Holy cow. My D cups are feeling totally inadequate right now. . .
@waitscale: Unlike all of the non-celebrities who get married once and forever?
There aren't enough animated gifs on the internet to properly convey the look of horror on my face right now.
It's petty and I cannot believe I am writing this on a Gossip Girl post, but there are at least twice as many apostrophes in this post as there should be.
There.
I said it.
Let us never speak of it again.
When is Nate finally going to hook up with Chuck? Chuck's the only person on the show he hasn't slept with yet.
@Underling: I'm sorry, he does not get to be on my team.
@lauraholtsteele: Agreed. I'm as pinko commie as it gets (and I'm Canadian!), but I'm not so narrow-minded that I can't respect divergent viewpoints and much prefer people to be honest than simply politically correct. I haven't been by Jez in a while, and now I remember why.
Ahh, Russell, I did like you when you were young and Australian (see "The Sum of Us" and "Proof," still one of my favourite movies ever), but my question now is - if you're such a great freaking actor, why can't you act like you're not a total dick 95% of the time?
Can't he just do the manly thing and pay women to have sex with him? They'd at least be nominally willing to see/touch his dick.
Mark and wife-to-be should compromise: she takes his last name, he takes her first name. Win-win!
JGroff may be enough to get me to watch this show again. It's not that I hated it (I saw the pilot and ep 2, I think), I just never seem to remember that it's on. Apparently if I watched anything at all that was on Fox ever, I'd get hit over the head with promo, but I don't, and I just plain forget about it.
@johnm001: Sadly (for the rumour mill, but happily for me because I love that show!), White Collar has been picked up for a second season already. :)
@muntjac is the worst grad student: My comment was intended as a reflection of the fact that your comment read (unintentionally or not) as if the only people who know the true facts about DV issues are people who are doing grad work at your school, as opposed to those of us who didn't have the opportunity for extensive, expensive post-sec education, but "just" work in the trenches. Or, the people who actually live through those experiences.
Academic work is wonderful and useful, but is absolutely no be-all end-all (or else we'd be at the end of this discussion).
Still a shelter worker, btw, still experiencing all of this on the front lines, still jaded and unable to be surprised by any display of inhumanity to man, woman, or child.
Hmmm. How about we stop contorting ourselves into mental pretzels trying to figure out whether a man who locked his wife in a basement prison for three months is worse than a woman who called her three kids "it" and continually told them she wished they'd never been born and never once touched them with kindness or love (both true cases I've dealt with), decide that both of them are heinous and need to be stopped/helped, and start actually doing something about it?
Like, oh, welfare state reforms that reward people who lie and cheat while making those who truly need and would benefit from start-over money jump through nine million hoops while they are in the midst of physical and emotional landmines. Or custody arrangements that require women to see men who have beat them black and blue every two weeks so daddy can maybe kidnap the kids? Or, you know, affordable and secure housing that doesn't look like it was built for WWIII? Or actual intervention programs for abusers that are more than a probation officer check-in once a week for eighteen months?
Yeah, I could go on, but I'm too tired and this makes me too depressed. Work in a shelter for a month and get back to me on how to fix any of this.
@muntjac is the worst grad student: Or, like I did, you could work in an actual shelter for 13 years.
After reading all of this crap about all of these losers, it would not shock me one bit to read a headline that says that Jon Gosselin had plastic surgery to change his race. Holy crap, could you even imagine how pissed Heidi would be she didn't think of that first?
/slinks off to read about world peace or something
@ihazakitty: Oh, yes. I read a lot of manga and just recently posted a review to Amazon because I wanted to let other people know that one of the anthology books I'd bought crossed over (non-explicitly, thank goodness) into shotacon, and I was really uncomfortable with that and wished that it had been noted somewhere on the cover (which leads to the good and the bad thing about yaoi manga coming in plastic wrapping), so I assumed that other people would appreciate the head's up. Again, I didn't want the book pulled, I'm more interested in informed consent for purchase.
@briarbite: Aw. You made me blush. Thank you! :)
And I believe that is absolutely true that some women are visually interacting with this stuff (including Rapelay) as well as other visual outlets for porn and hardcore fantasy. Hell, some of the porn that I watch (although predominately gay porn) certainly crosses some boundaries that others would consider to be uncomfortable/inappropriate.
@alula: I think it really depends on what you read - I read stuff that I find to be well-characterized, and in fanfic, canonically plausible, so "dub-con" (a term I really, really hate, because it's self-serving to fandom and akin to the "date rape" label) doesn't work for me, because none of the relationships that I am interested in reading about involve men who are significantly different in terms of power (although "White Collar" comes close, and, back in the day, "Oz" definitely made me look at those lines very, very discerningly).
However, there are plenty of women (and lots of men, hello nifty archive) who write one-handed. It's porn, flat out. Characterization doesn't matter, getting the names right barely matters sometimes - it's all written to get someone off, and there is nothing wrong with that, but I think it's something else that argues against the "fiction is somehow different" argument. It is different sometimes, and sometimes it isn't, but better (or worse) would be a hard argument for me to make.
@Me,Eloise: And that belief, I think, is exactly why the perpetual fiction that women cannot/do not offend sexually is so pervasive. It's like what happens when we find adult female teachers in sexual relationships with teenaged boys - people think that it's "not as bad" as a male adult with a female (or male) teen, somehow, which is absolute crap. Those adult women who have sexual relationships with teenaged boys (or girls) are sexual offenders, period. They are criminals. They need to be registered and monitored, just like men. The reasons why they offend may be different, but the offenses need to stop being treated like they are a joke because some "kid was hot for teacher." It's precisely because of this mindset that boys have such a hard time getting help, and boys who don't get help when they're young turn into deeply wounded adult males.
It's also why it can be so difficult for lesbians who find themselves in abusive relationships to escape and find help - the cultural collective mindset of "women aren't violent" is so hard-wired that women who are hurt by other women may think that there is nowhere they can be helped, or that what they have experienced isn't abuse, because a woman hurt them, and women don't do that. I can list you case after case after case after case of horrible partner abuse, child abuse, and reciprocal abuse perpetrated by women, and that's just from my career in the field. Women can be just as violent as men. Period. I will be having these arguments my entire life, not because the media doesn't report it enough, but because it is overwhelmingly women who just do not want to believe this to be true.
And, while it is absolutely true that some people who are violent and sexually violent use these kinds of materials, it is also true that the vast majority of people who use these kinds of materials are not violent or sexually violent in their real life, and continually reversing these correlations is scary, and dangerous.
@clevernamehere: I'm sorry, what does that have to do with what I said? Because what I am talking about ranges from quite silly, "we have to have sex or we'll die" stuff to very violent, very graphic, very hate-filled rapefic. Wherein the writer is controlling the outcome of the story - involving deeply disturbing, violent images of sexual assault perpetrated upon characters. It isn't "just" "[having] no control" - and the fact that a lot of the women who write it believe that there is a line between "just" writing a "oh, I was drunk and you forced me into sex but it's okay because I was drunk" is really any different from "rape"-rape, is just a disturbing a line as the "date rape isn't real rape" bs that people pull in the real world.
I am not saying don't write it, don't fantasize about it, beat yourself up if you get off on it. But I do think that pretending that a one kind of rape fantasy is more okay or even somehow inherently better than another is, imho, really naive and self-serving. Yes, there is a difference in what's being portrayed, but it's all, just like this game, still a fantasy. Lots of normal, law-abiding, moral people with strong values who would never and will never perpetrate crimes have violent/disturbing fantasies in their private lives. Lots of normal people role-play things that other people would find disturbing. And some of this fantasy involves simulated rape. So the question is: do we, can we, or even should we be regulating fantasies? To what end? And how will that help real-life victims?
I would personally be thrilled if I never had to stumble across another story in which someone was violently raped for no reason. I know that is not going to happen because I can't make people stop fantasizing about that, or stop them from writing those fantasies down and putting them on the internet. So my choice is to either stay off the internet, stop reading stories entirely, or take responsibility for my own interaction with this stuff.
Do we blame violent behavior on death metal, or videogames, or porn, or violent stories, or do we realize that there will always be a minority of people who are unable to interact with the real world without acting out their violent fantasies, while the majority of people who have violent fantasies never cross our radar because they interact with this stuff as fantasy material? I think everyone knows that not everyone who buys a death metal album is going to start slaughtering people, and despite the fact that death metal is filled with violent imagery, it isn't illegal. So where does that free-speech line fall?
