Your Worldview Is About To Be Violently Expanded @donttouchmycarrots - Tumblr Blog

lesbianhallieparker

THIS IS THE CUTEST SHIT IVE EVER SEENNNN

wabbledab

matchingvnecks

teachingwithcoffee

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

bigbutterandeggman-deactivated2

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.

aphnxrising

xtrapockets-deactivated20171024

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.

vorked

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

sandmandaddy69

bisexualdinahlance

huffylemon

damn ok lake superior

songsofwaterandnight

Ok yeah that lake is superior

apollos-boyfriend

the fact that we only have “herculean task” and “sisyphean task” feels so limiting. so here’s a few more tasks for your repertoire

icarian task: when you have a task you know you’re going to fail at anyways, so why not have some fun with it before it all comes crashing down

cassandrean task: when you have to deal with people you KNOW won’t listen to you, despite having accurate information, and having to watch them fumble about when you told them the solution from the start (most often witnessed in customer service)

feel free to chime in i ran out of ideas much faster than i anticipated

sherbertilluminated

Promethean task: opposite of a Cassandraean task. You have the right information, and SOMEONE has to share it. But it's all in the delivery and if you're the person to identify the problem you WILL be hated forever.

thearrogantemu

Oedipal Task: (1) Attempting to avoid an unspeakably awful outcome and in doing so creating the circumstances that will bring it about. (2) Trying to solve an problem and discovering that you are in fact the problem you are trying to solve.

theoppositeofprofound

Odyssean task: you’ll complete it but it’ll take 20 times longer than it should and involve multiple side quests and mini-adventures

lierdumoa

Pandorean task: some people fucked around and now it's your job to make sure they find out

fyeahgothicromance

professionalchaoticdumbass

IT

octal-alchemist

FUCKEN

y4wnd3r3

WIMDY

thehappyfangirl

Babe, wake up. New fucken wimdy just dropped

thesefallenembers

the problem with reading and writing leading to a strong vocabulary is that you tend to know the vibe of words instead of their meanings.

if I used this word in a sentence, would it make sense? absolutely. if you asked me what it meant, could I tell you? absolutely not.

disgustinggf

callmebliss

Y’ever read something and have understanding that has eluded you interminably suddenly stop, curl up, and snuggle neatly into a fold in your brain because a new way way opened to it?

macleod

I've seen this passed around a few times, and I have one thing to say:

It's online. The book was carefully and wonderfully recreated online by hand. You can find it here. The entire book is this easy.

calculusmadeeasy.org

breakingjustxn

well i mean, not wrong // credits: @screamingemonight on Instagram

susiephone

if i wrote twilight there’d be a kid in edward’s class who Zones The Fuck Out and daydreams about a story they want to write, and edward would just tune in to watch like a tv show when he’s bored in class and he gets genuinely invested and eventually he’s like “i know EXACTLY how they can fix this plot hole that’s bothering them but how can i tell them that when they don’t KNOW i’m their first beta reader”

ruffboi-mags

genuinely more compelling than literally everything else that happened in Twilight.

alexaloraetheris

But seriously like, Bella was supposed to be a new kid and an introvert, she could have been the Spacing Out kid and the mind-reading guy falls for her because of her Deranged Plot Twists and Compelling Tortured Characters like nothing he’s seen in his entire 100 years of living, but instead we got the most boring version of Vore and Scent Kink imaginable.

everythingfox

He is browsing the shops for christmas goods

gothicprep

stop playing the victim. that’s not even a real instrument

phoenixfire-thewizardgoddess

bloody-men-with-blue-eyes

willgrahamscock

I miss when every post was just a fandom mess with a supernatural reaction image

everythingfox

Petition for a longer video

cassassinated

I miss the days when, no matter how slow your internet was, if you paused any video and let it buffer long enough, you could watch it uninterrupted

mythicalwashrag

useful-info-haver

If you use Firefox, you can go to the about:config page, search for "media.mediasource.enabled" and double click on it to set it to false. After you restart Firefox, all youtube videos will load entirely even when paused! This also affects other streaming websites :)