Get REAL- Question everything!

Over the past few months I saw people fiercely defending and hating Hayden and JJ.

I need more nuances.

I dislike Hayden and JJ. I don't hate them.

First of all I want to say I believe the ones defending Hayden and JJ confuse them with Bood and Hazy. I also don't think the parallels are unintentionally choosen. Allyship is a spectrum.

For this part I want to use a famous comparison that went viral with sexism.

Allyship works similarly. And not every "ally" is the same.

So no as a queer person Hayden and JJ don't qualify as allies.

Hayden is reproducing harmful stereotypes with his son by telling him he can't wear nail polish after having a front row seat to seeing the problem of this culture. He is ok with JJ setting Shane up. He literally outed them. He is against the "uncle Ilya" name. He thought of Shane, his captain, as this "man", which is why he and JJ constantly try to set him up with feminie guys, when that image breaks for Hayden he is condescending towards Ilya. Ilya really doesn't chirp him that bad and only after feeling the walls. Ilya is incredible emphatic and perceptive. Hayden doesn't try to learn or speak up or respect or avoid assumptions.

Now to JJ. He first of all doesn't respect Shane when it comes to dating. He constantly pushed him. Even when being told to stop. He even talks about Shanes crush on Ilya and assumes Ilya is straight. Then when he does get more information, which Shane doesn't own him, he gets upset and makes this whole outing problem about himself. It feels shitty being left out? How about Ilya's struggle with the Russian law system, the fact that Shane had to hid for more than a decade. The pain. And he makes it about himself. Then he even encourages a discussion about Shane cheating. With a little bit of info suddenly JJ acts like Shane is not THE Shane Hollander anymore.

Obviously both are fine with Shane being gay in theory. Gay in book. But to see it, know it, to know his bf is another man. This. What queerness. That's tooooo much. He could have dated a twinky personal trainer. But like this?

I DON'T think Hayden and JJ are homophobic. But they aren't allies.

I also like this. It shows that the locker room and sports bubble does deal with deeply rooted homophobia, (and sexism and racism). It shows that you can have good intentions but still be flawed. It shows that good and bad aren't sides to be on. The world is colourful. So is support. It also shows us that we can think we are supportive but there is always room for improvement. In the end Hayden and JJ can only be so supportive. They won't seek it out. They aren't queer or woke like that. They are not gonna Nick Nelson google how to help with eating disorders. It's quite realistic.

Which is why I love the Ottawa centaurs so much. Because all the "difficult" aka queer, feministic, poc who don't play along guys play there. It gives us a great juxtaposition. Montreal Vs Ottawa. Toxic masculinity Vs healthy masculinity. It fits making mister russian always been chill about being bi on Ottawa and headmaster of proper full on gay crisis be Montreal. The shift from Montreal to Ottawa is important for Shane because it allows him to be himself. Which is why Ottawa married BAMF Shane ff are so healing.

I think we should see the depiction of allyship in HR as refreshing.

But so many straight people are keen on Hayden and JJ being good allies. And babes no. They aren't. They are in-between. Which is what a lot of people are. Fine with the gay, but does it have to be [Rozanov] [shoved up our nose] [taught in school?]. They wouldn't k!ll Ilya or Shane. They wouldn't verbally abuse them. But would they go the extra mile? No.

My less generous interpretation is that heated rivalry is so compelling *because* the love story is made more electric with bdsm, but it’s intentionally made more commercially successful through plausible deniability to not alienate/scandalize a wider audience. Dog whistling if you will, while cloaking some of the more misunderstood aspects of kink in scenes like the Vegas bathroom / penthouse with a level of emotional turmoil that gives viewers a way to opt out of (and in some cases, blame) the bdsm of it all.

So there’s one reading of those scenes where Ilya & Shane are roleplaying to artificially mask their true desire to be more emotionally vulnerable with each other. Like playing dress up to make things less intimate / real. It’s hot but it’s keeping their hearts safe. Reid’s Vegas bonus/blog chapter makes reading this scene a bit blurry, and I find it fascinating that she decided to include it/release it after the book was published — did she feel pressure to clarify that Ilya was actually acting out of fear in those scenes? Did that justify his particular flavor of sadism in that moment? I think that’s where the plausible deniability comes in.

Because for people who appreciate the sadism in those scenes, the way Ilya is acting feels more intimate than not. He’s trying to understand Shane and himself and the ways in which they are sparking this hunger thats gnawing gnashing growling inside them; when Ilya makes Shane pout and cry and Ilya hears the quiver in his voice when Shane’s shouting back at him, it’s Ilya’s way of finding the crack in the shields they’ve both been using to keep themselves safe. His sadism is getting them closer, and Shane’s submission to it is accepting that, rewarding that sharpness from Ilya with a softness he shares back. It’s not a crutch to avoid emotional intimacy, it IS their intimacy.

But it’s also tangled up in the emotionally devastating reality of their circumstances, they can barely get to know each other because they’re separated by the homophobia & racism & the injustices of their career, countries, families, and their respective traumas navigating all of that. So they’re bonding through sex without enough of Everything Else — communication, hanging out, casual mutual enjoyment — to fully support each other as much as they each need, and they hurt each other in the process. This is true whether or not sadism is the main driver of the scene, as evidenced by Ilya’s botched tunamelt-his-heart scheme, so it’s a bit of a double standard to say that ilyas sadism is less intimate / mature / loving than his “softer” side. But by giving the Vegas scenes an unhappy ending (Ilya not knowing how to ask for less emotionally charged pillow talk from Shane, Shane not knowing how to ask Ilya for a sweet kiss goodbye), there is an escape hatch for anyone viewing who doesn’t enjoy / want to enjoy their D/s dynamics.

The plausible deniability extends to how ilyas sadism is portrayed throughout his narrative arc as well. His demeanor during Shane’s first time anal is portrayed as gentle and encouraging and then he ghosts Shane for six months and the next time they fuck he’s big bad wolf-ing it, and Shane thumps his head on the elevator door and deletes his we didn’t even kiss text. It’s Good Ilya vs Bad Ilya and the bad Ilya is also kinkier. And then towards the end of the story, the domming and sadism become less stereotypical, which is refreshing for viewers who are enjoying the breadth of that portrayal, but can be more easily ignored by anyone who doesn’t want it. Ilya forcing giving Shane a blowjob while he’s on the phone with Hayden is crackling with sadistic electricity, but there’s giggling and the sun is pouring through the windows and they’re at the cottage they’re endgame they’re about to tell each other I Love You and anyone who isn’t looking for bdsm there doesn’t have to see it.

— youre right, it’s not a neutral act to ignore the kink. I guess what I was getting at is that it DOES feel anti-kink to ignore it and also the entity doing much of the work towards that action feels like the source material itself.

Like don’t get me wrong I love how the book and tv series are both very show-not-tell about the kink but ALSO the story is narratively putting scenes in an order that make it feel like there’s an emotional arc from bad kinky sad sex (vegas) to good nonkinky happy sex (the cottage). Vegas bathroom is my favorite scene of the show followed by Vegas penthouse but im in the minority in large part because it ends on a sour note. And the cottage has my third favorite scene with the phone call blow job. So to ME the arc does not feel like it goes from bad kinky sex to good nonkinky sex but again I think I’m in the minority with that read. At least what I’ve seen with mainstream interpretations of how the overall cottage vibes feel to most folks.

which is that so much of the For Those Who Have Eyes To See reading of this as a D/s love story, and most of why i am like, so genuinely emotionally invested in it is that the journey is not from more kink to less kink. it's a journey from less emotional connectedness to more emotional connectedness, as seen through the lens of crazy hot sex. it's not that there's less D/s as things progress between them, any more than there's less sex! but the D/s becomes emotional rather than exclusively sexual. it's no longer just "i'm gonna order you to beg to be touched in this bathroom," it's also "i'm going to pet you while you crouch at my feet." which is like, crazy! never seen before onscreen kink content! and for those of us who are knowledgeable about and perhaps personally invested in dominance and submission as a lifestyle and a cornerstone of relationships, the second thing is actually arguably kinkier because it's not sexual, because it explicitly shows that dominance and submission are simply part of how they relate to and love each other (everything is hollanov TPE)

but the average person i think has literally no idea that D/s even can be non-sexual and has never thought of waht it could potentially mean to people on an emotional level for someone to dominate and someone to submit. and so as the sex becomes warmer and the whole relationship including and maybe especially the kink becomes as much romantic as it is sexual, it's harder and harder to see it. and people are viscerally uncomfortable with power exchange, so they don't want to see it, and the show makes (and possibly has to make, given the constraints of the media ecosystem) room for a reading of their love story as this hayes-code-esque "and then they fell in love so they had normal sex forever instead of weird kinky sex, which is something only people who don't care about each other would do" as opposed to what i see, which is "and then they fell in love, in large part because ilya's dominance and shane's submission ultimately lead them to feel emotionally comfortable with and deeply connected to one another, and just like everything else about their relationship it no longer has to be sexual for them to allow themselves to have each other"

IMO, there’s clear arguments to made for D/s being present on screen (Vegas, for one), and more arguments for it being used as subtext (e.g. Shane kneeling at Ilya’s feet in the cottage comes to mind as being kink-coded in that specific way that vanilla audiences can write off, while in-the-know audience members will clock it as something more), but I think with fan discussions on the topic, you almost get a replication of the typical responses straight audiences give queer ones for daring to think a character might not be straight, but this time swapping ‘queer’ for ‘kinky’. Maybe even because they can’t argue that it isn’t gay, all that energy gets channelled into ‘well it may be gay, but it isn’t that kind of gay’ (cough respectability politics, cough cough)

I haven’t waded too far into the weeds of discussions like this, for obvious reasons, but I’ve definitely seen responses along the lines of ‘You’re reading too much into things’, ’why do you have to make everything about your gross perversions’, ‘the writers/actors/characters would never do such a thing!’, ‘just because you want Shane and Ilya to be kinky doesn’t mean they are in the show’, etc etc… which are all arguments I’ve seen used so many times against people daring to ship same-sex couples or to suggest a character might be LGBTQ when canon technically hasn’t said so. I do think there are levels to this, in the same ways there are levels to queer coding vs queer baiting vs head canons - probably, the dynamic on screen is maybe more mild than some fan interpretations give it credit for (which, to be clear, is not me being negative about those interpretations, I love seeing people read Hollanov that way and I do myself as well) - but there’s definitely this argument from certain parts of the fandom that says seeing any level of power exchange or kink on display is inherently fanon and not based on the text, which is just. Wrong.

And the worst part is, they are the the biggest gossips at the space mall you work at, so the price for their advice is knowing the entire station will know all about your stupidity.

The poem frames "him" as subordinate in several ways, not just to the narrator ("i fuck him on the floor": not that getting fucked is inherently subordinating, but the narrator has all the agency in the phrase, "he" doesn't decide what happens or where) but also to "his wife". She has filled the house with chintz, meaning it wasn't his decision or his actions. "Filled" is also a choice of words that suggests that there is no space for him in the home: the only place left for him, not already filled, is the floor. To me this framing invokes the trope of the henpecked husband, whose wife has taken dominion over the home and who has ceded its control to her because it, as the domestic space, is "supposed" to be hers.

This trope, of course, is misogynist in its normative rendition: it reinforces gender essentialism, it erases the significant material benefits such "henpecked" men derive from the domestic labor of their spouses, and it dismisses women's expressions of suffering and attempts at negotiating terms for their relationships as "nagging." In the narrator's dismissal of the wife's possessions as "chintz" (frivolous, feminine, contrasted with what is "real") we can see this same misogyny at play.

The narrator's misogyny, and the central fact of the poem which is that the husband is getting fucked by someone other than the wife, quite possibly flip the power dynamics of the poem on their heads. The wife is now subordinated: both by her social marginalization based on gender (a marginalization which drives her into the home and confines her there, like OP so cogently points out! As "he" has run out of room in the home and can only get fucked on the floor, so has she run out of room socially; the only place she can control and make decisions like filling it with chintz is the home), and by the narrator who is fucking her husband in her home.

There's an additional dynamic in reading the narrator as male, which most readers seem to have done: it invokes the particular, bitter misogyny that men-loving-men sometimes direct at women expressing femininity. There's an envy to it, of course--straight and straight-passing women get to (are forced to) express desire for men, have sex with men, marry men, love and be loved by men. His wife gets to be his wife: the narrator gets to fuck him, in their home. Straight and straight-passing women also get to (are forced to) perform femininity: they can buy chintz and decorate with it, without being devastatingly punished for it like people presumed to be men are from the time they're babies. The envy mixes with misogyny to produce disdain, disgust, dismissal. We can read the narrator fucking him on the floor of their home as an expression of power and dominance (again, not that the fucking has to mean the narrator is topping, or that topping is inherently dominant, but the phrasing is stark: "i fuck him", the narrator acts upon him as an object/recipient), not just over him but over the wife in absentia as well.

I think one of the things that makes the poem so compelling for being so short is the struggle at the heart of it, this complicated jostling for power between three people and their actions over time (the wife "has filled" the house, in the past: the narrator fucks him in the present, perhaps in the habitual). Who controls the house? Who controls "him"?

The gender of the narrator is immaterial; women are quite capable of fucking a man, and even being subconsciously/internalized misogynist about it.

Chintz is, definitionally, vibrantly-patterned cloth, often floral, typically on a light-colored background.

Thus, by stating that the fucking is explicitly happening "on the floor," the narrator is implying that this is not only a rare Chintz-free location within the house to fuck, but also more indirectly applies that this tryst is intended to be secretive, in the literal sense that neither the narrator nor the husband will leave secretions (stains) on the Chintz itself, and will instead take place on an easier-to-clean surface.

This contrast has been well-established in most of the analyses of the poem, albeit without the hiding-of-evidence aspect.

However, this has follow-on implications vis a vis the "keep[ing] it real" - the ways in which this fucking is different from the sex the man may or may not be having with his wife, at least in the mind of the narrator.

"Our sex is too raw, too messy, too primal, too 'real' to take place in contact with Chintz. I am so much cooler and hotter than this guy's wife."

The narrative unreliability and bias opens up many other potential readings:

Maybe the narrator is a squirter, and this is simply practical, whether it's secretive or out in the open.

If this is an open marriage or polycule, perhaps the arrangement is that the narrator can fuck him anywhere except the marital bed, so floor sex is their exclusive dynamic.

The dude might be a switch, or submissive to both the wife and the narrator, since there's no indication that his wife doesn't fuck him, too. The common read, that they're in a sexless and possibly loveless marriage, is not present in the text, except by the internality of the narrator's obviously-biased opinion.

The narrator doesn't acknowledge the wife's role in his sex life at all; they just don't like her interior decorating. The man's opinion of the Chintz is never discussed.

The narrator is self-centered and generally dismissive towards both of the other people mentioned's desires.

How would this poem read if, instead of Chintz, the author had said something less overtly feminine (and, as prev noted, implicitly sexist/heteronormative/misogynist)?

I've been looking for it. the closest i can find is a post which DESCRIBES the scenario you're mentioning and includes a screen capture of a 'comment' it claims as original to jjbang8. but it is a static image with no linkback to the OG post. the date I have is August 5th 2019.

people in the comments will be like "okay but we could at least get rid of ticks and mosquitos because those spread disease."

we actually CANNOT get rid of ticks and mosquitos. not only do we plain lack the technology to lead a pointed extermination effort against them specifically without taking a score of other species down with them, but if we developed that technology and did eradicate mosquitos and ticks, it would be the catalyst of utter ecological collapse the likes of which i think people are not quite comprehending.

the problem is not the existence of bugs. the problem is that our current global systems ensure that specific Peoples in specific places are disproportionately impacted by zoonoses (illness spread between animals and humans).

those same populations also disproportionately lack access to preventative tools & PPE (down to things many of us take for granted so simply as effective bug spray), and crucially access to medical treatment.

the goal should not be an eradicating effort against bugs which would quite literally collapse entire ecosystems, but equitable access to healthcare, investment in medical research to improve preventative and acute treatment for zoonoses, and the destruction of systems which are currently rapidly increasing the threat of zoonoses worldwide (climate change!)

i am not defending the existence of bugs because i think they're cute and because i don't care about the devastating suffering zoonoses cause millions and millions of people.

"After they overheard that ICE was at the courthouse to arrest someone, they improperly accessed court databases to determine who was not born in the United States," a DOJ detention filing says. "They then snuck every suspected illegal alien who was at the courthouse out a back door, where ICE, who was waiting in the parking lot for their target to leave the building, could not see them."

YEAH HE WOULD HAVE QUALMS ABOUT*WHO* HE WAS GOING TO SEE IF HE KNEW, BUT HE DOESN'T ACTUALLY CARE WHAT SHANE IS DOING

GOD the idea of bb shane having a habit of tattling on himself because A. he wants to make sure mom and dad are up to date with everything he did all day B. does genuinely want to be Good Boy and will just own up C. doesn't always realize what he did is or isn't "bad" ("i told christy at school today that her dress looks like boogers" "oh, honey, why would you say that?" "??? because her dress looks like boogers??")

and the idea of yuna and david having flashbacks to bb shane tattling on himself when he's standing in front of them with ilya