Music rules my mind

There was a brief period in 2021 (the “great resignation”) where it was an employee’s market, but because a lot of people changed jobs, while a small fraction of industries were able to tempt skilled employees with good salaries and benefits in order to hire and appear healthily in growth mode, the question of raises fell to the wayside even more than usual. Especially because this happened during Covid—at the time a lot of employers just completely stopped offering cost of living adjustment raises as an “emergency response” to the economy. And then…they just never picked them back up. Every year became a “challenging year” and it was normalized for a shaken-up workforce that you wouldn’t get a modest increase in wages annually. While a lot of industries especially the ones most visibly in need of wage reform like food service have had static wages for decades, a lot of our workforce in places like public service, education, manufacturing/engineering, and mid-level white collar jobs, the types of careers that, at bare minimum, exist of offset the initial investment a huge part of our generation in America has made into the 4-year college system, were able to keep their heads above water more easily if they landed a job that would at least kind of take care of their needs in this regard. It was considered a dealbreaker for many people looking to switch careers if that wasn’t offered.

I think when we talk about raises and upward mobility we associate it with middle class people making the jump from lower mid to upper mid; this is really the only major type of class mobility that exists in America. You might grow up with parents who have no savings, and eventually become the type of person who can save and take their kids to Disneyland. It’s kind of hard to see this being denied to people as a crisis given that poverty is inescapable. However I think the type of slow decline in wage stability relative to inflation is extremely scary because it actually means many people are backsliding out of even being lower middle class without realizing it. In the grand scheme of things this is a less urgent wage crisis than what effects hourly wage workers, but because of that I think a lot of people don’t realize it’s effecting them, and feel guilty or frustrated when they have what looks like a stable career and feel something slip away from them.

For example: my second salaried job out of college was at the corporate packaging & purchasing department of a major dairy supplier in Buffalo. I made $45k plus benefits in 2018, a major raise from the $15/hr I’d been making before. People in that office had had careers at the company that lasted 15, 20 years, and relied partially on a steady, expected annual reassessment and cost of living raise. Without it, their stability their salary offered them would drift away slightly every year. This is bad for many reasons, but particularly because when you grow a career somewhere, it’s likely your life grows with you in terms of costs: you start a family, maybe need to take care of your elderly parents eventually.

What I hear anecdotally though this has changed radically in almost all career fields. There is no guarantee wage increases will ever be normalized again to the degree they were pre-Covid, and inflation has increased roughly 23% since 2021. The $45k I made in 2018 is worth $33k now. That is simply true. Let’s assume that company was generous enough to raise that salary commensurate with inflation to $50k by 2021. If they had done that yearly to meet the economic realities by 2026, that person should be making $61,000. But they’re not. They’re making the material equivalent of half of that, basically. That is a massive, mind-boggling gap, and has nothing to do with the role itself, just the value of money, and a lot of people who entered the workforce in the 2020s have no idea just how much they are being denied because (like I was in 2018!) they’re in their early 20s and happy to have a salaried job. But while that salary bought me my first car and enabled me to do things like host people who weren’t able to have stable housing at my apartment, it is simply not offering that to people today.

In the mean time, some waxing strips, hair care stuff including dye or quality cutting utensils and a bit money for ear piercings would honestly help me feel less dysphoric and more like myself.

I hate asking for this help but it's kind of one of the main things fucking with my mental stability in this chapter of my life.

Setting a goal for 150 ^.^

Please don't tag. Other pay methods in the notes.

They sleep at night, even in the absence of a light cycle, because that's when the temperature drops. Unlike humans, they don't use blankets. They don't try to preserve heat. They want to cool down faster, because because that's what their body needs shut down and rest! They RELAX in the cold!

Not only that, but their version of breathing is a constant influx of cool air. If they're without that coolant for even a few minutes, they're in serious trouble, and after half an hour, they're dead. Unlike us, they're at constant risk of overheating.

But not while they have a source of cold nearby. Like, for example, a human who lives at a fraction of their temperature.

On the Hail Mary, Grace spends a lot of time pressed against Rocky. Their temperature differences are extreme enough that xenonite can't entirely halt the heat transfer, so it's pleasantly warm. He feels like a cat curling up by the fire. It's relaxing. Of course, he also feels a little bad that he's draping his freezing raincloud of a body all over Rocky, but he figures Rocky puts up with the unpleasant cold okay.

Except: Rocky is chasing the cold just as much as Grace is chasing the heat.

Most recently, a friend came over my house and saw my computer background and went, "Wow, um, I didn't know you were into that." To which I look at the picture of the well drawn muscular female minotaur in historically accurate Greek clothing and I start geeking out about how I love the detail the artist did with the clothing and I point out the period appropriate folds and pins, how the artist even inserted the native plant that was used to dye the clothing this particular shade in the background, and even how the belt has technology AND historically accurate weaving patterns on it.

Then I start explaining how I love the muscular choices of the minotaur, that I was so impressed with the artist's anatomically correct depiction of the muscles converging into the neck. That many people get an upright cow's neck wrong because cow's don't have collarbones, so it can be very difficult to merge the upper arms and a chest of a human with a cow's body. I draw her attention to the beautiful way they've merged the pectoralis major so smoothly while also staying true to how muscular they've depicted the rest of the body.

I finish up with my thoughts on the artist's bold choice to depict the minotaur as a female, and despite the underlying themes of a minotaur being violence, child murder, strength, and muscles. I segue into how unlike bulls, cow are perceived as mothers. That they are the major source of milk in human culture, and that idyllic depictions of them in a field usually depict calves frolicking nearby, yet the minotaur kills and eats children.

I finish and there is a long pause.

Some of the boldest political and emotional messages I've ever seen came from straight up no nonsense porn. It's a setting that allows people to approach a major facet of the human experience without shame or obfuscation.

Keep in mind this is coming from an asexual person-- I don't think physical desire is some foundational keystone of life without which one isn't fully human. I think it's as morally neutral as hunger and thirst, and almost as impactful on all of human culture.

So why does the fetish cancel out the art?

Our tendency to dismiss anything associated with sex or the expression of sexual desire as frivelous and meaningless leads a lot of people to forget that pornographic art is still art.

The artist didn't just jerk off on the canvas and a beautiful minotaur appeared. They didn't spend hours researching greek dyemaking and bovine anatomy just because they were horny for muscular women. And their admiration for muscular women doesn't cease to be inherently transgressive of traditional and mainstream views of femininity just because they expressed that admiration in a sexual way.

Francisco Goya's The Nude Maja is a classical masterpiece that took three years to paint and is considered one of the greatest works of art ever made. [^] It's also porn. It was commissioned by a man-- the Prime Minister in fact-- to hang in a private room specifically for his nudes where he "often retired after dinner." It's believed the model depicted may have been his mistress.

In the political climate in which it was made, depicting a fully nude woman was extremely controversial (in fact it's considered one of the earliest western works to depict a woman's pubic hair without obvious negative connotations) especially because Goya painted her looking directly at the viewer, making her an active participant in an exchange of desire, rather than a passive object.

Eight years after it was finished, the Spanish Inquisition raided the Prime Minister's home, stole The Nude Maja and all his other paintings, and put Goya on trial for "moral depravity."

Goya, who had by then been rendered deaf by an unknown illness that may have been cumulative lead poisoning and was already sinking into the deep depression that marked his later years, escaped prosecution only by arguing that The Nude Maja followed in the "respectable" tradition of the classical nude [^^] , despite the fact that the full frontal nudity, pubic hair, direct stare, and the details that established the subject as a modern, living, literal woman, not a mythological figure or allegory-- the very features for which it was considered problematic-- were substantial departures from that tradition.

He could draw enough connections between it and a "respectable" painting in that genre by another lauded Spanish artist, appeasing nationalist egos and satisfying people that he was suitably reverent of the idealized past. Therefore, it wasn't porn. It was valuable, it was a classical nude.

To a modern viewer, it is in fact, more or less indistinguishable from any classical nude, despite the fact that when it was painted, anyone who saw it could have told you it was porn.

Today, The Clothed Maja, an almost identical but less risque painting which he created directly after The Nude Maja [^^^] is one of the paintings included in Animal Crossing: New Leaf.

Another painting included in New Leaf is Beauty Looking Back by Hishikawa Moronobu. It's an arch-typical example of the ukiyo-e genre. While far from all ukiyo-e art was erotic, it's not an exaggeration to say the overwhelming majority of it was, at the very least, intended to titillate.

The very name ukiyo-e associates the genre with hedonism, courtesans, brothels and pleasure districts. Beautiful courtesans were the most common subject. Nearly every ukiyo-e master produced explicitly pornographic work at some point in their careers. [^^^^] Beauty Looking Back is a pin up. It would have been recognized in the time it was created as something inherently sensual and referential towards sex, despite not being explicit.

And yet, it's "artistic value" (I do not like this term. The value of art is not and should not be quantifiable) is so unquestionable that Nintendo included it in arguably one of the most family friendly games in their notoriously, stringently family friendly catalog.

What is a fetish, if not a non-sexual element that inspires sexual desire?

What is fetish art, if not a depiction of these non-sexual elements intended, whether explicit or not, to arouse that same desire in the viewer?

What defines something as being outside the boundaries of "normal" sexual desire? Breasts aren't a reproductive organ, they're not inherently sexual. Neither is the ass. But they do inspire sexual desire, at least in those whose cultural back ground has taught them to associate those body parts with sex.

If feeling sexual desire because of anything that isn't genitalia is a fetish, then all erotic art-- from the most explicit adult films to those Levi's billboard ads where the models are doing their best not to wear the jeans they are advertising-- is fetish art.

So when did The Nude Maja and Beauty Looking Back stop being fetish art, and become art?

When does it stop being shameful to admire the beauty and technical skill of a creative work just because it's sexual in nature?

Is it just time? Or have we let ourselves be led into imagining the past was a land of chastity and virtue, its art inherently more valuable and firmly divorced from physical desire-- where men could paint tits all day and other men pay small fortunes to commission and purchase those tit paintings all without a single impure thought-- compared to which our modern age is debauched, immoral, deviant, degenerate?

If that Minotaur was hanging in a museum with a placard that said it was painted in the 1700's, would you, or your friend, still assume it was fetish art?

If you'd come across it in a context where you knew it was sexual, would you still have stopped to notice and appreciate the skill and the research put into the details?

This was a hell of a tangent, and if OP is the kind of person who notices period accurate historical details at a glance and the particulars of bovine anatomy to the degree of being able to make an educated statement about how well someone has accounted for the musculature whilst attaching a cow head to a human body-- probably none of this art history trivia is news to you.

The point is just this. Maybe you weren't "tricked" into seeing the art before the porn.

Maybe your friend was tricked by our deeply sex negative culture into only seeing the porn and missing the art entirely.

[^]: Though he's better known on tumblr for Saturn Devouring His Son, which I'm always delighted to remind people is not a name he gave it. It wasn't discovered until after his death, so we can't know for certain what he intended to depict. The greek myth of Zeus's father eating his children was a best guess and, imo, a way of sanitizing the disturbing nature of the image by framing it as part of the classical tradition of mythological art, rendering it allegorical and academic instead of horrifying and unexplained. It was not the first time Goya's work would rendered more palatable to conservative audiences by claiming it was part of classical tradition, which brings me back to Maja.

[^^]: Physically fighting the urge to add a rant here about fascism and "degenerate" art. Just go watch Jacob Gellar's "Who's Afraid Of Modern Art." He does a better job of it than I would anyway.

[^^^]: presumably also at the Prime Minister's request, with the intention they be displayed together and not, as urban legend likes to say, because the Inquisition forced him to. The concept of creating a clothed and a naked version of the subject so that the viewer can imagine undressing them is a tradition well preserved in commissioned pornographic art today.

Tricky one cause the kernel's built around creating the need for salvation from a higher power, and you'll have to change up a lot of the systems for evaluating your own and others' moral worth to avoid operating with a deficit when there's no inbuilt release valve.