At The Bare Minimum, Becoming A First-class Parent Requires Years Of Studying Human Development, Having

Virgins and heroes: The socialization of women thru literature.

In early 1970s romance novels, no sometimes meant yes and a rapist could figure as a hero. And if you are in your middle ages, this is what planted in your mind those sexual scripts of "rape fantasy'. The Hallmark Channel only makes it softer.

Forty years ago public discussion was just beginning about equality in the workplace, domestic violence, sexual harassment, reproductive rights and other issues affecting women. Romance novelists quickly joined the discussion, grappling with these same issues through the lens of love.

Heather has no understanding of her sexuality and no power of consent. She has two bad choices: First, she can either be raped or kill her sexual aggressor; later, when Brandon rapes her, she can resist or learn to love her rapist. From this unpromising beginning, romance narratives quickly shifted in their exploration of women’s sexuality and the nature of consent.

In early 1970s romance novels “no” sometimes meant “yes” and a rapist could figure as a hero. By the end of the 1970s “no” meant “no” and a rapist could no longer fill the hero slot.

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— p. 3-4 of the Introduction to A Passion For Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female Affection by Janice Raymond

“Women together are not women alone.”

My gripe with Euphoria.

Introduction

I remember my initial decision to cower away from this show. I discovered through review videos and articles that this was far from teen-friendly, despite having a teen-centric cast of characters. This show opposes my morals immensely, but I think I was only intrigued by the main plot of drug addiction, which is a slippery slope to take in the media. I had seen that the main show writer, Sam Levinson, also struggled with addiction, so I figured there would truth to this fictionalized tale.

Euphoria's (2019) concept is not particularly new, however. It is based on a 2012 Israeli show by the same name, directed by Ron Leshem. The original had some of the same elements: a troubled group of generation Z teens, somone with a drug addiction, a girl with weight issues, a drug dealer and his brother, etc.).

Cast of Israeli "Euphoria"

I don't know much about the Israeli version outside of that, especially without access to the show. I have heard that it takes on a bit of a more sympathetic approach to its characters. Levinson's adaptation seems to take on a different approach in the form of HBO style exploitation. As someone who is part of Generation Z and is aware of our statistics, I find it peculiar that a lot of these teen-centric shows portray us as hyper-sexual alcoholics who wouldn't give it a second thought to try drugs on the side. It's bee documented recently (in the years 1995-2015) that the opposite has been occurring. Of course, our world is being adapted from the mind of a thirty-four year old man. Older men, young teens, and sex seem to be a reoccurring theme. We see how female characters are treated versus the males. There is even the inclusion of a trans identified male character in the midst, who I found myself weary of throughout both seasons for reasons I will explain in later posts.

It is easy to see where Sam includes himself in the drug addiction plot. The other plots, however, are just as telling on the psyche of male directors and writers and how they view the women and girls that they construct in their narratives. His co-writers are Zendaya and Drake. Notably, Drake has been shown to have his own immoral actions on full display, so his influence is one to take heed to just as much. Zendaya's ideas of feminism are also warped, as she believes in males deserving the rights to be in female spaces. Someone who can simultaneously compare a man's mental illness to a women of color's biological status already sets me up to critique the debased "feminism" of this story.

It is no longer a matter of these female (and even male) characters being complex when we are simultaneously told they are empowered by their flawed actions. Or, on the opposite side of things, we are told that they should be discarded accordingly when it suits the narrative.

I will dive into this mess of glitter and shine and tear away this show's esthetics as I navigate my thoughts throughout my viewing of both seasons. I will explore the female (and one female presenting trans) characters and analyze what I see fit based off of what I took away from them.

« Foreigners follow American news stories like their own, listen to American pop music, and watch copious amounts of American television and film. […] Americans, too, stick to the U.S. The list of the 500 highest-grossing films of all time in the U.S., for example, doesn’t contain a single foreign film (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon comes in at 505th, slightly higher than Bee Movie but about a hundred below Paul Blart: Mall Cop). […]

How did this happen? How did cultural globalization in the twentieth century travel along such a one-way path? And why is the U.S.—that globe-bestriding colossus with more than 700 overseas bases—so strangely isolated? 

[…W]hen 600 or so journalists, media magnates, and diplomats arrived in Geneva in 1948 to draft the press freedom clauses for […] the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights […], definitional difficulties abounded. Between what the U.S. meant by “freedom of information” and what the rest of the world needed lay a vast expanse. For the American delegates, the question belonged to the higher plane of moral principle. But representatives of other states had more earthly concerns.

The war had tilted the planet’s communications infrastructure to America’s advantage. In the late 1940s, for example, the U.S. consumed 63% of the world’s newsprint supply; to put it more starkly, the country consumed as much newsprint in a single day as India did over the course of a year. A materials shortage would hamper newspaper production across much of the world into at least the 1950s. The war had also laid low foreign news agencies—Germany’s Wolff and France’s Havas had disappeared entirely—and not a single news agency called the global south home. At the same time, America’s Associated Press and United Press International both had plans for global expansion, leading The Economist to note wryly that the executive director of the AP emitted “a peculiar moral glow in finding that his idea of freedom coincides with his commercial advantage.”

Back in Geneva, delegates from the global south pointed out these immense inequalities. […] But the American delegates refused the idea that global inequality itself was a barrier to the flow of information across borders. Besides, they argued, redistributive measures violated the sanctity of the press. The U.S. was able to strong-arm its notion of press freedom—a hybrid combining the American Constitution’s First Amendment and a consumer right to receive information across borders—at the conference, but the U.N.’s efforts to define and ensure the freedom of information ended in a stalemate.

The failure to redistribute resources, the lack of multilateral investment in producing more balanced international flows of information, and the might of the American culture industry at the end of the war—all of this amounted to a guarantee of the American right to spread information and culture across the globe.

The postwar expansion of American news agencies, Hollywood studios, and rock and roll bore this out. […] Meanwhile, the State Department and the American film industry worked together to dismantle other countries’ quota walls for foreign films, a move that consolidated Hollywood’s already dominant position.

[…A]s the U.S. exported its culture in astonishing amounts, it imported very little. In other words, just as the U.S. took command as the planetary superpower, it remained surprisingly cut off from the rest of the world. A parochial empire, but with a global reach. [And] American culture[’s] inward-looking tendencies [precede] the 1940s.

The media ecosystem in particular, Lebovic writes, [already] constituted an “Americanist echo chamber.” Few of the films shown in American cinemas were foreign (largely a result of the Motion Picture Production Code, which the industry began imposing on itself in 1934; code authorities prudishly disapproved of the sexual mores of European films). Few television programs came from abroad […]. Few newspapers subscribed to foreign news agencies. Even fewer had foreign correspondents. And very few pages in those papers were devoted to foreign affairs. An echo chamber indeed, [… which] reduced the flow of information and culture from much of the rest of the world to a trickle. […]

Today is not the 1950s. [… But] America’s culture industry has not stopped its mercantilist pursuits. And Web 2.0 has corralled a lot of the world’s online activities onto the platforms of a handful of American companies. America’s geopolitical preeminence may slip away in the not-so-distant future, but it’s not clear if Americans will change the channel. »

— “How American Culture Ate the World”, a review of Sam Lebovic’s book A Righteous Smokescreen: Postwar America and the Politics of Cultural Globalization

“The more we blame speech for violence, the more likely we are to use violence to stop speech.”

— Dan McLaughlin (via beyondthesleep)

I am speechless…

Everytime I see Germaine Greer mentioned on radfem tumblr I get a knee jerk reaction thinking about that creepy pedo book she made

The nature of duality

The world we inhabit is extremely complex. The universe is comprised of multiple layers and aspects that are independent but simultaneously interact with eachother. In this vast web of interconnections we have the ability to perceive the cosmic paradox of duality.

The most important thing to understand about duality is that everything and anything holds opposing truths. Duality separates truth into two aspects: relative and absolute truth. As human beings we are very limited in our understanding of the cosmos and most of the truth we perceive is in fact relative truth.

Relative truth isn't any less true than absolute truth which is why two contradictory statements can be true at once. It is simply an angle of looking at something but it does not account for all possible perspectives the way absolute truth does. An example of relative truth is that the Earth is very big (in comparison to us) but it is also very small (in comparison with the universe).

Absolute truth is eternal but this is not something that we'll reach during our transient lifetime in the physical world. That is okay because we're here to have the human experience, perceive reality from specific angles and experience duality. You've been given the choice to find your personal truth, share it, live it and this is part of your experience.

Absolute truth is beyond conceptual thinking, it holds no duality, it is all-pervasive and changeless. Everything emanates from absolute truth, the supreme cosmic truth is God Herself. God is in everything, we're a fragment of Her consciousness, an idea in the infinite mind.

"The eye by which I see God is the same as the eye by which God sees me. My eye and God's eye are one and the same-one in seeing, one in knowing, and one in loving." said Meister Eckhart. There are many degrees of existence in this Universe, a spiritually developed person is one who recognises the oneness in everything but also understands duality as she is a human.

In order to better understand this, think of a writer who is imagining a new character for her book. That character is an independent being and is not the writer but at the same time it is true that there is something of the writer in the character, for she could not exist without the writer. The writer is using her mind to create something that is in a sense separate from her but also one within her.

This is an ability of the finite mind, the infinite mind also has this capacity but greater. This is seen in the Hermetic principle of correspondence: "As above, so below; as below, so above.” Our mind is a microcosmic reflection of the macrocosmic mind but in a lesser degree.

Remember that all this is part of your human experience and you need not escape your materiality yet, you are here to learn from it. Ironically, you are separated from God only to come back to Her again. Chapter VII, The Kyballion: "the Law of Individualization--that is, the tendency to separate into Units of Force, so that finally that which left THE ALL as unindividualized energy returns to its source as countless highly developed Units of Life, having risen higher and higher in the scale by means of Physical, Mental and Spiritual Evolution".

That's another thing I've noticed about feminism. There's a heavy focus on mother's needs and wants because they're the "creators" of every nation/country. Most of those mothers aren't even feminist (whatever that means anymore) and are still attached to XY partners. There's hardly ever been a focus on young women and girls, single women, child free women, spinsters, etc. Just women and girls who have opted out of or are not entirely a part of the world's machine.

Most mother-worshipping communities seem to only value the woman's presence as an incubator. Young girls are therefore dismissed from all praise and consideration until they reach their menstrual cycles. Only then is society hell-bent on uplifting them as baby makers in the making, not as individuals with the potential for actual empowerment. Young girls can't foresee a future without an XY because modern feminism has always been teaching them how to complain about circumstances that were avoidable for the most part. Their mothers have used feminism to complain about their own mistakes - heck, most of those young girls were their "mistakes" - then project those mistakes onto their daughters, telling them they won't do any better. That's practically the generational "curses" taking place. They're birthed with their mothers wanting them to suffer too (if they weren't wishing for a son the whole time, that is).

what made you move away from feminism, if you don't mind me asking?

My personal desire to do so. I'm not going to blame the movement. The more time you spend around women, the more you realize how male-centric their aspirations are. Opting out of reproduction and sexual gratification is oppression to them. Feminism is about making women's lives with men more palatable. I believe that attraction to men is oppressive, let alone acting out on it. My life started improving in earnest once I completely distanced myself from men and the women who made me doubt my judgement, cue feminist circles. Women are either unaware of what men are - read this book - , or thoroughly unintelligent because emotional fulfillment can absolutely be substituted. Women's pursuit of male affection is that of potential debasement and endurance. I say, why endure at all? If you cannot comprehend this question, we are unlikely to understand each other.