that one duck

The students all take turns telling him about themselves, what they like, what they want to do, who they are, and Grace in turn tells them about the names they make him think of, and the stories (fictional and real) that go with them, and the kids get to pick the ones they like.

It’s a beautiful exchange of cultures and personal experiences, and every class is unique (one class ends up entirely named after niche Star Trek characters after requests from multiple students result in “Earth culture storytime” devolving into Grace infodumping about his favorite show and everyone becomes obsessed). 

the pottery i just bought with my husband's drachmas featuring an owl dressed up like a soldier:

And my dad and brothers? Were deeply disturbed by the movie Jennifer’s Body. I was flabbergasted. It’s not scary! It’s not even that gory. But they were horrified by it. These men who grew up on 70s slashers were legitimately shook by 90 minutes of Megan Fox eating a few teenage boys, mostly off-screen.

Similarly, my all-male reading panel for my thesis? Were so disturbed by my synopsis of the film Teeth that they couldn’t even talk about it. One of them said he couldn’t look at his wife for a week after reading it.

Again, grown-ass men who study and teach media for a living. Who definitely watch and enjoy horror movies. One of whom was a huge Tarantino buff. We watched and read worse in his intro to mass media class! But one movie about a girl whose vag could bite was enough to haunt him.

Then of course you have things like the Gone Girl backlash–men yelling that Amy Dunne is evil and women clamoring to assure everyone that they know she is not someone to emulate–the backlash against Carol Danvers, and, more recently, the griping from MRAs against the upcoming film Hustlers, which is about strippers scamming their Wall Street clients.

My conclusion? Most men–at least most straight, cisgender men, who are both my sample population and most of the ones whining that Carol is a “villain”–are perfectly fine with, and desensitized to, media where men do violence to women (horror movies), or men do violence to men (horror and action movies). They’re even sort of fine when women do violence to women (“ooooo cat fight!”).

But they get intensely uncomfortable when women are depicted doing any kind of violence to men, especially in films that tilt the balance of power to the other side of the m/f gender binary beyond a single moment or scene.

So woman as flesh-eating monster with men as her preferred cuisine? Woman who responds to unwanted sexual contact by biting it off? Woman who frames her cheating husband for murder? Woman whose response to harassment–behavior that many of the loudest whiners know is both creepy and reflective of their own thoughts/actions–is to break something?

Too scary. Unacceptable. Disturbing. These men hate being presented with the idea, even in fiction, that their position of power is socially constructed, that it could easily be flipped the other way. It terrifies them.

In feeling that terror, they experience a tiny modicum of what living, existing, moving, being perceived as a woman in the world is like.

in a series with multiple instances of men beating, humiliating, and occasionally killing female sex workers, including at least one main character and several sympathetic side characters. and two other main female characters being threatened with rape at various points

Not sure what happened to Navi in the end. My headcanon is that fairies for quests + healing "move on" after they fulfill their role for angst (but also because I can't imagine Navi leaving unless she had to?? that's her boy??), but regardless, I imagine Navi would dance around the topic of her departure.