could a man love a room?

friend sent me an Instagram reel yesterday with 1000s of likes that was basically like "pride and prejudice is timeless actually because it's about an autism romance 🥰" and then the creator proceeded to cite moments in the book and film where Lizzie and Darcy are "socially awkward" and....listen. I'm far from an Austen scholar, but I have taught Austen novels as an educator and this kind of psycho-pop analysis that views characters as individuals with autonomy over their actions, rather than tools in a story written at a particular time to say something about that time, pisses me off more than I can say without sounding like an asshole. I'm sorry but Darcy isn't rude and awkward and even cruel to Lizzie because he has autism, he says and does those things because he's a wealthy upper class land owning man raised to see a middle class woman from a large family with no male heirs like Elizabeth as inherently beneath him which he expresses to her multiple times because it is socially acceptable for him to do so in a society where someone like him is privileged above almost all others. He is "socially awkward" around her because of misogyny and classism (PREJUDICE) and she is "socially awkward" around him because a woman of her standing at that time simply wouldn't have had much to do with the gentry but to actually push back against the shit that Darcy says would be social suicide for her whole family so she protests the only way she can which is refusing his advances (PRIDE). not to be the "context collapse is the death of media literacy" guy. But this is the problem with the kind of head empty, let people enjoy things, if I can't relate to it what's the point type crowd. Youse think you're being so quirky justifying incoherent and anachronistic interpretations with your rampant individualism, ensuring that other people never confront anything that challenges them in these stories like patriarchal misogyny and classism. Pride and Prejudice becomes an "autism4autism romance", completely undermining the historical context of its status as one of the great social satires about the class and gender politics that Austen so expertly observed around her. This attitude is why we have nonsensical historical dramas that actively hate history like fucking edgy bdsm "Wuthering Heights", Bridgerton, The Buccaneers, and even a 2025 Frankenstein movie where the monster is just misunderstood and does no wrong uwu etc. because individual relatability and catharsis is king over anything actually saying anything about anything now. Everything is relatable and nothing is meaningful.

Getting really tired of how all the anti porn censorship posts going around are like, "I don't like porn but I will defend it" or "it was bad for me to see porn young but it's better than the alternative." I like porn. I want to see porn. I was not damaged by seeing porn as a young person. Porn and erotica are valid and fun vehicles for artistic expression and completely normal expressions of human sexuality. We gain nothing by being squeamish in our support of porn, erotica, and nsfw content.

No, no actually, I kind of do want that fuckass dome destroyed. If it's taken as islamophobic then so be it and obviously I don't actually want it to happen because it would lead to catastrophic conflict but y'all NEED to understand it's significance to islam is literally symbolism of (((victory))) over the jews. Why do you think it was built on top of the temple ruins in the first place. And literally it wasn't even that significant, the roof used to be made of cheap lead before it was painted gold ever so coincidentally in 1959, about ten years after israel was established. All of a sudden it's now one of the most important everrr sites in islam, which you see is why they have so much connection and claim to the land since forever and why they're the true indigenous people, and it's also why those jews simply just can't visit the ruins of their single holiest site, it'd be oh-so disrespectful to the poor muslims to have filthy yahud within range of their great arts and crafts project.