look. i don’t think my stretch marks are beautiful. i don’t think they’re tiger stripes or natural tattooos. i don’t think my acne is beautiful. i don’t think the bags under my eyes are beautiful. i just think they’re human. and i don’t think i have to be beautiful all of the time in order to be accepted and loved and sucessful. i don’t think every small detail of my outer appearence needs to be translated into prettiness.
i really liked that women have a range of costuming in “the last jedi” and none of it is objectifying.
rey’s athletic, low maintenance yet stylish costuming “matures” without becoming hypersexualized. that is accomplished through adding more complexity/layering in terms of multiple colors/darker colors. and her hair style becomes more “adult” without becoming impractical for fighting.
rose dresses for her work and is too focused on the mission to mess around with fancy dress: actually, the fact that she goes to the fancy peoples’ party in her Resistance jumpsuit is a visual representation of how she rejects their phony, corrupt beauty. she sees through it and wants nothing to do with it.
and yet femininity is not associated only with phony beauty! the noble leaders leia and holdo are dressed very feminine… holdo has purple hair ffs! they’re both elegant in gorgeous colors and textures, dresses, jewelry, etc. but it’s not done in an objectifying way. they’re women dressing feminine for themselves not for the male gaze. and clearly they consider (and most people read) their dressing as an expression of authority rather than frivolity.
that part of it was SO IMPORTANT. it’s easy enough to simply only show strong female characters who are not dressed feminine. but it’s something special to show femininity that isn’t about the male gaze as well, to have that wide of a palette.
in terms of showing a wide range of women with a wide range of gender expression, it was much better than the get-up they had leia in in TFA, which seemed to imply that Leia would be disallowed from expressing her Star Wars-y feminine sense of style because she’s a general now… so everything has to be beige and blah
bull. shit.
leia would not stand for such a fool notion!
There were so many different women in TLJ, it makes me happy.
TLJ IS CHOCK-FULL OF AMAZING WOMEN WHO ARE NOT OBJECTIFIED, WHO ARE DIVERSE, YOUNG, OLD, WISE, CUNNING, EVIL!!
I DO NOT UNDERSTAND PEOPLE WHO ARE SO UP THEIR ARSE THEY DON’T THINK IT’S FEMINIST ENOUGH.
Asdfghjkl!!!
I particularly appreciated Holdo and Leia’s farewell. There were some beautiful hand shots in this movie, and theirs with two pairs of hands dripping with Space Jewelry (apparently Carrie Fisher insisted the movie needed more Space Jewelry! ❤ ) was a highlight for me. It’s like a visual + costume extravaganza version of passing the Bechdel Test; a scene of conspicuously feminine emotional connection between two Resistance leaders and old friends.
Participatory democracy begins at home. If you are planning to implement your politics, there are certain things to remember.
1. He is feeling it more than you. He’s losing some leisure and you’re gaining it. The measure of your oppression is his resistance.
2. A great many American men are not accustomed to doing monotonous, repetitive work which never issues in any lasting, let alone important, achievement. This is why they would rather repair a cabinet than wash dishes. If human endeavors are like a pyramid with man’s highest achievements at the top, then keeping oneself alive is at the bottom. Men have always had servants (us) to take care of this bottom stratum of life while they have confined their efforts to the rarefied upper regions. It is thus ironic when they ask of women-Where are your great painters, statesmen, etc.? Mme. Matisse ran a military shop so he could paint. Mrs. Martin Luther King kept his house and raised his babies.
3. It is a traumatizing experience for someone who has always thought of himself as being against any oppression or exploitation of one human being by another to realize that in his daily life he has been accepting and implementing (and benefiting from) this exploitation; that his rationalization is little different from that of the racist who says, “Black people don’ t feel pain’ (women don’t mind doing the shitwork); and that the oldest form of oppression in history has been the oppression of 50 percent of the population by the other 50 percent.
4. Arm yourself with some knowledge of the psychology of oppressed peoples everywhere, and a few facts about the animal kingdom. I admit playing top wolf or who runs the gorillas is silly but as a last resort men bring it up all the time. Talk about bees. If you feel really hostile bring up the sex life of spiders. They have sex. She bites off his head. The psychology of oppressed peoples is not silly. Jews, immigrants, black men and all women have employed the same psychological mechanisms to survive’ admiring the oppressor, glorifying the oppressor, wanting to be like the oppressor, wanting the oppressor to like them, mostly because the oppressor held all the power.
5. In a sense, all men everywhere are slightly schizoid-divorced from the reality of maintaining life. This makes it easier for them to play games with it. It is almost a cliché that women feel greater grief at sending a son off to a war or losing him to that war because they bore him, suckled him, and raised him. The men who foment those wars did none of those things and have a more superficial estimate of the worth of human life. One hour a day is a low estimate of the amount of time one has to spend “keeping” oneself. By foisting this off on others, man has seven hours a week-one working day more to play with his mind and not his human needs. Over the course of generations it is easy to see whence evolved the horrifying abstractions of modern life.
6. With the death of each form of oppression, life changes and new forms evolve. English aristocrats at the turn of the century were horrified at the idea of enfranchising working men-were sure that it signaled the death of civilization and a return to barbarism. Some working men were even deceived by this line. Similarly with the minimum wage, abolition of slavery, and female suffrage. Life changes but it goes on. Don’t fall for any line about the death of everything if men take a turn at the dishes. They will imply that you are holding back the revolution (their revolution). But you are advancing it (your revolution).
7. Keep checking up. Periodically consider who’s actually doing the jobs. These things have a way of backsliding so that a year later once again the woman is doing everything. After a year make a list of jobs the man has rarely if ever done. You will find cleaning pots, toilets, refrigerators and ovens high on the list. Use time sheets if necessary. He will accuse you of being petty. He is above that sort of thing (housework). Bear in mind what the worst jobs are, namely the ones that have to be done every day or several times a day. Also the ones that are dirty-it’s more pleasant to pick up books, newspapers, etc., than to wash dishes. Alternate the bad jobs. It’s the daily grind that gets you down. Also make sure that you don’ t have the responsibility for the housework with occasional help from him. “I’ll cook dinner for you tonight” implies it’s really your job and isn’t he a nice guy to do some of it for you.
8. Most men had a rich and rewarding bachelor life during which they did not starve or become encrusted with crud or buried under the liner. There is a taboo that says women mustn’ t strain themselves in the presence of men-we haul around 50 pounds of groceries if we have to but aren’t allowed to open a jar if there is someone around to do it for us. The reverse side of the coin is that men aren’t supposed to be able to take care of themselves without a woman. Both are excuses for making women do the housework.
9. Beware of the double whammy. He won’t do the little things he always did because you’re now a “Liberated Woman,” right? Of course he won’t do anything else either….
I was just finishing this when my husband came in and asked what I was doing. Writing a paper on housework. Housework? he said. Housework? Oh my god how trivial can you get? A paper on housework.
During my first month with my therapist, I was given this worksheet to read and work on. She noticed that while I was talking with her, that my thoughts followed a lot of these. I wasn’t aware that my anxiety had brought me down paths of low self-worth and stinky thinking.
After a couple of weeks of talking with her, she gave me this worksheet to work on.
While, at first, I thought these weren’t going to work out, I was very surprised to see just how easy they were to use . My homework at that time was to identify which sort of thinking I used on the regular and which ones would best challenge them for me.
So, what do you think? Do any of the maladaptive thinking patterns sound like you? which ways would you like to untwist your thinking?
what if when icarus fell apollo caught him before he hit the sea, arms as warm as the sun, but safer.
what if when ariadne cast the rope across a broken branch aphrodite stepped in with a reminder that this, this is not the kind of love you die for.
what if when achilles was ready for war ares appeared with a smile and said “you win well when you win, but what are you unwilling to lose if you lose?” and achilles knew the answer.
if you could retell the tale wouldn’t you want to tell it kinder? wouldn’t you want to give them peace, even love, where you could?
tbh nothing is weirder to me than manly grimdark dudebro lord of the rings bc it’s just??? the epitome of light and love to me???? no narrative embodies hope and gentleness and healing like lotr does why must you insist on talking to me about badass aragorn vs. useless frodo. that’s not the point brad
I feel like this is also why so many of the post-LOTR Tolkien ripoffs are so terrible! It’s people pulling from Tolkien when they fundamentally don’t understand what makes Tolkien work. You get all these stories written by people who don’t think Frodo was worthy of his plotline and so they give it to their Aragorn expy instead, and it’s dull and boring and totally lacks the themes and the heart that make LOTR an important, enduring story.
when Aragorn shows up in Gondor no one cares who he is until he gets to the Houses of Healing, because the proof of true kingship is not being able to fight real good, it’s having “the hands of a healer”
so Aragorn calls his friends back from the darkness with little more than a gentle touch and a loving voice (and some plants, but it’s pretty clear that the plants alone aren’t enough) and that’s when the rumors spread through Gondor that the King has returned because the love of a king has this great power
like… that’s the big moment. washing his friends’ wounds and telling them they’re going to be okay. this is not macho! it’s not badass! I mean… in a way it’s actually really fucking badass that someone can get stabbed by a knife made of evil and Aragorn doesn’t even have to raise his voice when he says “not today,” but it’s not, like, standard fantasy badass.
Tolkien lived through a war. War is not entertaining and epic, it’s horrifying and terrible. That’s why all the climatic moments of LOTR aren’t battles, but decisions of love: Sam going back for Frodo, Bilbo giving Bard the Arkenstone, Aragorn healing Merry and Eowyn…
Where modern fantasy falls short is they think a war setting is the key to Tolkien’s success, so they describe warrior-man and the gorey, rapey, traumatizing things he does/sees (looking at u, SOIAF). But it’s not about fighting the war, it’s about living through it and loving despite it. Bilbo Baggins slept through his battles, Frodo and Sam (arguably, the main heroes) never fought or killed, a woman & hobbit defeated the witch-king out of love for their lord, not for power or fame. LOTR isn’t a story of war bc Tolkien had already seen that, it’s the story of hope.
The most telling and terrible moment for me in all of LotR is nowhere in the main quest. It’s the Scouring of the Shire. What must it have been like to come home from the war to blitzkrieg-ravaged cities, to continued rationing? What must it have been like to see the occupied territories while he fought and know this was someone else’s home?
The Hobbit and LotR were written by a veteran and incorporated his own experiences of what was possibly the war with the largest death toll in human history in its time. The violence is realistic, but it’s not the point. Like the rest of his generation, Tolkien was writing about what happens to the survivors.
Why do you think Aragorn forgives Boromir? Why does Boromir get a heroic death and funeral? Because he’s not an antagonist. His only guilt is to wish for an easy way out for his people, to spare them. Yeah, it wasn’t going to work, but it’s hard to blame him. It disturbs me how many characters in modern fantasy appear to be twisted homages to Boromir – traitors who only think of power for themselves.
Glorifying war and atrocities in Tolkien’s name is one of the grossest elements of modern fantasy. He would be appalled, I think.
im a bad person who thinks bad thoughts like ‘ew what is that girl wearing’ and then remember that im supposed to be positive about all things and then think ‘no she can wear what she wants, fuck what other people say damn girl u look fabulous’ and im just a teeny bit hypocritical tbh
I was always taught by my mother, That the first thought that goes through your mind is what you have been conditioned to think. What you think next defines who you are.
ealdor 