Please talk more about how “we wrecked women’s sexual shame.” You seem to think this is both a good and bad thing? How can we fix it?

Sexual shame in general has been a central organizing principle of modern civilization, but women’s shame in particular has been a tool for structuring societies all the way back to antiquity. Talking about the “good” or “bad” of it almost misses the point; like war, it’s so much bigger than the parochial priorities of the present.

So when I say something’s been “broken”, what I’m talking about is a vast, embedded system of control that has been overloaded and crashed by spoiled little boys who were never taught to appreciate their toys. By depriving women of even the most basic benefits of oppression –privacy, intimacy, mystique– men have essentially forced the women around them to begin dividing by zero. It’s all error reports and unexpected output from there.

As for a fix, what does that even look like? A wholesale replacement of the cultural infrastructure? A reset to some comfortable collection of pre-21st century norms? Legal patches that punt the problem down the road to generations yet unborn? Or is the fix as simple as openly acknowledging that the system exists, that it is huge and powerful, and we must each seek to engage it on our own terms?

I honestly don’t know.

The Amazing Cosmic Awareness of Duffy Moon

Dear god, I’ve found it. After all these years and all my haunted dreams, I’ve found it. The document at the heart of my destruction.

I had a soul as a boy, before I watched The Amazing Cosmic Awareness of Duffy Moon. I’m sure of it. I have no proof save my long-dried tears, but I am certain.

They showed this to me. Do you realize? The television people. They showed this. To all of us. We were children. I know now what I could only guess then, that there are hells beyond human ken, and so my last hope —as I teeter here upon my sanity’s fine edge— is that the monsters responsible for this Afterschool Atrocity have each found diverse damnations in which to churn.

So many years, so many decades. Trying to drown Him out, to quiet the memory of His eldritch assertions, to wash from my recollection all trace of the words that He burned into my rotting heart. Even now, I tremble to transcribe the terror.

“You can do it, Duffy Moon.”

This world is His, and I am lost.

Would you like to taste a 24cm brazilian’s white cock and take breakfast with all the milk inside, launch all the meat on it till the balls and dinner all of it again?you got hungry little bb? Wanna taste and be feeded, let me know :)

brat-grrl2:

who measures their dick using the metric system

Human history is nothing more than the long, slow process of men developing ever-finer scales of measurement for their penises.

I’m pretty sure Noah spent half his nights in the ark measuring his dick and inwardly lamenting that a “quarter of a cubit” didn’t sound as impressive as it should.

Stuff I’m Watching

  • Upstart Crow: My new Favorite Thing; thank you, British Television Industry, for giving me this gift. A winking, retro-sitcom reimagining of Shakespeare’s life, it turns Will into a harried-but-dedicated family man with a horrible London-to-Stratford commute, Christopher Marlow into a gregarious, talentless, heterosexual rake who occasionally rips off Will’s work, and Robert Green into a high-born, officious, Elizabethan derivative of Sallieri from Amadeus. If you’re aware of how absurd those characterizations are, then you’re well on your way to enjoying what’s on offer. It doesn’t hurt that UC features more historical misogyny jokes per minute than anything this side of Boardwalk Empire, and casts Yara Greyjoy from Game of Thrones as a wannabe actress who’s sort of a proto-Kimmy Schmidt/Sue Heck, on an endless, fruitless quest to be the first actual girl to play a girl on the English stage.
  • The Orville: This show confuses me. With every episode, I expect it to dissolve into a mess of repurposed Family Guy dick jokes or Spaceballs-esque satire… but it never does. Its biggest sin turns out to be a fondness for awkwardly anachronistic pop culture references; the rest of the time, it sticks to being a quirky, utterly sincere piece of upbeat space fantasy. It’s Doctor Who in Star Trek: The Next Generation drag, which turns out to be a rather nice thing.
  • Channel Zero: I admire CZ’s willingness to take itself seriously; in contrast to the regurgitated Kevin Williamson-isms of pop-junk like American Horror Story, it never deflates its own atmosphere with unnecessary, self-aware comedy. And they make excellent use of an obviously minuscule budget, with the mundane, flatly-lit settings and deliberately underplayed performances contributing to a constant level of unease and dread. The first season is creepier, but the second is more coherent.
  • Stranger Things 2: Well, that was more of that thing I liked.
  • Fear the Walking Dead: With this season’s relentless pruning of the core cast, and a delightful mini-Deadwood reunion giving it a little extra spark, I’m actually enjoying Fear more than the original show at this point. Where TWD’s Rick, Negan, and Ezekiel stand around giving speeches and launching wars, Fear’s Madison continues to smoothly alternate between shrewd emotional manipulation and brief, purposeful bursts of murderous violence in her efforts to Get Shit Done. Her ice-cold competence is a nice change of pace in this particular zombie apocalypse.
  • Star Trek: Discovery: The first two eps were very strong, with a completely unexpected shift in the status quo making a case for Discovery as a New Thing in the Trek universe. To my frustration, it doesn’t maintain that inventive energy throughout the run, with a couple episodes (the ones featuring Rainn Wilson, sadly) sagging into mediocrity. Sonequa Martin-Green’s stoic lead performance is fine, but Jason Isaacs steals every scene he’s in with a character that is basically a morally-modulated version of Hap from The OA. I’m optimistic that they’re going somewhere promising, but I’m still not completely sold.
  • Love: As much as I enjoyed Community, I really didn’t like Britta. I know she was kind of unlikable-by-design, but the result was that I dismissed Gillian Jacobs as an actor. Love proves that I was wrong to do so; I am now deeply in love with her.
  • Rick and Morty: For the good of everyone, the first episode should be banished from existence. I watched it ages ago, and was so turned off that it took four years for me to finally give the show another chance. I still don’t find belching and phlegm to be the comedy gold that Dan Harmon and company seem to believe, but there’s a huge leap in quality between the first and subsequent episodes. So okay, I kind of get it now.
  • The Punisher: We’ve only watched the first couple installments, but so far, I have no idea why this thing is getting so much critical shit. Barring as-yet-unseen narrative disasters or production failures, The Punisher is already better than Iron Fist and The Defenders. Yeah, it’s a little disorienting, seeing fucking Desi from Girls playing Micro, but my only complaint is the Netflix Universe’s insistence on wedging an increasingly boring Karen Page into the cast; Frank doesn’t need a will-they-won’t-they romantic subplot, so I hope that shit stops soon.

Hi. It’s another girl on the internet asking for sympathy. I’m tired of being my own person. I need a hug. Or something. What do people usually do when they deal with this stuff? I feel like it’s gotten worse all of a sudden. It’s like watching my own lungs drown in water in slow motion. Please don’t write me a mean response (if at all any). But also, thank you for the blog.

No meanness asked, none given. 😀

I wish I had some magic pill or mantra I could give you that would make everything feel a little more tolerable. Unfortunately, all I have for you is a hug, a pat on the head, and assurance that it *can* get better.

You girls are all tough as nails, in your own way. You have to be, to put up with men like me.

Mea Maxima Culpa

The American Right is deeply disturbed, but it’s time the American Left copped to our part in making them so. We spent the 1990s gaslighting them over Bill and Hillary Clinton, successfully convincing the body politic that up was down, black was white, and wrong was perfectly okay if you were cool about it.

I can’t help but think about the shit we fed them, and then pause to savor the flavor that currently dominates my own palate; it’s a pretty gross way to learn a pretty gross lesson.

  • “That wasn’t a lie, that’s just the way he talks.”
  • “She was horny and desperate, and he was famous. You know she was asking for it.”
  • “There’s nothing strange or inappropriate about a President’s unelected family being injected into major legislative efforts and foreign policy.”
  • “This special prosecutor is a partisan hack who’s chasing a fake story!”
  • “That wasn’t a lie, because it sounds true.”
  • “Who cares about shady business deals where the family lost money?”
  • “Rape? Don’t make me laugh! They just want to be on TV and file lawsuits.”
  • “Why do we keep talking about stuff that might have happened years ago? What about the economy right now?”
  • “That wasn’t a lie, he was only defending himself.”
  • “She’s so brave, standing by her man like that, not letting those greedy little bitches take them down.”
  • “All men are like that, so who cares?”
  • “We’re so lucky to have a President with a woman in his life who’s even better than he is.”
  • “That wasn’t a lie, because being in charge is fun.”

At some point, we really need to stop doing this to one another.

Fun Date Idea

You —a person who’s insecure about her trashy accent— and I —a well-known bastard— spend an afternoon exploring a crowded museum, where I insist that you express your thoughts about each display. Every time you finish speaking, I respond with “Say again? I can’t understand a fucking word coming out of your head.”

When a group of schoolchildren pass, I get their attention, point at you, and roll my eyes while you repeat yourself. The kids’ chaperone gives me a dirty look, but then pauses to listen to what you’re actually saying, shrugs, and gives me a sympathetic smile.

Then the chaperone and I go get a drink while the kids ask you if you were dropped on your head when you were little.

She was not beautiful.

She was old; not yet an elder, but long past the bloom of youth. Her hair was ragged and filthy, her face scarred by the ravages of childhood disease and a harsh life at civilization’s newly forged edge. When her lips curled back to howl out her pain, they revealed oddly angled, cracked teeth that had been used to defend as often as dine. Her scent was sour and dark, like the line of her mouth and the depths of her eyes. Her pendulous teats clapped together, their rhythm that of the frantic, lustful creature that had draped himself atop her.

She wasn’t beautiful, but there was *something* about her.

Not so, her attacker; he was an indistinct, brutal blur, raw greed and self-indulgence in the rough shape of a man. He was not the first of them to take her; she had been passed around by the band of raiders for… days? Weeks? I couldn’t say, nor, it’s likely, could she; her people observed the cycle of day and night, but they reckoned time in their bodies, in the demands of the viscera and the weakness of the bones. The starvation, exposure, and steadily escalating violence had therefore dismantled what passed for her clock, and she was left adrift in a strange, obscene, and eternal moment.

Whatever the true interval between the attack on her tribe, the murder of their men, the capture of their women, and her free-fall into the bottomless chasm of Now, it is enough to say that one more dirty, hateful brute stabbing at her battered flesh should have been indistinguishable from the last. And yet.

She was *special*.

It started long before the raid. Back with her people, on those nights her mother could not protect her from her father, or those days her father could not protect her from the other men; she had known fear. She had struggled, and clawed, and begged for release with all the strength she could muster. She’d become intimately familiar with a certain sort of burn and ache, and a rare, fleeting flash of something more terrifying still. Something that made her doubt the certainty of her senses.

So it was that she knew much of the desires of men. But the beatings she’d recently endured, doled out as entertainment… *those* were new. As were the open insults to her dignity: the way the bandits spat upon her, splayed her nakedness before the gods of heaven, and carved the wicked sigils of demons into her body. They didn’t care that she’d borne strong, brave babies, children who had harkened to signs and honored their elders. They didn’t care that her mother had taught her the special knots that secured their tent on nights when the indifferent wind roared across the plain. They didn’t care about the fish she could catch, the rabbits she could skin, the songs she could sing, nor the wounds she could mend.

She was nothing to them. But she was everything to *me*.

—————

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