find local theater near you. go to local theater near you. read plays. read non-fiction books. read fiction books written over one hundred years ago. go to the movie theater. watch movies with subtitles. watch slow movies. watch challenging movies. watch movies made for less than five million dollars. watch a documentary. watch television shows that have no fandoms. watch classic television shows. watch television shows starring actors that have no social media. read criticism of your favorite media frequently. think critically about your favorite media often. consume media made for adults.
ranking tertiary reoccurring gossip girl villains by their level of wickedness and malice. because chuck bass is a main character, he is not on this listāhowever he IS the most wicked person in gg just keep that in mind.
1. most wicked and malicious i think is definitely trip van der bilt. em @danielwaldorf pointed out to me that trip is responsible for causing half the main cast to be injured in car accidents and that is SO heinous. serenaās was kind of sort of an accident but he LEFT her there and then he intentionally tried to literally kill his own cousin and instead almost killed chuck and blair and literally caused a miscarriage like oh my god. just deeply evil and sick and twisted and heās also a congressman. he needs to be locked up. greatest hits: playing football with nate and dan while kids by mgmt played and fake saving a guy from a river.
2. william van der woodsen. this fucking guy. POISONED HIS EX WIFE for MONTHS to try to manipulate her into taking him back. the whole time letting her suffer like physically hurting her. and letting her children suffer and worry about their mom while supposedly doing this āfor themā. and then created an elaborate lie to ruin rufusā life. and the gag is that he literally suffers no consequences for this and everyone loves him at the end of the show and he MARRIES LILY AFTER SHE KNOWS HE WAS POISONING HERā¦.. greatest hits: he doesnāt have any i want him dead
3. jack bass. another evil man who ends the show no longer being criticized and just gets to prance around happily it makes me sick. literally devised hotelgate and asked for blair to be GIVEN TO HIM ntm their disgusting interactions prior to that. just a genuine sick freak like all the basses. greatest hits: ill begrudgingly give him the line āim like the magic johnson of hep cā
4. a bit of an upsetā¦.georgina sparks seems like sheād rank higher on the wicked and malicious scale. BUT she has never like physically harmed someone so she doesnāt quite get the top spot. but she has earnestly and gleefully tried to ruin lives. also she WAS involved in someoneās death and wanted to just leave him to die without calling for help, but it wasnāt her genuine intention for him to die. what makes georgina so awesome is that she genuinely has no empathy at any point in the show. youād think with a character like georgina that she would eventually have a moment where she finally decides to be nice or experiences guilt or something, but no <3 she dgaf. also unlike trip and others on this list, georgina has no motive to be fucking with people. sheās in it purely for the love of the game. greatest hits: tricking dan into thinking a russian mobsterās baby is his, the iconic little pranks she pulls on serena harkening her arrival in s1, and dressing up as a priest to ruin blairās wedding
5. okay actually agnes andrews. i was going to put her below juliet at first but then i realizedā¦.agnes and juliet BOTH drugged people, the difference being that agnes literally intentionally set up a scenario for jenny to get presumably sexually assaulted. and for WHAT like oh my god she also really has no genuine motive for any of the shit she does to jenny, sheās just evil. and evil not in a fun way just in a genuinely uncomfortable way where she consistently puts jenny in dangerous situations with scary men. also her burning the dresses i think did like 20 years of damage to jennyās developing frontal cortex. at least they were a little gay i guess. greatest hits: waitress can i get a revive
6. juliet sharp. okay i debated putting juliet above agnes because of how wicked her little scheme ended up becoming, but ultimately im ranking her a close sixth because she didnāt initially intend for it to become so insane. but she is soooo. her little red string vision board she has up in her apartment plotting out her scheme to ruin serenaās life. pretending to be rich and using a fake fancy apartment and renttherunway.com. tricking nate into getting STD tested so she could use that to make serena look bad. she was working hard! and imagine you do all that for your fuckass brother on his behalf because heās egging you on and then HE gets mad at YOU for going too far. oh i would have killed him!!!! greatest hits: her delivery of the line āno, you stupid bitchā and giving us dair
7. rachel carr. groomer. very intentionally groomed dan and followed the groomer playbook and then tried to play the victim about it. had beef with a teenage girl and dan had to remind her uh youāre beefing with a fucking teenage girlā¦.. greatest hits: not giving her any she is genuinely never enjoyable to watch
8. poppy lifton & gabriel. theyāre one entity so im grouping them together. kind of getting down to the lower stakes crimes tbh but i mean they diddddd steal danās entire college fund and he did not get to go to yale because of them. so thats pretty bad. greatest hits: poppy doesnāt rlly have any tbh but gabriel was funny in seder anything one of my fav episodes
9. damien dalgaard. i literally love damien. heās such a shithead. i think the pivot towards making damien a shitty toxic situationship for eric is a stroke of genius and itās one of my favorite plotlines in the show like it is SOOO fresh. eric was so underutilized for so long and using his obvious loneliness for a gg villain to exploit is just so smart. ranking him lower because his crimes are kind of lower stakes to me idk like just selling drugs and being an assholeā¦. could be worse. and he DID genuinely take issue with ben being a fucking creep and he helped dan and blair #findjuliet so in some ways he had his better moments. greatest hits: sulking in the back of the car with his headphones in while dan and blair flirted up front & sending jenny a little box of macarons and pills.
10. princess beatrice. lowkey just donāt like this character because i hate the louis plot by the point she is introduced but i meannn. she doesnāt even really do anything. talks shit about blairās ED and wants to ruin the wedding but then doesnāt even go through with it. she ultimately has a redemption arc so that right there takes her wickedness down several notches
11. diana payne: sheās barely a villain to me tbh but im including her because i know she was introduced with the intention of her being the newest schemer. her relationship with nate starts out very gross and exploitative to be fair. but again she has a change of heart and kinda rights herselfā¦ā¦.but still continues to have a freaky relationship with nate so itās complicated. i liked that you never knew when diana was being genuine. that was soooo needed in fuck ass season 5. greatest hits: sometimes randomly becoming serenaās evil advisor and lying to chuck about being his real mother LMAO
when i insist on odysseus as a rape victim i'm not trying to absolve him of patriarchy. he is, in many ways, a hero of patriarchy. even if i think some of the people who use him that way rhetorically have probably not read the odyssey, let alone understood its nuances, the cultural world of the poem and the narrative itself are patriarchal, and odysseus is both a product and perpetrator of that. but when i read about calypso forcing odysseus to have sex with her, i will still call it rape, not because i like him as a character, although i do, but because i think to not do so reveals a very troubling attitude toward rape and patriarchy in the ancient context and now.
i've tried and tried but i don't know how to have this conversation with someone who is determined not to accept the premise that, in the text of the odyssey, odysseus has no choice in the matter. if they've read the text, it's right there. from what i can read of the greek, it's there (į¼Ī½Ī¬Ī³ĪŗĪ·, force, constraint). i've never read a translation where it wasn't there. if they just don't care, that pretty much kills the discussion.* but sometimes they'll try to sidestep it, bringing up that the text implies he slept with calypso willingly at some point, or arguing that she doesn't explicitly compel him on the last night they spend together before he leaves ogygia forever.** to be frank, that's not the point. i'm not trying to absolve him even of the accusation of cheating on penelope. i'm not saying he was faithful to penelope. i'm saying he was still, at the point that we meet him in the odyssey, raped. period. i'm saying that's important in some way. i'm saying that using that word is important.
odysseus has power, as a man in a patriarchal society, but that power is not absolute. power is never absolute. i've heard it suggested that in the ancient context, the rape of odysseus is comic, in the sense of affirming life even in its indignities, and in the sense that humiliation is amusing (i have a lot of disagreements with the article, but it has given me endless food for thought). i'm quoting at length here, but bear with me:
Athena leaves Odysseus lingering on Calypsoās island in what is certainly the most unheroic, most challenging of all the trials that befall him on his return home. The narrator describes Odysseus as desperately wanting to leave Ogygia, crying in homesickness, but having to stay and, more to the point, share Calypsoās bed. I mentioned much earlier that an audience of that period would not expect celibacy from a married male away from home. Yet the situation must produce, it seems to me, quite another reaction in the males in the audience when the narrator emphasizes Odysseusā profound unhappiness with the arrangements. In a patriarchal society of that time, where marriages were arranged and wedding nights were more likely than not sanctioned rape scenes, households teemed with female slaves, the highways and byways with prostitutes, men were no doubt accustomed from puberty to have their way easily with women, and on their own terms. Nothing in their experience would prepare them for enforced sexual servitude to a woman. [...] With this episode, the narrator has introduced a comic counterpart to the ubiquitous comments on the faithful Penelopeās celibacy, that is, the image of her husband manfully performing his nightly duties in the home of the insatiable Calypso. It is comic, yes, but also every manās deepest fear.
why is it comic? because it's a reversal of expectation, of roles, of fortune. why is it unexpected? because it exploits the fear that a man could be treated by a woman the way he treats a woman; because a woman becomes monstrous by acting like a man. these are misogynistic ideas and fears, and they sound strikingly modern.
which means that: i understand the impulse to salvage calypso's image. i understand how itĀ couldĀ be interesting or productive or empowering maybe, for some women, because homer is so concerned with any fault in penelope's sex life (reinforced by clytemnestraās, and those of the slave women that odysseus and penelope own) and seemingly not at all with odysseusā. but calypso is arguing for the right of female gods to treat human beings however they want to, not for the rights of human women.
it also means that: the rape of odysseus becomes remarkable, when the rape of countless others is not, because of who he is. it's humiliating for him to be treated like a sex slave because he's a man and a king; other slaves are just slaves. similar logic is found elsewhere in the odyssey (it's humiliating for him to be treated like a beggar, but the other beggar in the house is just a beggar). this is not a text that believes in equal rights of any kind. but i think we have to ask the question, is it not rape because of that? should we not call it rape because he's a man, because he's a man who perpetrates specific evils, because other people have it worse? and why do i keep arguing that his situation is important to remark on?
god. i don't know. sometimes? just because we don't.
i've lost count of posts like this, comments like this, attitudes like this, of how many times i mention the odyssey and immediately hear about calypso, of how at best odysseus weeping on ogygia becomes the butt of the joke. and i'm not sorry that i don't find it more progressive than treating calypso as a shrill misogynistic stereotype. i do not find it interesting or original to take a man who is not in the position of power in a sexual encounter and say that he's being either disingenuous, ungrateful, or mystifying.
when we refuse to name what calypso does to odysseus as rape, absolutely regardless of what we feel for him, just that it happened, that that's what's going on, i think we do something sinister, potentially to real people. especially because this exists in a text where slavery is also often unnamed in translation and discussion, and other forms of rape and captivity and human suffering, and i think we need to name them all, without being afraid that naming one will take away from the others. saying odysseus was raped doesn't mean we excuse the intense misogyny penelope is subjected to, the enslaved lives of melantho and the other hanged women. it all matters. it's all important.
*as does the suggestion that odysseus could be lying and actually had a great time. but odysseus isn't the one telling us what's going down on ogygia; the narrator is. when given the opportunity, odysseus himself says very little, only maintaining that his heart wasn't in it. of course odysseus could be lying. he could always be lying. but calypso is the most relevant counter-perspective we have, and even she doesn't claim that odysseus wants her, just that she thinks he ought to be happy with her. it's to her obvious frustration that he isn't. without another authority in the text, saying "it could be straight lies" is a conversational dead-end.
and if, by the way, there's a lost version of the odyssey in which odysseus was philandering, and the version we have was written to clear him of those charges... it's still the version we have. how we deal with it says something about us.
**if i say "calypso raped odysseus" and a hypothetical person (actually several real people i have encountered) makes this counterargument, that implies that the threat of force is, then, what? not real? if 'at some point' being willing means that the harm of whatever came after that point is negated, it casts him as someone who mopes around out of boredom with an equal partner, when the text seems much clearer on the point that he's in this position against his will than under what circumstances and for how long he might have slept with her willingly. they are clearly not equals by the mere fact that she is a goddess; his mortality is, in calypso's eyes, the barrier between them. rip to everyone who finds the decision to leave ogygia a "surprising choice" but i am never less surprised by odysseus than when he's handling calypso as delicately as possible, in order to leave her as fast as he can.
Also, in some versions, couldn't we say that he was forced to sleep with Circe as well? She turned most of his crew into pigs, and they would be left like that if he didn't take her down, and in multiple versions, that involves sleeping with her.
I had a teacher once who insisted basically that all the relations between men and women in Greek myth were non-consensual, specifically falling on the side that the men were assaulting the women and nothing else. I kinda guessed based on how she acted that she was under the impression that only men can assault women. I pointed out one can argue Odysseus had such treatment, she said "no, I don't think so," shaking her head with a smug smirk. She kept saying "no" and making that same face even when I suggested we could argue that none of the relations, male or female, were consensual considering it's freaking Greek myth.
Rape is rape regardless of whether or not the victim is likeable.
And rape is rape regardless of whether it's a rapist being raped.
It's never okay.
I'd argue that in the case of Circe, Circe is more likely to be the victim - how much choice does she have about sleeping with Odysseus, when her power has no effect on him? With the moly, Odysseus and Circe's positions revert to the male/female power dynamics we expect from stories from this time and place. He threatens to kill her with his sword; then he sleeps with her. Her means of defense is useless against him. It's her life or turning his sailors back to humans.
do you view odysseus as a cheated ? i always did from my one reading in high school but i saw someone say this is a cruel mis characterization as he was not willing ? what do you think?
i think that was me who said that? haha i did make a post about it not too long ago. no, i always thought it was a coercive situation in both cases (calypso with the love magic and circe with the scary kind). not to mention the thorny issue of judging antiquity by modern standards of sexual politics. (it's sort of like dismissing any work of classic literature as "sexist" - like yes, obviously, but what else do you have to say? is this not a document of a different time and culture and, acknowledging the reality that life was difficult and oppressive at that time, is it not still a useful window into history and human nature?)
like yeah sure men were allowed to take concubines and slaves and have affairs with demigoddesses if they wanted to and women weren't. we know that life for all women was unfair and difficult, with various intersections of wealth and privilege based on their birth and what access they had to imperialist power. but i think you have to meet the text where it is, and i do think that the poem is telling us, in various ways, that odysseus wants nothing more than to get home, to his son, his kingdom, and most importantly his wife, who is portrayed as his intellectual and spiritual equal in a lot of different, subtle and not-subtle ways. the things that delay him are not things he chooses. it would have been obvious to a reader in ancient greece that no matter how much he might have enjoyed luxurious captivity by a hot goddess, it was still very much captivity. and in both instances, the thing that snaps him out of it (the magic compelling him to stay, or however you want to interpret it) is his desire to get home to penelope. so yeah! i would call that at the very least coercive.
but it's one of the oldest poems of all time, about a culture that's been dead and gone (and re-interpreted, many many times, by many different time periods, for many different political and aesthetic reasons) for like three thousand years. so it is all about interpretation, and since the poem itself is likely only one cobbled-together version of an oral tradition, and written in homeric greek which is highly susceptible to the bias of any particular translator...... i mean. what is the truth? it doesn't really matter. it's just a story and you can use it however you want, i think.
Please talk forever about Helen and ancient greek you are so enpoint
in the iliadĀ helen speaks the last lament for hector. the only man in troy who showed her kindness is slaināand now, helen says, ĻĪ¬Ī½ĻĪµĻ Ī“Ī Ī¼Īµ ĻĪµĻĻĪÆĪŗĪ±ĻĪ¹Ī½, all men shudder at me. she doesnāt speak in the iliiad again.
homer isnāt cruel to helen; her story is cruel enough.Ā in the conjectured era of the trojan war, women are mothers by twelve, grandmothers by twenty-four, and buried by thirty. the lineage of mycenaean families passes through daughters: royal women are kingmakers, and command a little power, but they are bartered like jewels (the iliad speaks again and again of helen and all her wealth). helen is the most beautiful woman in the world, golden with kharis,Ā the seductive grace that arouses desire. she is coveted by men beyond all reason. after she is seized by paris and compelled by aphrodite to love him against her willāin other writings of the myth, she loves him freelyāshe is never out of danger.
the helen ofĀ the iliad is clever and powerful and capricious and kind and melancholy: full of fury toward paris and aphrodite, longing for sparta and its women, fear for her own life. she condemns herself before others can. in book vi, as war blazes and roars below them, helen tells hector, on us the gods have set an evil destiny: that we should be a singerās theme for generations to comeāas if she knows that, in the centuries after, men will rarely write of parisā vanity and hubris and lust, his violation of the sacred guest-pact, his refusal to relent and avoid war with the achaeans. instead theyāll write and paint the beautiful, perfidious, ruinous woman whose hands are red with the blood of men, and call her not queen of sparta but helen of troy: a forced marriage to the city that desired and hated her.Ā she is an eidolonĀ made of want and rapture and dread and resentment.
homer doesnāt condemn helenāand in the odyssey sheās seen reconciled with menelaus. sheās worshipped in sparta as a symbol of sexual power for centuries, until the end of roman rule: pausanias writes that pilgrims come to see the remains of her birth-egg, hung from the roof of a temple in the spartan acropolis; spartan girls dance and sing songs praising one anotherās beauty and strength as part of rites of passage, leading them from parthenos toĀ nĆ½mphÄ, virgin to bride. cults of helen appear across greece, italy, turkeyāas far as palestineācelebrating her shining beauty; they sacrifice to her as if she were a goddess. much of this is quickly forgotten.Ā
every age finds new words to hate helen, but they are old ways of hating: deceiver and scandal and insatiate whore. she is euripidesā bitchwhore and hesiodās kalon kakon (ābeautiful evilā) andĀ clement of alexandriaās adulterous beauty and whore and shakespeareās strumpet and proctorās trull and flurt of whoredom and schillerās pricktease and levinās adulterous witch. her lusts damned a golden world to die, they say.Ā pandoraās box lies between a womanās thighs. helen is a symbol of how menās desire for women becomes the evidence by which women are condemned, abused, reviled. Ā
but no cage of words can hold her fast. she is elusive; she yields nothing. she has outlasted civilisations,Ā and is beautiful still. before troy is ash and ruin she has already heard all the slander of the centuries; and at last she turns her face awayāas if to say:Ā i am not for you
it's darkly funny to me at the end of the odyssey when odysseus and penelope talk about all the livestock and valuables they've lost to the suitors, and odysseus assures her he's gonna work really hard and soon go on lots of raids to get more, in the exact same tone as "don't worry honey, i'll work extra shifts down at the factory"
i've been seeing some confusion in the notes of this post so i'd like to clarify that the thing i find darkly funny isn't that odysseus is planning to head out, it's that he's planning to head out on raids. the man who was so enraged about the threat to his household and its resources that it led to a death toll in the triple digits is planning to go out and kill and enslave someone else entirely and take their livestock and valuables for himself to make up for the losses. and this passes as completely neutral information to both husband and wife and narrator!
penelope didn't have to turn the tree bed into a riddle. she could have asked odysseus to prove his identity, to tell her something only he would know ā which she actually did a few books earlier, when she asked the beggar to describe odysseus, and odysseus told her about a purple cloak with a particular golden brooch that she fastened herself twenty years ago. when penelope tells telemachus they have signs by which they'll know each other, you sort of expect more of the same. and instead, she decides to trap him. like a bug in a cup.
and it's delightful to me, idk, how odysseus has been trapped and cornered in various way throughout the odyssey, but arguably never so that he has to tell the truth to get out. (with the phaeacians, maybe? the omniscient narrator corroborates some of what he tells them, but do we really know everything?) and in fact he is not trying to get free of penelope. he wants something from her, wants to convince her, wants to be welcomed home, but until this point he's lied to her, revealed himself to other people before her, and been distant with her (though also patient! he doesn't try to strongarm or rush her into accepting him; it's his idea to sleep elsewhere).
except penelope isn't looking for him to be distant and patient. penelope lies in a way that requires odysseus to stop playing along ā not only to prove that he knows what odysseus knows, but that he's willing to tell the truth about himself.
#and the thing is he has a scar. a physical identifier. but that one he only shows servants to prove his identity#repeatedly flashing a scar on his thigh is MORE impersonal and less revealing. to him#he must do something far more exposing and vulnerable and revealing with penelope. he must drop the act via @ilions-end
also on top of everything nateās point is completely irrelevant āserena could never understand how losing her virginity means a lot to a girl like jenny (barf barf barf)ā she literally spent this whole morning talking to jenny about losing your virginity should be special. you are both on the same page to begin with so what the fuck are you talking abouttttttttt
it's actually batshit insane to me. really. like this episode as a whole bothers the fuck out of me because it's more centered on protecting jennys "innocence" then she's dating a really sketchy guy. it starts off as that until everyone and their mother learns that jenny is planning on losing her virginity to damien, and serena tries to be normal about it despite her own (valid) negative feelings towards damien. while nate is a fucking FREAK (derogatory and affectionate) and about how him tattle telling on rufus was for jennys own good........ and look, I find it slightly amusing of how fucking motivated he was to put a stop to this when this was none of his business and just fixated on jennys virginity, but at the same time like. Dude. Why Do You Care So Much? She Is Not Your Girlfriend. meanwhile. he's shaming his actual girlfriend for being a Whore... and then apologizes for hurting Him and His Feelings and He never actually apologizes.
and the cherry on top is that while nate was doing All That. dan, jennys brother, who was protective of her since day one, just Did Not Care and was just drooling over how hot vanessa is. which. real, king. but we have other issues at the moment. your friend is psychosexually obsessed with your sisters virginity, and she's dating a drug dealer. flip the horny brain off.
and don't even get me STARTED on rufus throughout all of this cause THAT is a whole other thing I don't wanna get into
