visual_pleasure.pdf

actually, I am interested in this - do you prefer insincere deference or somebody who outright disagrees with your politics? if you had to pick. I like your blog, but I don't agree with you on occasion, and I admit the way you post about white women reminds me of women with husbands posting vociferously about misandry/KAM. Which I personally find amusing if anything. On the note of Wilson, sadly I feel a lot of classicists are just like that, lots of guiltpride to go around regarding pseudowhiteness of Greek culture, but the real giveaway is the fact she's on Bluesky. It reminds me of one of my lecturers who was an anarchocapitalist and ran a very active Twitter account. Classicists just shouldn't be allowed on social media. That being said, I do wish people just read Wilson's review as just that - a review from one particularly notable classicist - who is markedly not somebody with an interest in folkloric studies writ large and it shows.

Thank you for reading my ask etc. and hope you and baby are doing well

whenever i get an ask that uses my wife’s race as a gotcha i have to admit i feel a bit confused as to why it isn’t clear that my criticisms of white women as a class don’t apply to every individual woman. if my criticisms don’t apply to you, then they are not about you.

i married my wife before i had much of a racial consciousness. would i still make the choice to marry a white woman today? probably not. but i am glad i met her when i did, because she is my soulmate.

i’m not on twitter or tiktok but this isn’t a new phenomenon, i assure you. at least once a year this discourse explodes.

black women are sensitive to this issue because they are the only community of women besides prostitutes who are impacted by HIV at a statistically significant level. this is because black men choose to fuck other men on the DL and they bring HIV and sundry other diseases back to their female partners. this situation is the result of a mixture of misogyny, homophobia, and patriarchy. so if folks want to criticize homophobia (or “biphobia”) in the community then they need to address the root of it: patriarchy and toxic masculinity, internalized by all and leading to tragic outcomes (women and babies unknowingly infected with STDs that ruin their lives).

but i’m not one to let these gay dudes get off (unfortunate word choice) without scrutiny either. while they do exist in a community hostile to gay men, they also exist in a world where condoms and prep are easily available. but they have no regard for their female partners or women in general so they don’t take prophylactic measures.

callum’s new movie. totally wasted on his fandom. a premise only i could love. i heard the execution is … not great, but it’s the thought that counts, isn’t it? jamie bell plays jack, by the way, and it moves me to a fit of derisive chuckling to imagine an entire family being psychosexually obsessed with billy elliot himself. you’re telling me elle fanning and callum are screwing up their whole lives to fuck their brother? and he’s their brother?

why did hotd take a character that was, in the source material, essentially just a charismatic teen boy with a dragon being raised by his dour uncle and turn it into a story where they heavily imply this sweet, submissive, and obedient boy is being raped by his flamboyant and seemingly actually insane uncle? i do appreciate that the dialogue highlights how ormund is, for lack of a better term, homophobic because that makes it clear he isn’t supposed to read as a gay villain and more as a cruel and craven pervert who is taking advantage of his power over this kid in every way imaginable. which tracks with the reality of how incestuous abuse works. between that and heleana asking her mother why she forced her to marry her own brother, it seems the show is finally engaging with the elephant in the room.

but, like, why now and with these characters? and why is condal denying what his own show is heavily alluding to in the dialogue (“i do what i can to keep him from, you know” and “you’re his little treasure” and basically everything daeron and gwayne discuss …)

speaking of, why is gwayne suddenly gay? it’s almost presented as a narrative counterweight. noble gwayne the honorable homosexual versus ormund the craven child molester who makes relentless gay jokes as a form of projection … again where is this coming from? and why is only a tiny subset of the fandom even talking about it? is it because the writing on hotd is so trash we all just accept whatever happens without reflection? 😭 i’m invested but i have so many questions from a narrative perspective …

anyway i was listening to the backlog of this podcast called youre wrong about and they read jessica simpson's autobiography for it. i did not know who jessica simpson was until i listened to this podcast. she seems to be the type of celebrity that ppl like me boo and hiss at but i found myself empathizing with her unfortunate run of luck through life when it comes to relationships and health. the 2000s were a lot more fucked up then a lot of ppl care to remember. i was also really struck by how her relationship with her husband was so horrendous and she was so isolated from the normal human world that, when filming the dukes of hazzard movie, she fell in love with johnny knoxville of all ppl bc he was nice to her and didnt treat her like she was stupid. he was basically her manic pixie dream boy bc he talked to her about hunter s thompson and the ramones. i cannot imagine how dogshit her life was at that point that the guy with 16 concussions from jackass was the only man around that treated her with basic common decency. insane. absolutely insane. what was in the water back then?

it is always interesting to hear the perspective of young folks on the 00s. the near-universal perception seems to be that it was a brutal environment for a girl child to be raised in, and i suppose that’s true, but i wasn’t cognizant of it. i of course felt bad about myself, but i let it roll off my back. it’s funny, because i feel much more impacted by the culture now, and i am made more miserable by it. i think being an immature kid who didn’t take anything seriously, didn’t think too deeply about anything other than my books and fandoms, protected me. i was a late bloomer, not really caring about my own personal image until college because i was so depressed and miserable in my home situation, as i’ve alluded to before. perhaps if i was a more feminine and culturally engaged child i would felt more connected to and hurt by the rampant cultural misogyny, but i simply wasn’t. i do think young women and girls have it far worse now, with the threat of technology being used to sexually harass them.

Today’s library garden harvest! The kids were very excited for our first ear of corn.