My Escape

Parenting.

The pope went to an artist, saying “We want you to paint the Sistine Chapel”. 

At the time, one did not simply say “No” to the fucking Pope. But this artist really didn’t fucking want to do it. So, clever little cookie goes “Dude I’d love to, but I’m unworthy of such an honor! You know who’s an even better painter? Fucking Michelangelo! Go check him out!” 

So, the Pope trots his little ass over to see Michelangelo and straight up tells him “I want you to paint the Sistine Chapel, and what’s his face said you’re the fucking best in the whole wide world.”

Now, Michelangelo, is one of the few people who would genuinely have been sassy enough to tell the Pope to go fuck himself. Besides, his true passion lies in sculpture, not in painting. Don’t get me wrong, he’s good at it, but he likes sculpting more. And just like the clever cookie artist, he knows that painting the Sistine Chapel is going to be a bitch. But he said yes. Why, you ask?

Pride.

If he turned the pope down, it would be as good as saying he actually wasn’t the bestest in the whole wide world and like fuck he was going to let that stand! So, he spent the next several years painting the Sistine Chapel, bitching about it to anyone who would listen (seriously, the letters that he wrote are fucking gold!), and attaining new levels of pettiness never before seen! 

There are cherubs doing hand signs that were (at the time) the equivalent of flipping the bird. He painted a great big picture of the gates of hell right behind where the Pope’s chair would sit! And so much more!

Those are the cherubs, and in the second picture there are the gates of hell.

The guy on the right, the one with the snake biting his private parts, is actually a cardinal that was angry at Michelangelo!

alright so my high school english teacher was the fucking BEST. we love that man. he was an english phd who was a professor but thought high school kids were smarter so he skipped out of his high paying college job to be the oh captain my captain dude and we were all so down for it. he taught us all freshman year, had a heart attack, pushed through and came back senior year and we were THRILLED. he sent us cards and shit saying he was so sorry he didn’t get to teach us this year FROM THE HOSPITAL. i adore this man.

i can’t remember what the book we were reading was for the life of me, but it was about rich ass americans living in europe and the central conflict was between old money mannered americans and new money wild and free americans you know how it be.

my teacher was also so open to whatever interpretations we had but in the middle of this book we were talking about how weird it was that one of the older old-money woman was so possessive of the main character (younger dude old money) and we couldn’t really figure out why she’d care. in the middle of this, my teacher puts down his book and sighs deeply.

“they have an extramarital relationship, you know that, right?”

the entire class collectively goes, “WHAT?”

“yeah. they’re a couple. that’s why she’s always hovering around him and controlling what he does.”

mind you, this class is a group of ap students at a catholic school. no teacher would ever point something out like this. it’s not in the book. someone asks, “it’s not in the text, though?”

the man starts LAYING OUT the historical context of these ex-pat american societies and shatters our minds. he’s sleeping with her to move up in social status and her husband KNOWS ABOUT IT and doesn’t GIVE A SHIT. it’s an open secret! this woman is TWICE THE AGE of the younger dude! she’s a milf on the loose with him and he’s BOTTOMING and this is a LITERARY CLASSIC.

he finishes laying this out and we are SHOCKED. the SCANDAL. the DRAMA! it’s glorious! we’ve never been so engaged in class!

i’m so shocked by the end of it for how hard he’s blown my mind that i just stumbled out “they’re fucking?!” out of shock and awe and he looks me dead in my eyes and goes “oh yeah.”

Yeah, there’s a reason for that.

Lisa Edelstein is Jewish.  As are Idina Menzel and Amy Winehouse, both of whom I have seen compared in looks to Gothel.  Gothel’s design is a pretty clear caricature of ethnically Jewish women.  

This is a pretty good contrast between Rapunzel and Gothel.  Rapunzel has the “typical Disney face”:

Here’s a more close up look at her features.

The hooked nose becomes even more pronounced as she becomes “eviler.”

If you wanted to claim that there was noting out of the ordinary for Disney animation when it came to Gothel’s features, you would have to find at least one Disney princess or heroine with similar characteristics (long hooked nose and dark curly hair, etc).

But here is what we have is -

small noses that turn up at the end:

wide, flatter noses (though cheers to Disney for not putting button noses on their characters of color, although Esmerelda’s clothing design deserves another essay on Rromani stereotypes and there are some major issues with Pocahontas as well)

And then a few misc noses (again, props for Jasmine’s nose not being a button):

Apart from just the design of Gothel, there’s also the whole: “obviously ‘other’ (read Jewish) woman kidnaps the pretty blonde (read: gentile) kid to use her for ritualistic/magical purposes”

Like that right there on top of the aesthetic Jewish-coding is what pushed the antisemitic caricature over the top for me.  It harkens back to antisemitic blood libel that claimed that Jews stole gentile children for all manner of nefarious reasons. Even when Gothel is in “mother” role to Rapunzel, she’s is shown as nagging and passive aggressive, both antisemitic stereotypes of Jewish women.

There is no one thing that makes her an antisemitic caricature, but the design, plus the storyline she plays out, plus her characterization cement the overall character as antisemitic.  

Jew-coding a villain is not in itself always antisemitic when there are also Jewish coded heroes. Rapunzel does not have that.

Having a villain steal a baby for magical/ritualistic reasons is not always antisemitic as long as the villain is not Jew-coded.  Rapunzel fails this as well.

Having a nagging and passive aggressive mother character is not antisemitic provided that she is not, again, coded as Jewish.  Rapunzel fails once again.

Hope this helps.

Nextdoor is a forge, and I am very close with the blacksmith that works there. Every morning I bring him a freshly baked loaf of bread. As I hand it to him our hands touch briefly. His hands are rough, yet they're so careful and gentle with everything he touches. I secretly want him to be that gentle with me.

One day, he walks into my bakery, he's still sweaty from the intense heat of the forge. In his hands is a small dagger in it's sheath. He hands it to me and tells me it's to protect myself if needed.

I take the dagger out of it's sheath. It's beautifully made. There are intricate designs engraved into the metal. It's so much more complicated than anything else yeah blacksmith has ever made. It must've been so time consuming to make.

I look up at him and with just one look I understand why he's giving it to me. With one look we both understand that we love each other. He leans in and kisses me. It's so soft and sweet, and gentle.

He comes by every day to get a loaf of bread and kiss me. We keep our relationship a secret. And everyone wonders why neither of us have found wives. But we know exactly why. And we're completely content with being secret lovers.