HereAndGone
17d ago
because for all her whoring she doesn’t seem all that damaged
'The most valuable things about me are my tits'? That's not striking you as unusual for a smart woman? I don't know, I get from that short piece about her upbringing why she wants to retreat into merely the physical and shut off her mind, because of the early experiences of constantly being hyper-sensitive and also having to be hyper-conscious and in control of every word and action - reverting to animal instinct is a welcome relief and I understand that part of the benefits people find in being submissive is sinking into that state of not having to think or do or be in control, just be a body moved about and reacting to stimuli under the direction of another.
But even there, she wants attention for her sexuality to be seen, to be desired, to be valued. And if she thinks that "I have until I'm 35 to enjoy being hot, then when I'm 35-45 I'll have to work at it" - then what? 45 and there's nothing there anyone cares about in her anymore, because her tits are no longer perky and there are other sets of 20-30 year old hot tits out there? That's kinda sad, and I hope she has more going on once her sexual attractiveness wanes. I hope she has people who like her for being Aella, not for being "hot tits girl".
HereAndGone
17d ago
As to my own opinion, I don't think she's damaged, because for one, she doesn't think she's damaged.
But something is off-kilter where she admits her hygiene habits changed because someone said "I don't wash my hair" (and now we have Aella happily revealing that she has had more sexual encounters than showers in a given period). That's... extraordinarily vulnerable to suggestion, where I'm sure the person who said they didn't wash their hair never meant it to be taken as "and so you should stop getting washed at all".
Is that due to her weird abusive upbringing, or to some quirk of her psychology where she was an over-sensitive child who imagined catastrophic outcomes? I have no idea. But I don't think that can be parsed as "oh it's perfectly normal and fine".
HereAndGone
17d ago
“aella is dumb, because child aella was afraid of pain”,
That's not what I meant, and I expressed myself badly. I'm saying that she was old enough to work out that refusing would only lead to more beating, that this is exactly what happened, and that she was unable to motivate herself to grit her teeth and accept immediate pain in order to avoid future pain. That probably ties in with the "I used to cry when hitting the pinata because people were looking at me" part about over-sensitivity and over-thinking. Yes, it was a horrible choice. Yes, her father was wrong.
HereAndGone
17d ago
No no no, you're forgetting the very vital sub-plot of the Former Love Interest showing back up! The ex-fiancée, the old flame, the childhood sweetheart - the threat who is hot and sexy and successful and a tigress and everything the main female character is not, and the male love interest either diverts his attention to her and it looks like they'll get back together, or the old flame does all she can to break up male love interest and female love interest.
That leads to the satisfying set-up where male love interest shows up, demonstrates his scorn for old flame because she has shown herself to be untrustworthy/only trying to use him for status and wealth/he was only trying to make female love interest jealous, and reaffirms that he has chosen female love interest over hot successful tigress, and then the ripping off clothes with his teeth scene follows 😁
The sub-sub-plot to that one is the distaff version of new/former love interest showing up for the female love interest. A nice guy (and I don't mean that ironically); someone supportive, different to the male love interest in not being dismissive and curt to her, a guy who is handsome and successful and desirable in his own right (but still not quite the equal of the alpha hot guy), someone who genuinely cares about her. Alas, he is destined to be friendzoned because he just doesn't have that spark, but he is understanding and bows out courteously because he realises that she and alpha guy are destined to be together. This is comforting reading for the consumer of such novels, because it demonstrates that the female love interest (who is the vicarious stand-in for the reader) has options, she's not just doomed to be dumped by the hot guy, she don't need him after all she can always get another guy who truly wants her for who she is.
Writing a romance novel, even a formulaic one, is a lot tougher than you think - way back I was part of an online group that tried doing the traditional tropes in an ironic way and we didn't get very far because writing is indeed hard. I'm given to understand there's a lot more sex in modern romance novels because times indeed change, and waiting for the wedding bells ending isn't enough, so the female and male love interests can get it on a lot earlier and indeed more frequently (while still going through the 'will they, won't they/he loves me, he loves me not' travails until the happy ending).
Cap is the Marvel version of Superman. The idealism is the point. Whether it's starting out as 40s literal "punch a Nazi" or 60s "Vietnam is not what we're about" or 00s Civil War "this is authoritarianism", or whatever they're currently doing with the character, the ideal of Captain America is what is best about America, its foundational myths, its aspirations, the shining city on the hill. The land of opportunity. The nation of immigrants, where you can leave the shackles of the Old World behind and have a fresh start, work hard, succeed on your merits, with nobody holding you down because of out-worn social classes like nobility and peasantry or because your lot in life is predetermined.
If you make the character dark'n'gritty Punisher type, you fundamentally misunderstand what it's about and you wreck it, so you either create a new different character to be the new dark'n'gritty pragmatist, or (as the development seems to have been with the John Walker character) retcon the retcon so it fits the ideals better (maybe our current ideals are feminist anti-racist pro-woke Cap, but the character is still a representation of idealism and not 'shoot 'em all, let God sort 'em out' pragmatism and cynicism).
HereAndGone
17d ago
For instance, you could pay someone to actually have sex with you while telling you you're a loser.
I believe that is the sub-type of kink known as humiliation kink? And the ultimate humiliation, I guess, is that you're not even good enough to use as a disposable fuck toy. Look, I dunno, even normal vanilla sex is not my thing so I have no idea how the wiring for the kinky stuff goes. Maybe it's all by degrees: you start off with having sex while being insulted, but after a while that's no longer good enough so you need more.
HereAndGone
17d ago
given how insane of a concept it is to pay a sex worker to aggressively not have sex with you
Kink is not rational insert shrug emoji It's like the old joke:
Masochist: Beat me, beat me!
Sadist: No.
HereAndGone
17d ago
Maybe using capitals? anti-Woke Right is different to anti-Woke right? Though I agree, it's confusing all round.
As to the videos - I don't know the guy, it's cheeky of me to put forward opinions on his personal morality, but it's a tough one. The gay acceptance/gay marriage movement pushed hard on mainstreaming as representing "no, all that stuff about gays being degenerate is propaganda, they just want to get married and have kids like you".
And then the guy has his sex tapes released and oops yeah gay widower with kids is engaging in kink with prostitutes. Well, just like straight guys too so I suppose that is true equality!
I have to agree that this particular kink isn't the worst example of perversity that it could be, just second-hand embarrassment for anyone who doesn't share those kinks. I think we as a society probably are gone past any surviving standards of "public figures should behave decorously" never mind "private citizens shouldn't be frequenting prostitutes".
I still don't understand why the hell people make sex tapes (or take nudes for their partners) in the first place, though. We have plenty of examples of how that goes bad - the tapes get leaked, you break up and your ex uses the nudes for revenge porn, or even in the first place while you're still together they're sharing those private images around with their friends.
HereAndGone
17d ago
but frankly I'd hardly be less skeptical of any mother pushing a ten-year-old into a modeling career.
I am definitely in agreement with that. What I find repugnant is all the cheerleading by the media coverage over it. We have more than enough stories of modelling being a career that can be destructive for adults, but shoving a ten year old into being a LGBT role model in an industry that devours and spits out young hopefuls is meant to be a heart-warming success story and not one of "here's a parent willing to throw their kid into a meat grinder so the parent gets attention and head-pats".
HereAndGone
17d ago
Some eight year olds do. Some learn to do so. Some have parental duties shoved on them. The perversity in that situation was that to avoid pain she had to volunteer for pain.
HereAndGone
17d ago
It's not conditioning, I understand why she didn't want to go over and be beaten. But she was old enough to figure out "if I hesitate, I'll get beaten again; more beating is worse every time; do relatively small pain now and avoid greater pain later".
That's hard! Of course it's hard! But she's smart, and wasn't stupid as a child, she just was stuck in the moment and it wasn't until her brain shut down that she finally broke the cycle. It was abusive, but people in abusive situations learn to adapt to avoid the worst outcomes. "If I go over I'll be beaten, no no no" is the natural reaction. But it's like the stupid gom-jabbar test in Dune: learn to shut down the animal reaction so you can survive. I think she did learn to do that later. Her father wasn't pointlessly cruel, he stopped beating her as soon as she obeyed (that's deliberate cruelty, I'm not trying to claim it was anything but that). The worst abuser is the one who doesn't need an excuse, one who would have beaten her even if she obeyed. When there are rules in place, you learn to game the rules.
I realise I sound like I'm being very hard on a young child in pain, and that's valid. But I think there's also a real question of nature versus nurture: how much of her current psychology is the result of reaction to the way she was raised, and how much was a very over-sensitive in a pathological way state that would have reacted badly even in conventional parenting situations?
Her description of her childhood rearing is indeed terrible, but I can see ordinary not-terrible parents deciding that an over-sensitive child who (for instance) is reduced to fits of tears at a birthday party simply because "other people are looking at me!" needs something to toughen them up a bit, and that the kid has to be compelled to do this for their own good (cruel to be kind). "If you don't do X, you won't get Y" is part of ordinary child-raising. If you gave up on "oh no, they hate it, they're crying and begging, we won't do it" and let the kid off, then there's a good chance they'll just become ever more introverted and sensitive, won't learn how to deal with adverse events or "I don't like this but it has to be done" and you'll end up doing more harm in the long run.
The parents didn't force her to keep doing karate, and I think she doesn't understand why. It wasn't "oh they weren't totally cruel after all", it was that the aim had been achieved: she learned to power through and do something she found personally unpleasant. That was the lesson: no, even if you are 'burning with shame and have tears pouring down your face' the dreaded outcome isn't that bad after all. You didn't die. People were not laughing at you. You got through it and the world did not end. Think of exposure therapy. It needn't have been karate class, it could just as well have been a dance class and young Aella was working herself up into imaginary fears of "the others are toddlers! people will think I'm a toddler! they will be laughing at me for being so stupid and dumb and useless that I have to go in with toddlers!"
That doesn't mean that beating a child eleven times is a good thing after all, but rather that some of the treatment was normal child-raising. My parents made me do things as a kid that I loathed, and in the long run they were right. I have to do things even today that I hate (going out in public and mingling with people, for one) and that early experience has given me the tools to cope. If my parents had let me off because 'burning with shame and tears pouring down', I'd be a news story by now about "hoarder hermit had to be rescued by social services, never set foot outside front door in thirty years, house is condemned as unfit for human habitation".
HereAndGone
17d ago
I haven't been following the comics but my impression was that Walker was kind of a proto-Homelander (starting out as Super-Patriot, a villain or at least anti-hero). So Bucky/Winter Soldier, who was there at the start with Original Cap, surely has a lot of opinions about pretenders to the title:
The character of John Walker was first introduced as the supervillain Super-Patriot in Captain America #323 (November 1986). Mark Gruenwald created Walker to counter the general message in Captain America of patriotism being invariably good, describing him as someone "who embodied patriotism in a way that Captain America didn't—a patriotic villain." He said, "Basically, I just wanted to do the opposite of Steve Rogers. Okay, Steve Rogers is a poor northern urban boy. So I'll make a guy from rural middle-class south. Cap is now old, so this guy'll be a real young up-and-comer. Cap has lofty ideals, so I'll make Super-Patriot be more realistic and more pragmatic. So, I put together his background and character traits by playing the opposite game."
I do like how the general aura of Cap means that even the grittier reboot version gradually becomes more heroic to fit the ideal 😀
But yeah, that would have been too deep for this kind of movie.
HereAndGone
18d ago
The "I'm totally bi even though I've never done nothing about it" if confined to silly girls (and women) is relatively harmless, it's when they start trying to make this An Identity and pushing it on others that it becomes a nuisance. No, you're not queer. No, I don't care. No, don't try and tell me you are being persecuted because you are 'straight passing'. The fun part of the irony there is that they're doing this about the LGBT++++ set being insufficiently falling over themselves to celebrate the wondrousness of the "so bi it's invisible" lot; now they have to deal with the obnoxious 'I am so a real queer' types the way straight people had to deal with the obnoxious 'I'm the only gay in the village' types.
HereAndGone
18d ago
Aella did have a weird and indeed abusive childhood, but mixed in with it there's bits where the parents were not being unreasonable. A kid that is so sensitive they burst into tears because "people will be looking at me" does need to learn how to handle being in public. When one of my nephews was a kid, they were very sensitive and lacking in confidence, so his parents signed him up for a taekwondo class. And he did like it, and it made a huge difference in coming out of his shell. So for "burning with shame and tears streaming down my cheeks" Aella, the parents were not in fact being cruel to insist "you have to do this or else".
Also for someone smart, she acted kinda dumb. "Oh no, if I do this thing, I'll be punished" but she can't figure out - e.g. with the spankings - "okay, grit my teeth, suffer this one, and then I'm free". Instead it took eleven beatings until she worked out "do it and get it over with". I'm sorry for her, but she definitely was not the sharpest tool in the box when figuring out how to deal with the situation. Probably because she was so over-sensitive and over-emotional, hence the karate lessons were the kind of outside distraction she did need to learn how to toughen up.
I know that sounds unsympathetic, but there really are parts of her story where I can't help but go "okay, this thing here? this was in fact good for you". Like this little anecdote:
And I had very normal hygiene habits for many years after leaving home - it was only after meeting a girl with gorgeous hair who told me “oh my secret? I just don’t wash it” when I started experimenting with weird stuff.
Yeeeeah. Someone who stops washing because somebody else said they didn't wash their hair (probably meaning they didn't wash it every day, or didn't use commercial shampoos rather than their own homemade blend of eggs and beer) is someone way too easily influenced and without any sense of "is this going too far?" I probably would have forced baby Aella to go to karate classes, too.
HereAndGone
18d ago
If you watch just a few of them you can start to see the formula
Which sounds exactly like the romance novel formula (at least as it was back when I was reading them as a teenager). So that's probably why they work: guys are likely not going to be watching romance movies/shows, women are, this is the successful formula for women's romance novels.
HereAndGone
18d ago
I recently watched the newest Marvel movie, Thunderbolts.
You have my condolences.
I only saw photos of the cast and I was going "Who the hell are these people, I recognise nobody except Sebastian Stan who must be playing Bucky/Winter Soldier" and while they seem to have a Captain America in the movie, I think that is a wasted chance to have Bucky and Fake Cap arguing it out over "who is Captain America, what does he mean to the public?" - I'm presuming this is more along the line of "wacky gang of misfits get together and pull through for the greater cause", is it?
Seeing as how puberty is when we start the process of growing up, I wouldn't be at all surprised. If you try freezing your bodily development at the stage of eleven years of age, why expect this won't happen to the brain as well? And even reversing and going off puberty blockers would, I imagine, have effects too: at the least, you've held back natural development for a period of time that now you are trying to catch up on, and at worst it's the same way that smoking does have an effect on your lungs even after you stopped smoking (if you adopt all healthy habits after quitting smoking, this has a much better outcome long-term).
HereAndGone
18d ago
I think I've made my peace with adults deciding to take hormones and wear the wrong clothing and try embarrassingly to talk like the opposite sex
'Free, white, and twenty-one' as the saying used to be (though now that's racist for including 'white'). If you're a legal adult and not harming anyone else, okay, fuck your own life up. When it comes to minor children, we need to be a hell of a lot more careful.
I happen to think the world is considerably better for having trans people in it,
I've been through this before with the self-affirming, ego-stroking, this is a reaction to being rejected but don't you dare point that out that we're feeling hurt and trying to soothe ourselves that "well of course being queer is so much better than being silly old boring cis het! we queers are so special and creative and brave and exciting! without us there would be no science and art or nice things! white bread!"
Gee who would have thought that raising a generation on this would result in every kid trying to indicate that "in fact I am a bisexual non-binary femme and not a cis straight girl, even though I've only dated guys and am married to one", because being cis het is not only boring and dull but also bad and wicked and systemically oppressive?
And we're getting it now with the trans thing. And I think it serves the genuine trans people poorly, because the fringe cases, the extremists, the batshit insane, and the 'hop on the trend bandwagon' types are getting all the publicity and making ordinary people think "well if this is what trans means, I want nothing to do with it".
Maybe you think "hurrah, a ten year old trans model!" (who is now thirteen) is an improvement for the world, I look at that and go "a manipulative crazy bitch conditioned her kid into this because she's the extreme form of a Stage Mother and is using the kid for attention and praise reflected back on her". Munchausen's By Proxy involves adults causing genuine harm to the child in order to make the adult feel better. I think that's what is going on here, and instead of heaping praise on the Brave and Stunning mothers like Dee McMaher and Jeannette Jennings we should be taking the kids away and giving them a chance to breathe and figure out if they're really trans, or gay, or just needing help navigating difficult circumstances.
HereAndGone
18d ago
I'm against it, because I think it's mental illness the same way that having schizophrenia is mental illness. Does this mean that we should be mean to schizophrenics? No. Should we refuse them treatment? No. But also should we as a society adopt the ruling that "if Jane says that the spy cameras in the pipes are watching her, we all agree this is so and we hang up blankets over the walls"? No. We tell Jane there are no spy cameras in the pipes, we don't pretend "of course there are spy cameras in the pipes and this is normal and natural".
I think Rowling started out more supportive because she is more socially liberal (e.g. why the hell come out with "and Dumbledore is gay" for one?) but the backlash to "hey maybe don't put biological male bodies into rape crisis shelters" that she just wanted to set up death camps to murder all trans people pushed her to the limit.
HereAndGone
18d ago
I think it did happen during industrialisation for white collar work, though. Previously, you had a clerk writing documents all day. Maybe he could do ten letters a day (figure pulled out of the air, not backed up by data). The Victorian postal system was incredible; in London you would have multiple daily deliveries of post (so it was possible to write a letter in the morning, post it, and have a reply by the evening).
This wasn't happening in a vacuum, things like the expansion of the railways meant faster travel and now it was possible to send and receive goods over longer distances.
Then the typewriter gets invented. Now your productivity in the office has skyrocketed (relatively). Now you can do ten letters in the morning! Naturally, no employer is going to pay workers to sit around for the rest of the day, or go home after half a day's work. Now that your output is more than ten letters per day, your employer wants you to do twenty letters per day, because now the business can grow to support that.
And typewriters were the thing that made startups (to use a comparison) possible. Now women could work. Now you could buy your own typewriter and set up as a secretarial service for small local businesses that maybe didn't or couldn't afford to employ a clerk, but did need documents written (or typed) up. The new job of "typist" was created:
The typewriter appeared in the latter half of the 19th century, a period of massive industrial and societal change. The Industrial Revolution had paved the way for the increasing dominance of big business, bringing fundamental changes to ways of working. As bureaucracy increased, so did the requirement for documentation and processing. With the emergence of the typewriter and the need to create documents quickly, a new role developed: that of the typist.
...One woman who took advantage of the opportunities offered by typewriters was Ethelinda Hadwen. Born in Lancashire in 1863, she was the daughter of a cotton mill owner, studying in Paris during her teens. After returning to the UK in 1886, she opened a typewriting office in Edinburgh with her business partner Elizabeth Fleming. The office provided typing services to local firms and was the first of its kind in Scotland. The average typewriter office employed four or five people, usually women, and offered typing and translating for businesses, banks, lawyers, authors, architects, and professors. These were businesses where women weren't only workers, but unusually for the time, also employers.
Now costs came down and productivity soared. And gradually the role of "secretary" no longer meant "a job for a man, possibly a university graduate, who will deal with more than just correspondence" and became "a job for a woman who can type and take dictation but is a vocational training job".
By 1891, the time of publication of this Sherlock Holmes story, typewriters as the new office tech were commonplace enough that they could be used in crime:
“It is a curious thing,” remarked Holmes, “that a typewriter has really quite as much individuality as a man’s handwriting. Unless they are quite new, no two of them write exactly alike. Some letters get more worn than others, and some wear only on one side. Now, you remark in this note of yours, Mr. Windibank, that in every case there is some little slurring over of the ‘e,’ and a slight defect in the tail of the ‘r.’ There are fourteen other characteristics, but those are the more obvious.”
“We do all our correspondence with this machine at the office, and no doubt it is a little worn,” our visitor answered, glancing keenly at Holmes with his bright little eyes.
“And now I will show you what is really a very interesting study, Mr. Windibank,” Holmes continued. “I think of writing another little monograph some of these days on the typewriter and its relation to crime. It is a subject to which I have devoted some little attention. I have here four letters which purport to come from the missing man. They are all typewritten. In each case, not only are the ‘e’s’ slurred and the ‘r’s’ tailless, but you will observe, if you care to use my magnifying lens, that the fourteen other characteristics to which I have alluded are there as well.”
Until typewriters, and secretaries, and typing pools, became the new normal and that reached the saturation point of "we are at thirty letters a day" which became the new standard of productivity. And then came word processors, and... rinse and repeat.
HereAndGone
18d ago
Maintaining a high female employment rate in white collar labor is the end all be all of western governments
Why?
If your reply is "because WIMMEN RULE THE WORLD and they force the government to go along and prop them up with bullshit jobs to be 'equal' to men" then I say you are mistaken.
It's economics. In order to grow the economy, business and government wanted a larger pool of workers. Here are all these stay-at-home women, get them into the workforce (and if that has the happy side-effect of depressing wages and reducing our labour costs well that's nice too). Social expectations shifted, helped along by feminism, that women who didn't go out to work were "wasting" their education and were somehow being parasitic on society. Economic expectations around two-income families meant that things like mortgages were calculated on the basis "both of you are earning, right?" Tax revenue is also based on "everyone who can work is working" and that includes working-age women. A lot of service industry jobs (and I'm including things like nursing and teaching here) are now female-dominated.
Economic necessity also means that women need jobs (no more staying at home being supported by parents if single).
Youi can try having "the man is the breadwinner, the women is the homemaker and child raiser" system back, but unless the guy is making very good money, it won't be economically feasible, and for low-income households, given government supports, the woman is probably better off being unmarried and raising the kid, with a live-in boyfriend or a boyfriend who lives elsewhere and just visits. Is that ideal? No. Is that what we've got now? Yes. Okay, take all the women out of the workforce, raise men's wages accordingly. And every cost-cutting management rule goes "so now we need cheap immigrant labour or automation instead".
HereAndGone
18d ago
Prior to 2020, it was very hard to get a company to agree to let you WFH even one day a week, because they knew you'd probably spend the time much less productively. Again, "somehow" the real work that was out there still seems to get done.
When working from home, I find I'm more productive because I know I can block out my time the way I like, so there's no panic rush to try and get it all done in hour A to hour B. If I'm not busy (because there are times when there just isn't that much 'real' work to be done), I can go off and do housework or do personal things online, then the next batch of real work comes in via email or whatever and I work on that. There isn't the rush over "I have to get this done by X o'clock, because I have to be out of here by clocking off time, because I have to be home on time to make sure I don't miss the delivery" or whatever, so I can be more thorough.
In the office, if the 'real work' isn't enough to fill up the day, then I do waste time online or pretending to be busy or procrastinating so putting off work because I want to fill up those empty hours. The difference is that at home, I'll go and put on a load of laundry. At work, I'll have some tabs open and a spreadsheet and pretend to be 'working'.
That's what I took away from the anecdote; it just happened that the other kids were toddlers (it was a beginners' class after all) and she had the hyper-sensitivity that she describes as crying because other people looked at her at a party. So to put it in CBT terms she was catastrophizing - "if I'm in a toddler class, everyone will think I'm only as good as a toddler!" There's no indication there were other people there than the teacher of the class, maybe (but not for sure) other parents. She was convinced other people were thinking about her, paying attention to her, being critical of her - and that's all down to the lack of self-confidence that being made go to a class like that is addressing. Well, and from the home environment where her parents were constantly watching and being critical, but that's another matter.
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