So- and again, this may be my bias, because I've said before that I am personally tired of watching movies with white women as the underdog characters, especially when their antagonists are of color- but I think this movie tried to pull a bit of a Psycho, where it shifts main characters (or at least the weight of the narrative) as you follow along.
But I just... I don't feel like it did it very well đ Even with all this time, where I guess I was supposed to be, I wasn't too invested in this lady and I'm a little salty for Clark's character potential, as ain't shit as he was đ I was trying to see some more into his broken psyche before he just... got murked. Oh well, I guess. That was so disappointing to me.
I just feel like it could have done more with Clark as a character. Or, if we were really supposed to care this much about Mary, then develop HER as a character some more, outside of these abstract shots, so that when we deal with the conflict between her and Clark, it would have more weight. But because I feel I was led to follow him, to be in his mindset, I feel like I didn't get enough of him before being pushed into Mary. We watch him suffer, we watch him make horrible decisions, we're finally seeing just what type of guy he is... and then boom. He gets his final revelation, then he gets ragdolled.
And doing that with a Black man as the MC is where it gets funky because... All this and in the end, I'm still a white woman's plot device and spooky scary monster?? Dassit?? đ all right then. I genuinely found this movie rewatchable up until That moment. After that, it was like. So I feel no need to watch this shit again. Undelivered orgasm.
It hurts me because it had the POTENTIAL to be more here with Clark as a horror antagonist while Black!!!! And I don't feel like it delivered on that. So, overt use of racism? No, not at all. I don't think they thought too much about intention at all when whoever wrote this story though, and THAT'S what resulted in it. That, or they didn't manage to deliver the way I think the goal was. Either way. I was really having a great time until the last thirty minutes đ
And if I may be honest... I'm only saying "antagonist" because he's acting in opposition to Mary. But fr fr, I don't consider him to be a villain (which is what many people incorrectly think antagonist means) in this movie. I don't! Sometimes Black characters aren't good people, and I'm okay with that, but that doesn't make them the villain.
And I honestly would have had more fun if he HAD been the villain, if they'd taken the time to WRITE that!! But... No. They just... Didn't. They didn't really do anything with him other than go "his life sucks and he's mean to white women about it, he discovers the Backrooms and then he dies". Ooooh, violent angry Black man scary to white women, it's not like we've never seen THAT before. đ Like. Not that I think I'm a movie level writer but I feel like I woulda took that in a different direction.
Walter wide was many things but it is extremely funny how he neglected his own flesh and blood teenage son in order to be an even worse father to a wholly different guy
also, google is free, but pick up a textbook every once in awhile. Find articles written by POC and keep up to date with how you can be a better ally. I took a black feminist theory class in collegeâŚtaught by two white women.
You heard me right. Two. White. Women.
Which is fucking insane in itself, but on the first day of class one of the professors was reading an article, written by a black womanâŚand decided that it was completely acceptable and appropriate to drop the n-word (hard r) and every single person in class was fucking MORTIFIED. Even in the context of education, there was no reason for a white professor to so casually and subtly use that word. (They were called out for it immediately after and profusely apologized)
My point is that covert racism is still racism, and unfortunately it is alive and well.
I also have all of the articles and works saved from this class if anyone would like to do some heavy and necessary reading! I have hard copies, but Iâm sure I can find the links for the articles as well.
Just after doing a little research on google, I found these articles to be incredibly helpful on breaking down covert racism, racism, white privilege, etc.
covert racism
systematic racism
racism and health
becoming trustworthy white allies
what is white privilege
books on systematic racism, racial justice, and anti-racism
race equity tools
Bottom line, white people have no excuse to not stand up for BIPOC. There is no excuse for racism. There is no tolerance, and we have to do better. I firmly believe that the first step in becoming a better ally is to educate yourself.
To say, âThis is my uncle,â in Chinese, you have no choice but to encode more information about said uncle. The language requires that you denote the side the uncle is on, whether heâs related by marriage or birth and, if itâs your fatherâs brother, whether heâs older or younger.
âAll of this information is obligatory. Chinese doesnât let me ignore it,â says Chen. âIn fact, if I want to speak correctly, Chinese forces me to constantly think about it.â
This got Chen wondering: Is there a connection between language and how we think and behave? In particular, Chen wanted to know: does our language affect our economic decisions?
Chen designed a study â which he describes in detail in this blog post â to look at how language might affect individualâs ability to save for the future. According to his results, it does â big time.
While âfutured languages,â like English, distinguish between the past, present and future, âfutureless languages,â like Chinese, use the same phrasing to describe the events of yesterday, today and tomorrow. Using vast inventories of data and meticulous analysis, Chen found that huge economic differences accompany this linguistic discrepancy. Futureless language speakers are 30 percent more likely to report having saved in any given year than futured language speakers. (This amounts to 25 percent more savings by retirement, if income is held constant.) Chenâs explanation: When we speak about the future as more distinct from the present, it feels more distant â and weâre less motivated to save money now in favor of monetary comfort years down the line.
But thatâs only the beginning. Thereâs a wide field of research on the link between language and both psychology and behavior. Here, a few fascinating examples:
Navigation and Pormpuraawans
In Pormpuraaw, an Australian Aboriginal community, you wouldnât refer to an object as on your âleftâ or âright,â but rather as ânortheastâ or âsouthwest,â writes Stanford psychology professor Lera Boroditsky (and an expert in linguistic-cultural connections) in the Wall Street Journal. About a third of the worldâs languages discuss space in these kinds of absolute terms rather than the relative ones we use in English, according to Boroditsky. âAs a result of this constant linguistic training,â she writes, âspeakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes.â On a research trip to Australia, Boroditsky and her colleague found that Pormpuraawans, who speak Kuuk Thaayorre, not only knew instinctively in which direction they were facing, but also always arranged pictures in a temporal progression from east to west.
Blame and English Speakers
In the same article, Boroditsky notes that in English, weâll often say that someone broke a vase even if it was an accident, but Spanish and Japanese speakers tend to say that the vase broke itself. Boroditsky describes a study by her student Caitlin Fausey in which English speakers were much more likely to remember who accidentally popped balloons, broke eggs, or spilled drinks in a video than Spanish or Japanese speakers. (Guilt alert!) Not only that, but thereâs a correlation between a focus on agents in English and our criminal-justice bent toward punishing transgressors rather than restituting victims, Boroditsky argues.
Color among ZuĂąi and Russian Speakers
Our ability to distinguish between colors follows the terms in which we describe them, as Chen notes in the academic paper in which he presents his research (forthcoming in the American Economic Review; PDF here). A 1954 study found that ZuĂąi speakers, who donât differentiate between orange and yellow, have trouble telling them apart. Russian speakers, on the other hand, have separate words for light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy). According to a 2007 study, theyâre better than English speakers at picking out blues close to the goluboy/siniy threshold.
Gender in Finnish and Hebrew
In Hebrew, gender markers are all over the place, whereas Finnish doesnât mark gender at all, Boroditsky writes in Scientific American (PDF). A study done in the 1980s found that, yup, thought follows suit: kids who spoke Hebrew knew their own genders a year earlier than those who grew up speaking Finnish. (Speakers of English, in which gender referents fall in the middle, were in between on that timeline, too.)
nostalgia bait is much less effective when you have memory problems. "hey its that thing from your childhood, don't you love thing from your childhood?" i wouldnt know </3 i forgor.
having high cognitive empathy with npd is so funny because its like Yeah i intrinsically understand why you act and feel the way you do because it makes logical sense but . do i gaf? no not really
Letâs get one thing straight before we go any further. Your brain is not a courtroom. It isnât a judge. It isnât a jury. And it sure as hell isnât a reliable witness most of the time. For the rest of this series Iâm going to treat your mouth like the computer and your brain like the software running it. Sometimes that software works exactly as intended. Sometimes it glitches hard and starts throwing absolute bullshit onto the screen. The problem isnât that the glitch exists. The problem is believing every error message it spits out like itâs divine revelation.
If youâve got ASPD traits, vulnerable NPD, trauma, or honestly just a long history of unhealthy coping mechanisms, chances are your software has learned some deeply questionable shortcuts. It thinks itâs helping. Most of the time those shortcuts did help you survive once upon a time. Survival software and healthy software are not the same thing, and a lot of people never update the program after the danger has passed. One of the biggest traps I fell into was believing that if I thought something, it had to be true.
âThey looked at me funny.â
âTheyâre disrespecting me.â
âThey questioned me on purpose.â
âTheyâre trying to embarrass me.â
Slow the fuck down. You had a thought. You did not receive a verified message from the universe confirming objective reality.
People do this with everything: relationships, politics, religion, arguments. If a belief protects us from discomfort, we cling to it like itâs hard evidence. Sometimes it isnât. Sometimes itâs just a very convincing story your brain keeps looping because changing the story feels worse than believing the lie. Thoughts arenât facts. Theyâre guesses. Predictions. Old survival scripts running on autopilot. Sometimes theyâre useful. Sometimes theyâre complete garbage and the only thing theyâre protecting is your ego.
Feelings arenât much different. People love saying âtrust your feelingsâ like theyâre some pure inner compass. I donât. Not blindly. If youâre dealing with a personality disorder, trauma, or any number of mental health issues, your emotional alarm system can be about as reliable as a smoke detector that goes off every time you make toast. That doesnât mean your feelings are worthless. Theyâre data. Notice the difference. âI feel offendedâ is data. âThey intended to disrespect meâ is a conclusion you just invented and decided to treat like fact. Those are not the same thing, and treating them like they are is how you start manufacturing enemies out of thin air.
Before someone decides Iâm telling people to ignore actual abuse, no. If youâre in a genuinely abusive or toxic situation, get out. This post isnât about teaching you to tolerate mistreatment. Itâs about learning not to invent threats every time your brain gets uncomfortable. Hereâs where overrides come in. Imagine your brain is an overprotective security system that treats every small movement like a home invasion.
Someone disagrees with you: alarm.
Someone doesnât text back quickly: alarm.
Someone criticizes you: alarm.
The system thinks itâs protecting the building. The problem is youâre the owner of the building, and your own security system keeps tackling you every time you try to walk through the front door.
An override isnât smashing the security system with a hammer. It isnât pretending the alarm isnât screaming. Itâs walking over to the keypad and saying, âYeah, I know youâre freaking out. Stand the fuck down.â That takes practice. A lot of it. Most people think the only options are acting on the impulse or suppressing it until you explode later. I donât think thatâs true. Suppressing an impulse is standing there screaming internally while trying to look fine. Overriding it is giving your brain something else to do instead of the thing itâs begging for. Maybe your first impulse is to start an argument or cut someone down. Override. Walk away. Go cuss at the trees. Call someone safe. Write the rage down. Punch a pillow. Do literally anything except the exact thing your brain is demanding in that moment. Will it still suck? Absolutely. But youâve interrupted the script, and thatâs the entire point.
My hardest override has always been anger. When Iâm angry I donât just want to make a point. I want to win. I want to say the thing that cuts deepest because my brain mistakes humiliation for resolution. Thatâs not honesty. Thatâs using honesty as a weapon and calling it integrity. People hide behind that all the time. âIâm just being honest.â Maybe. Or maybe youâre throwing a Molotov cocktail and calling it constructive criticism. Thereâs a difference, and most of us know which one weâre actually doing.
One of the easiest and most useful overrides I ever learned was also the simplest: shut the fuck up. Seriously. Not everything deserves a response. Not every disagreement deserves a debate. Not every slight deserves a war. Sometimes the smartest thing you can do is bite your tongue, sit on your damn hands, and leave the room before you get the chance to make it worse. Because hereâs another uncomfortable truth: sometimes you cannot trust yourself in the moment. That isnât weakness. Thatâs self-awareness. You wouldnât hand a toddler a fork and point them toward a wall socket because you trust their excellent life choices. Sometimes your brain is the toddler. If you know youâre about to make things worse, walk away before you get the chance to prove it.
Finally, hereâs the thing I want you to carry for the rest of this series. Your brain will tell you stories.
âThey meant this.â
âTheyâre against you.â
âYouâre right and theyâre wrong.â
âThey deserved it.â
Sometimes those stories will even sound logical. That does not make them true. Your brain gets to make suggestions. It does not get the final say. You do. And thatâs actually good news, because software can be updated. You just have to stop treating every error message like gospel.
[PT: North Korean minors are in dire need of aid. /End PT]
In North Korea, the infant mortality rate is 33%.
40% of the population lives in poverty.
Around a quarter of the population lacks sufficient food.
North Korea is led by a dictatorship, where speech and action are limited, with harsh legal punishments for stepping out of line. Many minors lose their families to arrest or execution, especially during attempts to escape and refuge elsewhere.
There are reports of disabled citizens being taken to camps, as well as reports of forced sterilization , and disabled infants being executed upon birth in hospitals. Disabled people are also severely inadequately provided for.
In North Korea, there are reports of girls as young as 14 being drafted into Kippumjo (translated as "Pleasure Brigade") who are meant to provide sexual entertainment to high ranking parties.
60% of women & girl refugees aged 12-29 are sex trafficked, with 15% being forced into cyberrape (in which they are forced to do sexual acts on stream), and 30% are forced into marriage with Chinese men.
Women immigrants who are returned to North Korea pregnant are forced into abortion, even in the later months of pregnancy when the baby has already formed enough for birth. Babies (not fetuses) who are removed alive are often killed or left in a bucket to die of malnutrition.
There are up to 30,000 half North Korean children living in limbo in China, after their mothers fled from North Korea and are married to Chinese men (often forcefully.) This number doesn't even count for the fully North Korean children who were brought over. These children are not recognized as citizens and have no access to healthcare, legal protection, or anything of the like.
North Korean orphans are usually illegible for adoption, forcing them to grow up alone or under unofficial care.
If you are capable, please donate to Crossing Borders [link] and/or Liberty In North Korea [link] to help North Korean refugees and orphans!
Sources:
Human Rights for North Korea [link]
Human Rights Conditions For Persons With Disabilities In North Korea [link]
Nothing To Celebrate: North Koreans with Disabilities [link]
North Korean Prisons Accused of Forced Abortions and Infanticide [link]
Slipping through the Cracks in South Korea: The Uncertain Futures for the Children of North Korean Defectors [link]
Children of North Korea [link]
North Korean children: Malnutrition and growth [link]
Help North Korean Orphans [link]
Is it possible to adopt a North Korean orphan? [link]
i dont want to die. i have so much to live for. i just wish there was a way for me to make things better that wasn't dissociating and staying disconnected. all i can do is change how i view things. i cant fix the situation when i'm the only one who is willing to make changes
i dont know how to not grow jaded and resentful of my situation when it's entirely out of my control. i dont know how to not be angry when every single thing ive tried has failed. when my years of efforts have never caused enough change. i dont even know if anything they could do would ever be enough.
it hurts to hold so much anger and resentment towards someone i know who is closer to their death than to any way of living i recognize. it hurts to hold so much anger and resentment towards people i know are doing the best they can
but this is where we are. this is how things are. i can't do anything but change myself.
everything is fine until i remember. everything is perfectly fine until i take more than a minute or two to evaluate how they treat me. everything is fine. they don't hit us often anymore. they dont have cameras in my room. i have some agency. things are fine
One of my hottest transfeminist takes that I have is regarding drag and ballroom actually. Read the whole thing in depth instead of skimming it then getting mad at me.
I think that the US transfemme desire to disown drag/ballroom is a symptom of both white cultureâs destruction of ancestral ties and the importance of cultural continuity, and of the predominantly white ignorance of it as a gentrified Black art form similar to how whites treat other Black art. They want a destruction of it because they see the effects and results of the gentrified version and assume thatâs all there is/was.
In particular itâs frustrating because while some drag queens are cis, a lot are trans women, non-binary, or otherwise transmisogynized and drag/ballroom and the tipping culture associated with it existed in part because the transmisogynized are so fucking unemployable and it provided/s a method beyond mutual aid for the redistribution of money, through the labor of performance.
In relation to trans women, I view drag queens as a pathway to transness similar to crossdressers, femboys, (unfortunately) sissies, and similar - where although the perception of them currently may cause harm to the perception of trans women at large due to the ways they compromise with predominantly white cishetero society to allow transfemmes to explore their gender, they are, in fact, still functionally people within the spectrum of transfemininity even if they havenât fully accepted their gender expansiveness for themselves. Harm they cause to the perception of transfemmes does not lessen them from that societal assignment, any less than we can say Caitlyn Jenner, Blair White, or Kelly Cadigan are less trans women because of the harm theyâve done to the perception of trans women. They are all, in effect, varying levels of transmisogynized whether they realize it or not.
When I was in DC I knew a lot of drag kings/queens and literally 95% of them are trans and either came to drag/ballroom as a way to explore their gender through art and/or make money bc poor, or started it and it was a gateway to unlocking their gender. Not counting the cis performers elevated by stuff like RuPaul, who is explicitly transphobic, I think I can count on my hands how many cis performers Iâve met. Hell, even with RuPaul shit a number of drag artists who have been on his shows later come out as trans (such as Bosco, who I literally grew up with), in part because they suppressed their transness publicly to maintain their career until they reached a point the blowback of coming out wound impact them less. Pulling a F1NNSTER to keep cash flowing for survival, if you will.
Iunno like. The earliest Balls we have records of were literally 1880-90s, predominantly Black (the oldest drag/ballroom performer we have records of was a Black trans woman from DC), and was one of the only safe places for trans people to exist as themselves. So I find the idea of writing it off due to a much more recent gentrification and commercialization of it as ignorant as how people often treat other demonizes or commercialized Black art.
âI just donât like the spectacle it makes of transness and harm it causes-â
Baby all Blackness is spectacle to crackers and An Amount of modern drag is white people doing minstrelsy of all Black women - not in the sense of gender at all but in the sense of race.
Like. A lot of Black culture in the US specifically is Big and Loud *because* of the repression of it weâve faced and the force towards respectability politics, which has echoed to queer culture because queer culture in the US is made vast majority from Black culture. Our existence is a spectacle so why not make a show out of why they hate us and try to erase us so that they canât get rid of even more.
Hating âthe spectacleâ of an actual performance art form is solidly rooted in white supremacy and white cultural notions of propriety/respectability. Many aspects of âspectacleâ seen in drag are directly taken from Ballroom or adapted from it/vogueing.
In summary: traditions are meant to change with situational, cultural, and environmental need but still be sustained as part of a culture. Gentrification is a poison to this that makes it harder for those the culture belongs to to practice it as it should. White ancestral shame is a poison that makes them think they should nuke everything historic/cultural that makes them uncomfortable regardless of whether itâs theirs or whether itâs something they stole and gentrified. Also yeag like,,, itâs a job/gig income predominantly for societal âundesirablesâ to make money when theyâre under/unemployed due to marginalization. And itâs also been gentrified to *gestures at RuPaul, et al.*
No matter what you think about drag or ballroom, poor predominantly racialized trans folks still gon be doing it because it is part of our culture no matter what tv shows and big names and people who have only seen those do to it, and itâs always going to be seen as one of the âdisreputableâ pathways to transness that makes other trans people look down on them because of the complicated ties to transmisogyny, because until someone publicly says the words âIm also a trans womanâ, WE also view them as a personification of what we fear the world sees us asâa man in a dressârather than an egg finding their way to gender in a way we deem unacceptable because it doesnât align with how we think it âshouldâ be done.
And I think thatâs on us honestly, not on them. If we say it can take as long or as quickly and as easily or messily for someone to sort out their gender as needed, this also has to be extended to the transmisogynized we view as âdisreputableâ regardless of if/when they reach a conclusion we deem acceptable or whether they die in the shell, never able to remove their masks fully.
