Waiting for Better Days

[dezyderata]

[vieneinpace]

Nude Girl Reading (1921) by Sir William Orpen.

[gouged-doll]

katherine brown

[tenephre]

[vieneinpace]

William Etty's Male Nude, with Arms Up-Stretched (1828) revamped by Astra Zero

[perriaeyjeve]

[becomingvecna]

Sculptured Web by anncarringtonart

[perriaeyjeve]

[limerencs]

[p1death]

Lucien Clergue, Nu de la Foret, 1973

[communistkenobi]

One of the things that’s so ridiculous about citing someone getting bullied in high school, or being downwardly economically mobile, as a causal explanation for them becoming a school shooter or a nazi or whatever is that those things are extremely common. Most people were bullied in school at some point in their lives. Most people are downwardly mobile as young adults. Most people have dysfunctional and/or limited social circles. Like it’s just such a weak claim. It purportedly attempts to use broader social trends to explain anti-social behaviour, but the net is cast so wide as to be meaningless, so it ends up (maybe ironically) becoming a very individualistic explanation - becoming a school shooter is because this guy, specifically, was poor. Becoming a nazi is because this guy, specifically, had a dad who didn’t care about him. It essentially lets this behaviour off the hook because it positions those social/economic circumstances as unique to Nazis and school shooters. It engages in the idea that poverty, poor education, and family dysfunction (which is only something that happens in poor households) is what produces bigotry - the unwashed ignorant masses are where bad ideas come from

[estrogenesis-vaporeongelion]

i think the key is that they use these particular explanations mostly for young white men, i.e. those whom the system is designed to privilege, protect, and empower. the deep & unspoken implication, in my view, is that whereas being bullied / socially outcast or being poor are the rightful positions of other kinds of people, it was insulting to the dignity of this young white man's privileged identity to be treated the same. and it is normal for men to respond to certain insults to their dignity with rage and violence. it mirrors the way that people talk about violence committed by adult men -- someone hurt or insulted his family, or his sexuality, or his team, or any of the myriad things men are expected to protect with righteous and exceptional violence, except it's keyed to the world of the young man who merely expects to inherit all these things rather than the man who protects them from atop his barricades.

[itsapmseymour]

They got new photos of the moon,

I knew she had colors hiding in there 🥹

[snter]

[rosieandthemoon]

By The Moon Salibi

[bauliya]

so women are supposed to grin and bear the books, the comics, the movies, the plays, the tv shows, the stories, the sci-fi, the translated ancient poems, the fucking millennia of men writing about their self inserts torturing women and it being declared as High Art by other men, we’re supposed to read it in our free time, study it in classrooms, include their styles in our own writing, accept their cultural influence as natural, watch it in the cinema, write about it, talk about it, accept it, aspire it, but men can’t tolerate three seconds of female wish fulfilment of a woman snapping the wrist of a creep without feeling personally kicked in the balls.

[darkshrimpemotions]

This reminds me of something I observed in college while I was doing my honors thesis on women in modern horror films. I watched a LOT of horror during that time as part of my research, and sometimes that was done with my family around.

And my dad and brothers? Were deeply disturbed by the movie Jennifer’s Body. I was flabbergasted. It’s not scary! It’s not even that gory. But they were horrified by it. These men who grew up on 70s slashers were legitimately shook by 90 minutes of Megan Fox eating a few teenage boys, mostly off-screen.

Similarly, my all-male reading panel for my thesis? Were so disturbed by my synopsis of the film Teeth that they couldn’t even talk about it. One of them said he couldn’t look at his wife for a week after reading it.

Again, grown-ass men who study and teach media for a living. Who definitely watch and enjoy horror movies. One of whom was a huge Tarantino buff. We watched and read worse in his intro to mass media class! But one movie about a girl whose vag could bite was enough to haunt him.

Then of course you have things like the Gone Girl backlash–men yelling that Amy Dunne is evil and women clamoring to assure everyone that they know she is not someone to emulate–the backlash against Carol Danvers, and, more recently, the griping from MRAs against the upcoming film Hustlers, which is about strippers scamming their Wall Street clients.

My conclusion? Most men–at least most straight, cisgender men, who are both my sample population and most of the ones whining that Carol is a “villain”–are perfectly fine with, and desensitized to, media where men do violence to women (horror movies), or men do violence to men (horror and action movies). They’re even sort of fine when women do violence to women (“ooooo cat fight!”).

But they get intensely uncomfortable when women are depicted doing any kind of violence to men, especially in films that tilt the balance of power to the other side of the m/f gender binary beyond a single moment or scene.

So woman as flesh-eating monster with men as her preferred cuisine? Woman who responds to unwanted sexual contact by biting it off? Woman who frames her cheating husband for murder? Woman whose response to harassment–behavior that many of the loudest whiners know is both creepy and reflective of their own thoughts/actions–is to break something?

Too scary. Unacceptable. Disturbing. These men hate being presented with the idea, even in fiction, that their position of power is socially constructed, that it could easily be flipped the other way. It terrifies them.

In feeling that terror, they experience a tiny modicum of what living, existing, moving, being perceived as a woman in the world is like.

And they flinch every time.

[tzikeh]

Here have a newspaper comic from 1993

[perriaeyjeve]

[unreadable]