festeringfae

[festeringfae]

this is not a humble-brag, humble-bragging is what people who think they are the main character do. people who are assigned main character as a fatal flaw have things happen TO them. For example: I find out some Stephen King-ass lore about the town where their grandparents lived, go for a walk despite it being 3am to clear their head, spot a giant spider web with a spider sitting in the center just in time as I exit the backyard, make a mental note to avoid the spider web on the way back in, stroll the suburbs, overhear some frantic meowing that leads to finding a kitten behind the tire of a van, debate whether you can call 411 or animal control or whatever at 3am and also the merits of squatting next to someone else's van with my phone flashlight on at 3am (the van is, at least, plastered with decals for a kids' karate school, so it would objectively be one of the stupider vehicles to try to carjack.) Decide to go home to acquire treats to see if i can lure the kitten out. It occurs to me that finding a gray kitten behind the wheel of a vehicle on a walk after finding out my childhood trauma town was reminiscent of something out of Pet Sematary specifically is a little on the nose. I walk directly into the spider web. It is huge and clinging too many places and I'm in my backyard at 3am, so I just slide my shorts off entirely to get it off. Step back into house. Remove shirt too, because Fuck It. Put on dress, grab handful of cat treats, head out again. Return to the vehicle owned by people who could perform martial arts on me if they caught me skulking around in the dark hours of the morning. Silence. Kitten previously could not shut up. Balance cat treat on tire. Nothing. Wait. Eventually hear noise that might be treat falling. Put treat next to tire. Wait. Nothing. No mewing, no scuttling, literally no indication that this kitten ever existed. Check nearby sewer to make sure Church the Cat is not more of a Pennywise the Dancing Clown. Nothing. Leave the rest of the treats next to the sewer. Debate whether morally obligated to leave the karate kids a note. Decide if Church has crawled into the engine, it's Sunday morning, nobody is going to karate camp, he has over 24 hours directly next to a sidewalk to decide to meow for help again before he's at risk for becoming the star of a Mary Lambert flick. Go back home. Deposit spider ecosystem into laundry basket. Reflect on how I don't really like the vampire Lestat, but he would Get what just happened to me. Hit post at 3:50am

I do relate to the vampire Lestat in that yes I am a diva but also it's not so much that I have main character syndrome as being the main character is a fatal flaw that a larger power has seemingly assigned to me & I just kind of have to deal with it

[festeringfae]

I do relate to the vampire Lestat in that yes I am a diva but also it's not so much that I have main character syndrome as being the main character is a fatal flaw that a larger power has seemingly assigned to me & I just kind of have to deal with it

[festeringfae]

Check out this website for helping out campaigns that don't get a lot of attention:

This is made by Twitter user @ mqudsi

[festeringfae]

If you noticed, most of the updates coming from Gaza the past few days and especially today have been about the famine.

People in Gaza aren’t reporting the massacres because they are starving.

Literally everyone I follow from Gaza has been pleading for food today, mostly flour.

It’s truly unbearable to witness this manufactured starvation plan, imposed by Israel and its allies against besieged Gaza, especially when you know that there is enough food to feed all of Gaza for the next 3 months, stockpiled at a warehouse awaiting entry but being blocked by Israel, according to UNRWA.

I feel immense pain and shame, and I know many of you do as well. Speaking about this is no longer viable, we need to scream.

[festeringfae]

[festeringfae]

Things that confuse me about Scream (1996):

Why does Sydney have a giant, highly-visible-in-shot poster of The Indigo Girls in her room, which largely serves as a setting to talk about why she doesn't want to have sex with her boyfriend, despite nobody in the media-obsessed world of the movie dropping the L word?

What kinda name is "Cotton Weary"?

[festeringfae]

does anyone wanna teach me how to make AMVs?

"Girl, So Confusing" Amadeus AMV

[festeringfae]

Are we far enough past the initial round of discourse on Sabrina Carpenter to have a discussion about a broader topic using the "Man's Best Friend" album cover as an example? I don't know, but I guess we're about to find out, because I wanna compare the aforementioned album cover to a photo of the singer on the cover of Rolling Stone to talk about the practical application of the phrase "male gaze."

So I wanted to brush up on the specifics of the original definition of "male gaze" in order to better organize my thoughts for this post, but it turns out the original concept by Laura Mulvey is pretty exclusively focused on the image of women within a narrative framework, and also, is the subject of a whole book, not a neat thesis sentence I can just squeeze into a post. I found this info on the very conveniently named https://media-studies.com/male-gaze/ , though, and it briefly mentioned that in Paul Messaris' Visual Persuasion: The Role of Images in Advertising it's mentioned that "“female models addressed to women… appear to imply a male point of view."

If you don't already know, the image on the right generated significant controversy about how women are portrayed, whereas the image on the left has not. The image on the right, along with the title of the album it serves as cover art for ("Man's Best Friend"), invokes the suggestion of BDSM, submission, and potentially puppy play. Discussion of the merits of this broader context is beyond the scope of this post, beyond the acknowledgment that these topics are typically considered more taboo than visual markers of ""vanilla"" sexuality.

Speaking of vanilla-- whether in a literal or figurative sense, the word is usually associated with "white." The Sabrina on the right is wearing all black, as is the figure with her with their [presumably "his"] face cropped out of the image. This figure is wearing long pants and closed-top shoes. Sabrina's black dress is thigh-length, with sleeves that end shortly before her elbows, and it is impossible to tell the neckline of the dress because of Sabrina's arm-- reaching for the black leg in front of her-- obscuring the shape of her chest completely. Parallel to the line of this arm, the line of a section of Sabrina's hair extends from the figure's hand to Sabrina's scalp-- the ends of her hair are within the figure's fingers. Additionally, there is a black ribbon extending from the midsection of the dress, possibly a decorative bow that has either come undone or deflated (it is unclear by the camera angle.) Both of Sabrina's black, high-heeled shoes are on her feet, her knees are on the floor, and the hand that is not reaching for her partner's leg is on the floor, palm-flat. Her eyes look directly into the camera, at the viewer.

The Sabrina on the left is naked, but is still wearing white, long thigh-highs with lace embellishments. Her feet are otherwise bare, though a single white high-heel stands upright in frame to her right. She is balancing on her knees on the floor with her torso upright, both her arms crossed over her chest with her painted nails visible to the camera. A long section of blonde hair is also over her chest, in between her crossed arms. The majority of her long blonde hair trails down her exposed back to rest past her buttocks to slightly beneath where the lace embellishments on the thigh-highs cut off. There is no figure to the left of her, but there is a hookah on the small table directly parallel to her, the mouth of its water pipe trailing onto the floor. Sabrina's chin tilted back, as well as slightly turned out towards the camera in order to give the camera a complete view of her facial expression. This expression is vacant, with her eyes cast upwards. The reason she is looking up is unclear; in a literal sense, she'd be looking at a presumed ceiling.

The album cover has been interpreted at length already, so I'm going to focus primarily on the Rolling Stone cover. It's associations are largely "vanilla," both in terms of color palette and sexual associations. White in Sabrina's cultural context suggests bridal, virginal, socially acceptable as sexuality can be. Sabrina's hair is longer than usual (long hair on women being the traditional cultural standard), ostensibly covering her bare ass while simultaneously drawing attention to it. She's seated in a pose that would further emphasize this curve, but more importantly: absolutely no one would ever sit in this pose candidly. Both photos have Sabrina on the floor on her knees, but Rolling Stone has her in a pose where she'd be having to strain her core muscles just to keep her balance-- and for what purpose? Her expression doesn't depict that there's any kind of sexual or other gratification there-- her eyes are completely vacant of any specific emotion. There's no practical reason to pose that way. The album cover has her hair pulled in a very direct way, and regardless of the audience's thoughts on it, they know why it's being done, and the motivation is assumed to be that of either Sabrina or her partner-- in other words, the motivation of "characters" within the "world" of the photo. In contrast, Sabrina's hair being pulled by having it in between her crossed arms is not a focus of the photo, to the point where it is reasonably arguable that's not something the viewer is supposed to take away is happening. Her breasts are already covered by the crossed arms, and the hair is long enough that if she draped more of it in the front than crossing her arms would not be necessary. If we were presuming the image of Sabrina within the photograph was a character with internal motivations, it could be argued this was a depiction of a modest motivation, but her tilting her head back so that her extra-long hair modestly conceals the full image of her buttocks contradicts this-- she's already accepted that hair is enough to conceal private parts of her body. Therefore, the only conclusion left for the audience is that Sabrina is posed that way solely because it is how the photographer wanted to depict her. In other words, for the gaze of the photographer, whoever that may be.

There's no internal motivation within the Rolling Stone photo: there's no reason that Sabrina as a person would leave the mouth of a hookah on the floor to collect rug lint, or contort her body in a painful balance to look at nothing. In the album cover, the viewer may not like the motivation of Sabrina-the-subject, may not agree on what that motivation is, but there seems to be a consensus that the image of Sabrina on the cover has a narrative perspective to either agree or disagree with. People are mad at Sabrina-the-person for what Sabrina-the-image is doing, because it is conceivable to walk in on someone on their knees in a physically-stable way in front of a presumed man holding their hair.

My question is not why people are angry at that; my question is-- why did the photo where the human subject is photographed as if they have no interior not spark an even greater anger? What do we do to ensure photos like the Rolling Stone cover are recognized as dehumanizing, and provoke the appropriate response?

[festeringfae]

when i first heard about the male loneliness epidemic i was like oh yeah close camaraderie and bonding between men is often discouraged in favor of competition or, if not discouraged, at least filtered through a lens of individualism that precludes deep connections. and then i learned what people meant by it (men arent getting laid) to which i say skill issue

[festeringfae]

watching a video and realizing I miss the term "flame war", it was JUST tongue-in-cheek goofy enough of a term to describe how silly it was to carry on long arguments online over shit that doesn't matter and was often started/spurned by a troll. Now ALL of it is just "discourse" or "engagement" which feels like they put a godawful slap of PR paint over the surface of flame wars like a cheap landlord looking to charge 1000 dollars more for the same crumbling walls

[festeringfae]

Green Arrow is the best superhero because when I need to make a left turn, he’s the guy that comes through for me

[festeringfae]

"Girl, So Confusing" Amadeus AMV

[festeringfae]

[festeringfae]

♱ Temple of Roses canotier ♱

A little more of my work, I love this wonderful lace! My workshop „ Antique rose garden “!

[festeringfae]

[festeringfae]

jeepeon (based on this image from Let's Find Pokemon)