis was foundational to the ragebait ecosystem of the 2010s, from which we got basically the entire culture of modern far right politics, btw.

[iteh3xael]

I genuinely believe myself and others are being so sincere and literal when we say TOUCH GRASS

[tpwrtrmnky]

I went outside and got an education, that's where I learned that you can obtain knowledge and insight through analytical methods, then noticed that some people who sit on the internet yelling at strangers get really mad about that constantly.

[pensivegladiola]

Don’t make me point to the Omar Sakar poem

[unorcadox]

(You’ve chosen to not remember this part.)

[gorgynei]

average chapter of house of leaves