[unknowable]

but the funniest part of this is not that they were debating the exile of a man who has been dead for over 500 years.

I do not have to reinvent the wheel every time I write fanfiction

I do not have to make every chapter's word count above 1,000 in order for it to be good

It is okay if some things don't make sense

I can write whatever I want

I am writing this shit for free

If people don't like my stuff, they can block me. If they're being mean about it, I can block them.

The most important part of writing fanfiction is having fun

Writing fanfiction is supposed to be fun

I do not have to appeal to people

This shit is fun

Really nice recipes. Every hour.

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.

book is being adapted

into a movie

I think it is super fucking important that the source be easily findable and checkable.

Because Iran is paying for Wikipedia to be scrubbed. My blog isn't scrubbed.

I also archived this article in the Wayback Machine and Archive.is in the event that something happens to the article. Because again, history is being changed in front of our eyes. So.

"dark money": "Dark money" technically refers to untraceable or difficult to trace political donations. AIPAC's donations are all out in the open. It does not in any way fit the literal definition of "dark money". What Mamdani appears to be saying here is that the money itself is "dark" or evil because AIPAC (associated with Israel and Jews) has (metaphorically) touched it.

"single goal, to preserve their power": Mamdani frames AIPAC as uninterested in specific policy or political changes--the usual reason that PACs exist. He accuses them instead of being interested in power for power's sake, which it will use to undermine the health of society. He implies a contrast with himself and the DSA, whose intentions are painted as good and pure and whose goals are implied to to hinge on creating specific political and policy changes, with any interest in gaining power merely a side effect or dirty necessity of achieving such goals. In other words, he is taking an organization that is doing the exact same things that his own organization is doing, and painting it as uniquely evil. Mamdani tends to reserve this kind of rhetoric for organizations associated with Israel and, by extension, Jews.

"turn us against each other"--this accusation makes little sense. AIPAC is an organization focused on American-Israeli relations. It has no interest in tearing apart American society. However, Jews have long been accused of trying to undermine the coherence and well-being of the societies in which they live. It is not a factual statement, but an accusation built on and promoting distrust and scapegoating of Jews.

"moral change"--this statement puts AIPAC in opposition to "moral change" and morality in general. It build on and feeds into centuries of Christian and Muslim antisemitism painting Jews as immoral, scheming, an operatives of the devil.