#man who keeps trying to fill a void that should be filled with homosexuality

[yelenanatural]

can’t wait for homosexual villain eddie diaz arc

[villlainarc]

Sic Semper Ad Astra

Thus Always To The Stars

Summary: In which Crowley falls, but not before leaving behind stars in the sky and love in his angel’s heart.

Pairings: Ineffable Husbands (Aziraphale/Crowley)

Warnings: unhappy ending (but it also takes place before the source material so the promise of a happy ending is there), minor amnesia at the end (but it is neither truly addressed nor does it have any lasting impact on the story), potentially upsetting alterations to the way god is normally perceived (aka i mess with religion a bit both so the story can work and for my own sanity), aaand let me know if i missed anything else

Word Count: 5388

A/N: an extraordinarily late gift for a friend, and my first leap into writing something for the good omens fandom (which, fair warning, will not be a common occurrence. at all.)

ao3

_________________________

Once upon a time, before the Earth with its land, sea, and sky, there were stars. Really, stars came before most things—they were, after all, the creation formed out of the very first elements in existence. They were hydrogen and helium, tied together with trace amounts of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and iron, reacting to emit an intense heat. If you looked at them from afar though, you’d see only light, pure and brilliant.

This is what Raphael knew stars to be. It wasn’t really that he didn’t care what they were made of (though that was still true), it was more that the elements had yet to be named. For you see, before the stars and the galaxies and before even hydrogen and helium, there were angels who had more important things to do than waste their time coming up with names for the things they created.

Perhaps Raphael should have cared more for the details and names of his creations—names do hold power after all, and this was true even at the beginning of time—but he did have only six days to, with the rest of the angels, aid in the creation of an entire universe.

So you could say that he was a tad preoccupied.

In the end though, that didn’t matter. Names would come later: after the stars lit the heavens and the oceans filled with water, after the wind began to whip through the trees and Adam took his first breath. For now, Raphael was content with spinning light into stars and placing those glowing orbs into the emptiness of space.

It was while he was in a galaxy that would later come to be known as Alpha Centauri, flying the final beam of light around a star that Raphael first met Aziraphale. The other angel had somehow made his way into space and was now hovering a few feet away from Raphael and his star, gravity be damned (gravity hadn’t been named yet either, though it did exist—even, for the time being, in space). In all likeliness, Raphael wouldn’t have noticed Aziraphale for hours more if the angel hadn’t called out a chipper, “Hello! What might you be doing all the way out here?”

Raphael’s head whipped towards the voice, the star going temporarily ignored. He blinked at the new arrival, startled. Scientifically speaking, Aziraphale’s voice shouldn’t have reached Raphael. Space is a vacuum, and as such, sound isn’t able to travel in it. But angels aren’t exactly scientifically viable themselves, so rules don’t apply to them in quite the same way (if they ever did at all). That wasn’t the reason Raphael was so startled, though. Actually, he didn’t know that sound wasn’t supposed to travel in space in the first place. No, the reason Aziraphale had startled him was far more simple: Raphael was supposed to be alone out here. As far as he knew, he was the only one who was allowed to be out in space, forming stars or otherwise. He’d been just about to say so when he looked at Aziraphale—really looked at him.

Contrary to popular belief among some Christians, homosexuality has never been frowned upon by God. In fact, She has always considered it to be just as natural and beautiful as the love between a man and a woman. This may not seem relevant, but when Raphael saw Aziraphale floating in space, soft hair forming a halo around his head and backed by a void dotted with glittering lights that he’d placed there himself, it suddenly became so.

(Neither love nor attraction had been coined as such yet—only partially due to the fact that neither had been felt in the three prior days of the universe’s existence—but Raphael understood that he did feel something distinctly homosexual stirring as he watched this newcomer sit serenely in midair.)

Raphael had to fight to keep his jaw from going entirely slack as he stared at the angel for just a moment longer. Clearing his throat, he attempted to regain some semblance of dignity as he said, “I could ask you the same thing. I am supposed to be out here, but I sincerely doubt you are.”

“Well,” Aziraphale began, oblivious to Raphael’s slight (slight meaning very obvious to anyone that wasn’t Aziraphale) gay panic, “I’m not supposed to be anything yet, I don’t think. I’m a principality, you see, and with no humans having been formed for me to protect… I don’t believe I’m supposed to be anywhere.”

“Oh,” Raphael said, having only half-listened to Aziraphale’s explanation but having fully decided that gravity was completely unnecessary in space if ethereally floating angels were going to exist without it before waving it away. “You know, I really don’t think—”

“Ah! Where are my manners,” Aziraphale said, having known about manners for a few hours now (though he’d forgotten what they had said concerning interruptions), “I haven’t introduced myself!”

“You also didn’t let me finish what I was going to say, but—”

“Oh dear, that’s a part of ‘manners’ too, isn’t it?”

Raphael merely nodded, deciding not to point out that the angel had interrupted him again. It was best not to upset such a magnificent being, in Raphael’s opinion.

“I apologize, my dear.” (Pet names weren’t an official creation yet, but that didn’t stop them from causing the person on the receiving end of them to become hopelessly flustered.) “Now, let me try that again. My name is Aziraphale, and what should I call you?”

“Raphael,” Raphael said, pretending he hadn’t been affected by the pet name that had so clearly affected him (the term “blush” hadn’t been coined yet, but that’s what Raphael was doing, and it was painfully obvious to—yet again—everyone but Aziraphale).

“Well then, Raphael, what are you doing out here?”

“Right!” Raphael said, snapping himself out of whatever trance-like state seeing Aziraphale had put him in. “I’m an archangel, you see, and I’m the one who God tasked with creating the stars.”

“What are stars?” Aziraphale asked, cocking his head to one side as he floated ever nearer.

“Stars,” Raphael said, “Stars are these things.” He gestured towards the glowing sphere he’d abandoned a few moments ago before motioning for Aziraphale to come slightly closer. “They’re made of light and space stuff, see?”

“Mm,” Aziraphale hummed, unfurling his wings for the first time since Raphael had seen him in order to examine the star more closely. “It’s beautiful.”

“I’m glad you think so.” Raphael preened ever-so-slightly at the praise, a small smile gracing his face as he watched the angel continue to flit about.

“I do have a question about it though.”

“Oh?” Raphael frowned slightly, having not been expecting questions about his creation.

“What purpose does it serve? The star that’s closest to the human’s planet—”

“That would be the sun, and the planet’s Earth,” Raphael supplied, turning Aziraphale’s interruptions back onto him (this odd sort of justice still didn’t equate to good manners).

“Yes, the sun,” Aziraphale agreed. “The sun’s purpose is to sustain life on Earth, and Earth is the only planet God is putting life on, is it not?”

Raphael nodded, still unsure where Aziraphale was going with this.

“Well, if that’s the case, then why are stars needed out here? If they aren’t needed to sustain life, then why did She send you to create them?”

Raphael blinked. He hadn’t thought about this before. He’d been told to create more stars, and so he had. What did it matter if he wasn’t aware of their purpose? So Raphael merely shrugged, saying, “I assumed they were to encourage the spread of life to other planets, but I never really thought to question it. Why do you ask?”

“I think that everything we’ve been told to create is here for a reason, don’t you? It just seems odd to me that this would be an exception.”

“I guess,” Raphael agreed tentatively. “What are you getting at?”

“Well,” Aziraphale said, drawing out the word, “what if the stars weren’t an exception? What if their purpose is to be beautiful? What if they exist as a sort of beacon of hope for humanity, as a source of light even when their planet is cloaked in darkness? Think about it, Raphael. It would make sense, wouldn’t it? For there to be something with no purpose, just to give hope to humans in times where things seemed darkest? To give them light without pretense? Wouldn’t it be wonderful of the Almighty to do that for the humans? Don’t you think it’s just magnificent that She sent you to create something that’s sole purpose is to give hope?”

This time, Raphael’s jaw drops (he closes it again quickly, but it had dropped all the same). He never would have imagined the Almighty creating something purely to provide hope and beauty. Aziraphale was truly flipping his entire world upside down, but Raphael didn’t think he minded all that much. The way the other angel seemed to think about things held just as much beauty as the stars he claimed to be the epitome of it, and it all made Raphael want to know more about him.

Aziraphale was still watching him expectantly though, so Raphael nodded quickly. “I— yes. Yes, I do think it’s rather… magnificent, as you put it.”

The angel’s answering smile shone brighter than any star Crowley had ever created. “Oh, this is simply incredible. I’m so glad to have met you and your stars, my dear.”

“No,” Raphael frowned, waving the sentiment away. “You’re giving me too much credit. It’s you I should be thanking, really. You were the one who showed me the beauty in all of this, after all.”

“I suppose so. Even still, it is you creating that beauty, is it not? Without you, I wouldn’t have discovered the magic in this universe.” Aziraphale’s smile grew. “I’d say that makes us a pretty good team now, doesn’t it?”

“Uh. Ngk,” Raphael responded eloquently. “I guess so?”

Aziraphale let out a laugh like a silver bell.

When it became clear the other angel was content to simply watch him and wasn’t going to add anything else to the conversation at the moment, Raphael said reluctantly, “I think you should head back to Earth soon. I don’t want you to get in trouble somehow for being out here.”

“Is this your way of asking me to leave?”

Aziraphale’s tone had been teasing, but Raphael’s eyes went wide in horror at his own words anyway. “No! No, absolutely not. I truly have enjoyed your company, Aziraphale. I just don’t think anyone is really supposed to be out here. From what I hear, this place—space, I believe it’s called—is going to be deadly to humans. Angels too, most likely. I don’t want you to be hurt because I kept you here.”

“Are you trying to save me then? Oh, Raphael, that’s so kind of you!”

“I. Uh. Yes, thank you. I do my best.” Raphael told himself his face was not turning a brilliant shade of red, though that was an abject lie. Were it not for the cold vacuum of outer space, his face would very likely appear to be lit with real tongues of fire. “I can take you back, if you’d like,” Raphael heard himself offer. “I just have to finish lighting this star, and we can go back together.” Raphael paused, gathering light in his hands once more and, not wanting to sound too desperate to spend more time with Aziraphale, added, “So you don’t get lost, of course. That’s all.” The reassurance was far more for Raphael’s benefit than the other angel’s.

“I suppose I can wait, in that case. I’ve never watched a star being created before, I don’t think I’ll mind sticking around a little while longer.” Aziraphale turned an impossibly soft smile onto Raphael, who looked very deliberately in the opposite direction and didn’t answer.

Despite his attempt at stoicism, Raphael found a fond smile creeping across his own face as well. That smile stayed stubbornly in place as he sprinkled a handful of stardust over the galaxy, bringing the creation of Alpha Centauri to completion. And though he tried to stifle it, Raphael’s smile remained persistent even after he and Aziraphale returned to Earth.

With the memory of the angel who’d asked questions as pretty as he was etched into his heart, Raphael’s smile wouldn’t fade for a very long time indeed.

_________________________

Once upon a time, there was an archangel who brought the cosmos into being and once upon a time, there was a principality who became fascinated with him. The principality’s name was Aziraphale, and he most certainly had not been created to obsess over questions he was never supposed to have asked and angels he had never been supposed to meet, but obsess he did.

Since the universe had been created a few days before, Aziraphale’s curious mind had been constantly occupied with questions about it (angels hadn’t been created to be curious or to question the Almighty, but Aziraphale had never matched the idea of what angels were supposed to be). He wanted to know about the stars and the moon, the sun and the sky. He picked flowers if they caught his eye, and he asked questions about them as he breathed in their sweet perfume. Aziraphale gazed into the depths of the ocean, and he found that he wanted to learn about each wave that crashed to the shore, each creature that swam in its depths, and each drop of water that made it up.

But most importantly, he wanted to know why. Why were the stars and the moon only visible during the night when they were some of the most beautiful things in the world? _Why_did the sun—something that was created with the purpose to give life to all those who lived beneath its rays—have the potential to be so deadly? Why was the sky blue, why did roses have thorns, why did waves crash into the shore, and why was it all so beautiful?

(Aziraphale had his assumptions, naturally, but that could never and would never beat truly knowing.)

In any case though, his questions didn’t matter. It wasn’t as though they would be frowned upon, and it couldn’t be so bad that he wanted to know things. The pursuit of knowledge could hardly be considered evil.

(Right?)

(Wrong.)

Aziraphale, though, had no way of knowing either way. For you see, asking questions shouldn’t be considered evil. It wouldn’t be as time went on, but it was at the beginning. The Almighty would grow out of Her insecurities, and questions would become welcome once more. All beings are flawed, after all, and God Herself is no exception. The only difference between Her and us is that She was endowed with divine grace—that, and a great deal more time.

But this is getting far, far ahead of the story and is beside the point even if it weren’t. The Almighty doesn’t come to fully understand Her powers until much too late, for you can’t exactly raise an angel. Again, though: beside the point. This is not God’s story, so all you need to know is that questioning anything the Almighty did was, in the beginning, considered evil.

Aziraphale didn’t ask the ‘why’ of those most important questions, though. He never would have imagined that his very nature could have been considered twisted and wrong, so he’d never thought to dwell on the idea.

(Perhaps he should have.)

Even when he heard word of angels falling, Aziraphale didn’t think to question his own perceived ‘goodness.’

(Perhaps there are a lot of things that he should have done.)

It was only while he was being ushered along with the rest of the angels towards God only knew where to watch the spectacle of a lifetime that Aziraphale began to ask the right questions.

“Has anyone seen Raphael?” he asked someone walking beside him. They shrugged in reply, and a feeling of unease bloomed in Aziraphale’s chest.

“Do you know where Raphael is?” he said to another angel a few moments later. They shook their head, seeming not to know the answer either, and Aziraphale’s heart began to pound.

He wasn’t sure why he’d suddenly grown so nervous about his friend’s well-being. It wasn’t as though Raphael had ever done anything wrong. He was an angel in every sense of the word, and yet Aziraphale still felt his breaths growing more shallow by the second.

Just before his part of the crowd was about to enter what could only be called an arena, Aziraphale found a face he recognized at long last. It was not Raphael, but perhaps Gabriel would know more than Aziraphale did.

“Gabriel, you don’t happen to know where Raphael is, do you? It’s silly, but I can’t seem to find him and my chest has begun to seize up, which I can assure you is not a particularly pleasant feeling.”

“Aziraphale! Oh, it’s good to see you.” Gabriel’s height caused him to look down upon Aziraphale to talk to him, and that did nothing to ease his nerves. Still, he allowed Gabriel to continue. “Hadn’t you heard, though? Raphael is one of the angels who’s going to fall.”

“What?” Aziraphale let out a tiny laugh through which doubt ran so deep that could almost be considered a scoff. “Why would he fall?”

Gabriel shrugged. “I’m not privy to that sort of information, I’m afraid.” Aziraphale frowned. He wasn’t sure if angels could sense lies, but what Gabriel had said certainly sounded like one.

Perhaps it was because of this frown that Gabriel added, “And even if I did know, it’s not like I’d be allowed to tell you.” He laughed good-naturedly, though it held no mirth. “I guess we’ll never know some things, hm?”

“Right,” Aziraphale said, unconvinced.

“Well,” Gabriel concluded, clapping Aziraphale on the shoulders, “we should both head inside now, don’t you think?”

Aziraphale nodded, at a loss for words. For an angel so clever and with an endless stream of questions, having his words seemingly ripped from him was jarring. He shot Gabriel a smile to appease him, then entered the arena-like structure.

Still following the crowd, Aziraphale found himself being herded into a row comprised solely of stone benches a few feet from the ground. He sat, smoothing his robes in an effort to maintain some semblance of control over the situation he was in.

Heartbreak is one of the most painful things a human being can experience. It feels like fire ripping through you, like the most painful of burns scorching you from the inside out, like anger, like tearing, like blazing, searing heat.

Or it feels like ice covering every inch of you, like a numbness you can’t possibly explain, like pain, like breaking, like overwhelming, crushing cold.

Or it feels like a light going out or the shattering of glass or the last note of a song or like drowning beneath the waves of a storm-ravaged sea or the final word of a story you never wanted to end or like a black hole that steals all things good from the world.

And sometimes, it feels like nothing at all.

As of the day Raphael and the other angels fell, heartbreak hadn’t yet been invented, nor had it been experienced by any of God’s creations.

(They were lucky, in those days. Impossibly lucky.)

Though he wasn’t aware of what it was or understand what he was feeling, Aziraphale would be the very first of God’s creations to have his heart broken.

For him, it would feel like nothing a human could possibly comprehend. Angels feel so much more intensely than humans, so it would only follow that their broken hearts feel that much more like the end of the world. There’s no way the pain of it could ever be adequately described, but if you must imagine something, imagine having everything you’ve ever dreamed of and more (infinite love and happiness, sunlit days and moonlit nights, breezes and clouds whenever you wanted, dramatic reunions on rain-soaked streets, winters full of soft, fluffy snow that makes the world feel just a shade brighter, endless praise and fame and money and success (or if you’d prefer, a tight-knit family and the most wonderful friends you could ever wish for and comfort and warmth): all yours because you made it so) then imagine it was all physically ripped away from you in the same brutal way a heart would be ripped from a chest.

It feels exactly like that, only thousands of millions of times worse.

(Needless to say, Aziraphale was in for a treat.)

As he sat waiting for something—anything—to happen, Aziraphale fell back into his pool of questions. Why was Raphael going to fall? Why were any of the angels going to? God made both angels and humans in Her image, so why were they imperfect? Why was the world so cruel and unfair to someone Aziraphale cared for, why, why, why?

He didn’t know any of the answers, and worse, he didn’t know where to find them either.

He didn’t know why it was that when he spotted Raphael in the line of angels about to fall his heart leapt and his chest filled to the bursting with confetti butterflies, he didn’t know why his face felt warm when the soon-to-be-fallen angel flashed a smile at him. Aziraphale couldn’t seem to figure out why he was filled with so much grief on Raphael’s behalf and he couldn’t fathom why it was that he troubled himself so with the fate of an angel that he’d met only once (love works in strange ways among angels, but Aziraphale wouldn’t discover that until a certain someone’s little miracle involving a church, a bomb, and a bag of books caused him to finally look at him in the same way he had all those centuries ago).

No matter the answers to these questions though, Aziraphale still kept his eyes trained on Raphael, searching for any sort of clue written in the contours of his face. Raphael, in turn, switched his focus from the whispers of an angel next to him to answering Aziraphale’s questioning gaze.

Aziraphale was certain the dramatic movements of Raphael’s eyebrows were trying to convey some sort of message, but it was completely lost in translation. Seeming to realize this, Raphael merely shook his head, a soft smile lighting his face. He didn’t speak—Aziraphale wasn’t far from the ground, sure, but the arena was still far too large and full of far too much chatter for him to be able to properly hear anything—but Raphael seemed to be trying to say _some_thing _some_how (this was the first instance lip reading had to be employed, and while Aziraphale didn’t know the name for it, he was fortunate enough to be rather skilled in the practice nonetheless) and as though through magic, Aziraphale could tell what it was.

Raphael’s message wasn’t a long one (a long message would have been virtually impossible to translate, this being the very first use of lip reading and all), but it was filled with more gravitas in it than a few words had any right to be.

“We will meet again,” Raphael mouthed. “Someday, we will. I promise.” He then appeared to form words that looked to Aziraphale like “I love you,” but he didn’t think that was right and chose to disregard it. The first bit was a heavy enough weight for him to bear.

Raphael whispered that same phrase—the one that looked like “I love you”—again before the ground dropped from beneath him without warning, preamble, or fanfare.

Aziraphale’s mouth fell open in a silent scream.

Then his eyes closed, and his memories faded into nothing.

(He was fine, of course. Aziraphale would wake up in a few minutes and be told he had been created to replace an angel that had recently fallen. He would believe this lie, because why would he not?)

_________________________

Raphael had promised they would meet again (which was a promise he would make good on, and not only because angels simply don’t lie), but that wouldn’t be for a long, long while (the universe had only existed for a handful of days at that point though, so time was still very subjective and a long, long while may not seem long at all in hindsight). Aziraphale, however, wouldn’t remember that he knew Raphael for even longer still, and he wouldn’t find out the true reason Raphael fell for eons upon eons more—it wouldn’t be until after Armageddon (the first one, at least) that he learned the truth. He would learn, though. That much had always been written in the stars.

But, long, long before Aziraphale and Raphael would meet again though, even longer still before Aziraphale remembered that he knew Raphael, and eons upon eons more before Aziraphale learned the whole truth, there was a conversation.

“You sent for me?”

“Ah, yes, Raphael. Please, have a seat. There’s something I feel we, as archangels, should discuss.”

“What is it?”

“You look concerned, my friend, but there is no need to be. I assure you, everything is well. Or, at least, it will be.”

“That sounds awfully ominous.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean for it to. Neither of us will be affected by this, of course, so there’s no reason at all you should be worried.”

“I’m sure there’s no need for such theatrics, Gabriel. Just tell me why you wanted to see me.”

“Ah, of course. I’m sure you’ve heard word of what Lucifer has been saying, right?”

“About how he believes that he’s more worthy of ruling over the universe than—”

“Yes, about how he believes that he’s more worthy of ruling over the universe than the Almighty. Well, in any case, She is planning on doing something about that.”

…

“…Are you going to tell me what She’s going to do or are you expecting me to make a guess?”

“No need to be snippy, Raphael. I’ll tell you.”

“Well, go on then.”

“Don’t rush me, Raphael. The pause is for dramatic effect because what She’s planning to do is quite dramatic. And before you say anything, yes, I’m getting there.”

…

“…Are y—”

“So the Almighty! Has let slip that Lucifer might not be… around here much longer.”

“…And that means?”

“You’ve heard of Hell, right?”

“You mean the place deep within the Earth that the Almighty created as a—”

“Yes, the place deep within the Earth that the Almighty created as a direct opposite to Heaven.”

“I’ve heard of the place, yeah. What about it?”

“Well supposedly, from what I’ve heard, that’s where Lucifer is going to be sent. He’ll be cast out of Heaven, disgraced, dishonored, and with a name so besmirched he will never bother us again!”

“Huh.”

“And a few other angels will be sent with him, of course. Others that he’s drawn to his cause, those that have questioned Her too much, or were too prideful, or lusted for more power, you know.”

“I’m sorry, what was that middle one?”

“Being too prideful? You know, like—”

“I know what being too prideful is, Gabriel. I meant the other middle one.”

“Oh, yeah. There have been a few angels that questioned Her actions too much, like Azazel, Aziraphale—”

“Aziraphale? You can’t mean— Is he meant to be cast out with Lucifer and the others?”

“Yes, he is. Is that a problem?”

“I— no, not really, it’s just…”

“I’d choose your next words _very carefully _if I were you.”

“…Yeah, so it’s just that Aziraphale hasn’t questioned Her actions nearly as much as I have. Are you sure he’s meant to fall?”

“Hm, falling, I like that. We should use that instead of ‘cast out.’ Sounds a bit pretentious, if you ask me.”

“You’ve just completely missed the point.”

“Right. Well, if he’s supposed to fall, then, yes, I’d assume you are too.”

“You know, that’s not _actually _what I—”

“Huh. I thought you were better than this, Raphael.”

“Hang on, Gabriel, I—”

“I’ll have to arrange this with the Almighty, of course—”

“Gabriel—”

“—she’ll have to be alerted of this new development, and who better to alert her than m—”

“Wait!”

“Hm?”

“It… it’s, uh, completely my fault that Aziraphale asked questions in the first place. If I hadn’t met him, he wouldn’t have questioned anything.”

“So… what are you saying, Raphael?”

“I’m saying that if I fall, Aziraphale shouldn’t have to. With me out of the picture, he won’t question the Almighty anymore. He shouldn’t fall, I should.”

“I… huh. That makes sense, doesn’t it? His memory of you will have to be erased though, of course, so your influence is no longer hanging ove—”

“Yes, yeah, that’s fine. Was that all?”

“You know, I’m very disappointed in you, Raphael. You’re an archangel, you should be better than this. No angel should question the almighty, obviously, but—”

“Wonderful, I’ll be on my way then. Nice chat we’ve had.”

“Tsk, tsk. With the amount of disrespect for authority you show, I’m surprised I didn’t realize you didn’t belong here way earlier. Honestly, I should have known the whole Aziraphale debacle was your fault. He always was such a good angel.”

“Mhm. How ignorant of you.”

“I wish I could say I’ll miss you, but I’m afraid I’ll never miss a disgrace such as yourself.”

“Mhm. Yes, how could I have betrayed you like that.”

“Right? It’s positively despicable.”

“Mhm. Well, I’d better be off then. Nice knowing you, Gabriel.”

“I can’t say the same. Good talk, though.”

“The best.”

It was a conversation full of lies and other assorted deception, but a conversation that sealed the fates of both Raphael and Aziraphale nonetheless. It was a conversation that saved one angel and doomed another, but it was a conversation that Raphael would never regret having.

_________________________

As Raphael fell, he turned his gaze skyward, towards the stars he’d played a role in creating mere days earlier. He reached a hand towards them unconsciously, grasping for a world he no longer belonged to.

In later years, he would claim that he hadn’t fallen, not really, but instead had sauntered vaguely downwards. This was, of course, untrue. Raphael had fallen the same way all the other angels had: in a rush of blinding pain and eyes squeezed shut, face turned towards the last glimpse of Heaven they’d ever see. If you looked at it through that lens, Raphael was far from special.

It was, however, true that Raphael had metaphorically sauntered vaguely downwards. He didn’t fall in the same way the other angels had in that his fall had a certain sense of grace to it. He’d sauntered vaguely downwards in the sense that he’d left Heaven with a smirk in place up until the moment the ground dropped out from beneath him, and he’d sauntered in the fact that he remained confident in his choice to fall even as he took his very last angelic breath.

Sauntering vaguely downwards implies a sort of confidence in oneself, in one’s choices. Raphael had that in spades. For as long as his consciousness remained trapped in existence, Raphael would not wish—not even once—that he hadn’t chosen to fall in his angel’s place.

So in that sense, perhaps it was true that Raphael had not so much fallen as sauntered vaguely downwards.

And perhaps one day, when Raphael was no longer Raphael but Crowley instead, his angel would look up at the stars and remember the now-demon who had created them before falling in his place. Perhaps Aziraphale would remember too the love that had begun to grow between them, and perhaps he would understand why Crowley had made his sacrifice.

But that day was not the one Aziraphale was living because, as far as he knew, Raphael—or, as he was now known, Crowley—had never existed at all. All Aziraphale remembered of him was held in the stars Crowley had created once upon a time and in the way those stars lit up tears that fell from the angel’s eyes for reasons he couldn’t fathom.

_________________________

find other stuff i’ve written under #writings from the stars

[cirgaydian-rhythm]

Mawaru Penguindrum Rewatch - Ep. 1

the fucking STARS floating all over Himari and her bedroom - the same fucking stars associated with Ringo from her introduction, all as Shouma talks about (the cruelty of) fate

that gyroscope thingy? the beads on it aren’t red at the start here

And the kids:

“The apple is the universe itself. A universe in the palm of your hand. It’s what connects this world and the other world. / Other world? / The world Campanella and the other passengers are heading to. / What does that have to do with an apple? / Basically, the apple is the reward given to those who’ve chosen, of their own free will, to die for love*. / But everything’s over when you’re dead. / It’s not over. What I’m trying to say is that’s actually where everything begins! / I don’t get it at all. / I’m talking about love!”

*This is Tree’s translation, as the subtitles weren’t quite accurate

Other than the fact that these kids are replaced by Kanba and Shouma in the last episode, and that it’s an obtuse summary of the ending, it also gives us two things:

1. “The apple is the reward given to those who’ve chosen to die for love.” Apple, or in Japanese, Ringo. It’s no coincidence that there’s a character literally named “apple” in a show with very heavy apple symbolism. And in the end, Shouma takes Ringo’s punishment, allowing Ringo to be with Himari, who is the only character that willingly, knowingly, chose to give up her life force so that Kanba (and everyone else) would survive. (I mean, Ringo, too, also willingly accepts the fact that she’ll die in order to save Himari, so who’s to say who got the fruit ;P) (But I consider Himari’s sacrifice to be more in line with what’s said here, as she chose to die and has a whole scene about it, whereas Ringo merely accepted that she would die if she chose to use the spell.)

2. “Everything’s over when you’re dead. / That’s actually where everything begins.” This might be reaching a bit more, but here it goes: Kanba shared the apple with Shouma when they were both on the brink of death in the boxes. They are both alive because of the fate they shared, which is why, when Shouma burns, Kanba goes, too, but they return essentially back at the age where they shared that fate. They die, and return to where everything began.

I still don’t know what’s up with that weird statue with the two dudes being a ball. And it is clearly two dudes. Every time I see it, I feel like there’s a globe missing between them, like it should be some kind of gay re-imagining of Atlas. I could probably make it about Kanba and Shouma and how they make each other’s world whole or whatever, but, well...it’s a weird statue.

There’s a small sea otter plush and kappa plush (miniatures of the ones Ringo has) by the register where they’re buying Himari’s Hat. Himari’s Hat which is...half of Momoka...that they wrapped in a pink ribbon... lol

Okay, I’m just...I love the little things that keep visually/thematically linking Himari and Ringo.

I wonder if Kanba’s resolve during Himari’s death has anything to do with the fact that he already lost one family...

Tree went back to pause on the blackboard behind Tabuki during the classroom scene - the only translated part of the board is “how embryogenesis works,” but it is talking about frog development. And one of the pictures that’s shown in this episode and gets focused on near the end of the series has Shouma holding a frog (and Kanba’s shirt saying “love frog”), and then there’s Ringo’s whole occult deal with the frogs...

Why are there so many frogs?!?!?!

(Tree said that if this was a “the scorpion and the toad” thing, they were gonna be pissed) (as far as we can recall, it doesn’t fit with...anything, symbolically, but it’s funny, nonetheless)

Red umbrella...when the penguin was sent by Kanba... (Kanba loves his bro, m’kay?)

San-chan teaching Himari how to knit!

Tree pointed out that the penguins’ autonomous actions are reflections of various needs/desires of their human buddies. Kanba and Shouma’s penguins recklessly pursue things to try to fill the “emptiness” they sense in their humans - emptiness that comes from the fact that Kanba and Shouma are two halves of a whole thanks to the apple they shared. They are only “whole” when they’re together, but because Shouma doesn’t remember, there’s a schism and they can’t connect the way they’re supposed to. Kanba’s penguin pursues erotica as a crude representation of the love Kanba desires. Shouma’s penguin consumes everything in sight because it doesn’t know why the emptiness is there (because Shouma doesn’t remember why), it’s just trying to fill the void in any way it thinks it can.

Himari’s penguin, though, is very stable, but is also constantly knitting. Himari picks it up from San-chan, and San-chan knits even when Himari is not. Tree’s theory is that San-chan is stable because Himari is “whole” - she has life force from both Kanba and Shouma. But they’re unstable and unable to connect, so San-chan knits as a desire to weave them back together.

Is the gyroscope around the world in the teddydrum sequence the same as the one in the doctor’s office? I mean, it looks VERY similar, and given that the gyroscope changes in Sanetoshi’s presence and is focused on a lot around him...

Tree just asked if it was supposed to be the Gears of Fate. It probably is, since it’s associated with both Sanetoshi and Momoka.

“If a man ignored fate, and ignored his instincts and DNA to love someone else... Is he really human?”

On the surface this looks like he’s asking if he’s still human for loving his sister, but knowing that Kanba and Himari aren’t related at all (and Kanba knows that) means this interpretation doesn’t hold water. The other argument could be made that he’s ignoring his “fate” as the son of the Natsume clan...but he was already disowned, and it had nothing to do with Himari. So this can’t really be about Himari. So who’s the only other logical person Kanba could love that would be against “fate,” “instincts,” and “DNA”?

It has to be Shouma.

(This is an interpretation that has to be made with the full awareness that media is not created in a vacuum, and nobody’s opinions in the show are meant to be Absolutely Correct - homophobia and the misconceptions of homosexuality are very much A Thing, and even if the author is aware that these are misconceptions, there’s nothing saying that Kanba knows they are. As a story set in a time and world like ours, it’s entirely possible for Kanba to believe that loving another boy is against fate, (survival) instincts, and DNA, especially if he believes that his “fate” was to be with Himari.)

Tree also pointed out that this question could’ve been posed in a platonic sense - as in, he’s chosen to love and protect a family that’s not his own, which goes against basic survival instincts that dictate that he should be loving and protecting his own blood family (whose survival would still continue his own genetic line, even if he himself doesn’t reproduce).

Either way, a romantic love for Himari wouldn’t be going against fate/instinct/DNA, as she’s an unrelated female. So either he’s talking about a platonic, familial love for Himari, or he’s talking about a romantic love for Shouma.

[isolavirtuosa]

Unlikely Office Romances 5-6

[fanfiction] Gundam Wing, 1x2x1, probably PG-13ish though there are some mildly sexy times and the usual trashmouth

Dr. Heero Yuy, Preventers forensics expert, can’t seem to get over his crush on his former wartime comrade Agent Duo Maxwell.  Agent Duo Maxwell can’t seem to stand the sight of him… and yet…?

Parts 1-2

Parts 3-4

Parts 5-6 under the cut

- 5 -

             I glanced down at my phone and snickered at the picture Quatre had sent me of him and Mariemaia.  Quatre had a fake mustache, looking like a B-movie villain as Instructor H.  Mariemaia had a fake nose, mustache, and a stuffed mushroom toy on her head, clearly portraying Professor G.  They were both holding up gunpla models and trying to look serious.

           “Hey, who’s sending you amusing texts?” Trowa asked, elbowing me in the side.  “That’s my gig.”

           I swiveled the barstool I was sitting on, holding my phone up for him to see.

           “…Quatre…?” Trowa said slowly, seeming confused.

           “Yeah, I dunno, we’ve been getting along really good lately.”

           “Okay, but Quatre?”

           “What’s the matter, Tro, ya jealous?”

           Trowa hesitated.

           I cracked up.  “What, are you afraid Quat’ll steal your important job of making sarcastic comments to me throughout the workday?”

           “It’s a time-honored duty,” Trowa said solemnly, but there was something off in his expression.

           “No, really, what’s up?” I asked, looking into his eyes.

           “Nothing,” Trowa said with a relaxed shrug.

           “Do you still have a crush on Quatre?!” I asked, getting gleeful.

           “When did I ever?” Trowa asked, arching his eyebrow.

           “When we were all lonely teenage boys, and the two of you would sneak off together to blow each other’s flutes.”

           Trowa rolled his eyes, taking a long pull from his beer.  “The only two of us who were crushing on each other were you and Yuy.”

           “You bastard, I can’t believe you would bring that up!”

           “You just accused me of… and I quote, ‘blowing Quatre’s flute’.”

           “Yeah, but I told you that Heero thing in confidence, when I was very inebriated.”

           “And you should have known that I would find the perfect moment to exploit it.”

           “You’re the worst best friend ever.  I’m gonna promote Hilde to Best Friend Number One.”

           “Hey, you do what you gotta do,” Trowa said, seemingly unaffected by my very real and serious threat.

           I sighed loudly, signaling the bartender for another drink.  I turned back to Trowa, eyes suspicious.  “So you’re not harboring latent homosexual feelings for Quatre?”

           “Sorry to disappoint, but no.”

           “Oh, well that’s good, ’cause he’s totally hittin’ it with Dorothy.”

           “That cannot even possibly be true.”

           “I’m dead serious.”

           “Is this like your Wufei and Sally theory, because I gotta say…?”

           “That one’s true, too.  Look, I can’t control the heteros and their weird mating choices, I can only report them to you factually.”

           “Yeah, okay, but… Quatre?  And Dorothy?”

           “That’s Secretary of State Catalonia to you,” I said, snickering as I did every time Dorothy and her damn eyebrows showed up on my television.

           “Who is voting for her?”

           “Apparently Quatre and the entire Maganac Corps, which is like what, ninety percent of the voting population?”

           “There aren’t that many members.  More like seventy… three percent,” Trowa corrected me.

           “The point still stands,” I said, gesturing at him with my drink.  “That woman slept her way into office.”

           “Eergh,” Trowa said with a shudder.  “You’re serious?  Do we need to sit Quatre down and have an intervention?”

           “I already tried,” I said with a sad shake of my head.  “And now every time that I hear she’s gonna be coming to L1 for something, I’m gonna keep picturing their booty call and I won’t be able to sleep for days.”

           “You’re ridiculous.”

           “You say that, but you know I’m right.”

           “Oh my god, Quatre and Dorothy…” Trowa muttered, then kicked back his entire drink.  “Why do you keep telling me these horrible things?”

           “Because I care about you, obviously.”

           “That makes no sense.”

           “Says you, bub.”

           “How many drinks have you had?”

           “Not enough?” I said with a grin that announced I was clearly lying.  I had definitely bypassed my usual self-imposed limit, but lately I just found Marty’s depressing.

           “Yeah, okay, I think it’s time to head home,” Trowa said, taking my beer and drinking it for me.

           “Jerk,” I said.  “Wanna come over and hang?”

           Trowa blinked slowly, then shrugged.  “Yeah, sure.”

           “Cool, man, cool,” I said, wobbling to my feet. God, I was lame, getting completely plastered like a kid.  I was an adult now.  I was practically thirty.

           “Are you going to make it to your place?” Trowa asked, looking back as he led the way to my apartment.

           “Yeah, sure, I’m fine,” I said, laughing for no reason.

           “Maxwell, get it together,” Trowa said with a sad head shake.

           “I’m so together I’m like a puzzle.”

           Trowa didn’t deem that worth responding to.

           I gave my own cleverness a pity laugh and followed Trowa up the stairs.

           My apartment was a swinging bachelor pad, and I was more than happy to welcome Trowa into my home.  If only the damn key would fit in the lock.

           “Give me that,” Trowa said, fingers brushing mine as he took the key away.

           “I was just about to get it…” I protested.

           “No, no you weren’t,” Trowa said, sticking the key in the lock and turning it with ease.

           “Are you a wizard?” I marveled.

           “Yes, Duo, you’ve discovered my secret,” Trowa said, ushering me inside.  “During my free time, I wear a tall hat and carry a magic wand, and I go to Heero and Quatre’s Dungeons and Dragons parties.”

           “Ahahaha, I can see that,” I cackled.  “They’re such nerds,” I added for good measure.

           “Oh, I thought Quatre was your new BFF.”

           “Yeah, my nerdy BFF.”

           “So does the nerdy BFF rank higher or lower than the sexy and witty BFF?”

           “I already told you that Hilde’s number one, HA!”

           “Bantering with you when you’re drunk lacks a certain amount of… finesse…” Trowa mused, sitting me on the couch.

           “Sorry I haven’t been finessing you,” I said, laying my head on the back of the couch.  “What’re all these black spots in my eyes?”

           “How much did you drink?” Trowa asked, leaning in front of me and looking into my eyes, a slight wrinkle between his brows.

           “I might have had a drink or twelve before you came…” I said, trying to count the actual number of drinks I’d had and failing.

           Trowa sat down next to me, looking worried.

           “I’m fine, Tro, no worries.”

           “It’s not that I don’t believe you,” Trowa said, “but I don’t believe you.”

           “No, really,” I said.  “It’s not like I’ve been binge drinking to fill the sad, lonely void in my heart.”

           Trowa stared at me.

           “Oh, damn, is that what I’ve been doing?” I muttered.  Then I laughed for good measure.  Gotta keep things light.

           “You are in a sad state,” Trowa commented, parking himself next to me and bumping my knee with his.

           We were both quiet for a while.

           “Is this it?” I finally said.

           Trowa turned his eyes on me, calmly waiting for me to continue.

           “I guess I spent my youth just surviving, and now here I am, happy peaceful life and all that shit, but like… is this it? Is this what life is supposed to be?”

           “What else should it be?” Trowa prodded.

           “I don’t know, but Christ, like is this what we were fighting for?  For people to have really fucking pointless nine to five office jobs where they don’t actually do anything, so they can get paychecks, so they can get drunk and forget about how much their lives suck?”

           Trowa was looking at me funny.

           “What?!” I asked.

           “I think you’re just bored, to be honest,” Trowa said.  “And also having a midlife crisis.”

           I mused that over for a bit.  “Yes… bored… yes!  So simple, yet so deep.”

           “I don’t know about deep,” Trowa said.  “I was just stating the obvious.”

           “No, no, you are way deep, man,” I said, patting him on the back.  “You just get me.”

           “Do I?” Trowa said, and there was something sad in his eyes.

           “Hey, what’s that about?” I asked climbing up his arm and staring into his eyes.  They were really green and kind of bewitching, and I was clearly not sobering up fast enough.

           “What?” Trowa asked, leaning his face away from mine.

           “I wish I could see inside of your brain,” I said mournfully.

           “I’m going to get you some water,” Trowa said, moving to get up.

           “Don’t leave me!” I protested, holding onto his arm.

           “Duo, your kitchen is two feet away.”

           “Troooowaaaa, I’m having an existal… eximastential crisis here.”

           “What do you want me to do about it?”

           “Huh,” I said.  “No clue.”

           Trowa let out a long, exasperated breath.  He stayed seated, and I stayed holding onto his arm.

           “Sorry, Tro, I’m terrible company tonight,” I said, resting my cheek against his shoulder.

           “It’s not really different from any other night,” Trowa said in what I interpreted as a fond way.

           “Ha, burn,” I said, letting my eyes slide shut. I was suddenly very tired.

           I woke up tucked in my bed with a horrible headache.

           Sitting up made everything in my body go crazy, but lying back down didn’t help.

           And why did my damn phone have to be ringing?

           “Shut uuuuup,” I groaned, flailing my hand around on the nightstand.  I managed to knock the phone on the ground, making me groan louder.

           I didn’t remember getting out of bed to get my phone.  I did remember suddenly realizing that I was lying prone on the floor, with my phone jammed under my back.  I rolled off of it with a quiet string of curses and picked it up to check the missed calls.

           Preventer’s Headquarters.  Damn.

           I hit redial, and held the phone in the general direction of my ear.

           “Maxwell, get down here now.”

           “Huh?” I said.

           “Office.  Now.”

           “But… it’s Sunday… I think?”

           “Oh, well in that case let me call the terrorists and let them know that they need to put their plans on hold because it’s your day off.”

           “Thanks, Wufei, you’re the man.”

           Wufei hung up on me.

           I groaned, crawling across the floor in the general direction of my bathroom.  Surely a shower would solve all of my problems.

           I don’t know how I got to the office. Trowa had left some hangover meds sitting out on my kitchen counter for me, which probably helped.

           “What did you do last night?” Hilde asked, giving me a onceover as she held the elevator door.

           “Sadly, no one,” I said, sidling up next to her and trying not to fall over.

           “A tragedy,” Hilde said, hitting the door’s close button.

           “The real tragedy is why the hell are we at the office on a perfectly good day off?”

           “Because some stupid kids are fancying themselves revolutionaries, and we have to clean up their mess.”

           “Damn, that sounds bitingly familiar.”

           “Huh?” Hilde said, then gave it some proper thought. “Ha, yeah.  You guys were so off track with your gundams and your military aggression.”

           “What a clusterfuck that all was, good thing you straightened me out,” I said, holding the open door button as Hilde got out.

           “No one could ever straighten you out,” Hilde said, sounding more serious than the previous tone of the conversation.

           “Was that a gay joke or a subtle jab about me leaving you on L2?”

           “Maybe a little bit of both,” Hilde said breezily, pushing her way into the office.  “Good morning, Preventers.”

           “Good morning!” Andrea chirped, looking perfectly put together.

           I eyed her suspiciously.

           “Coffee?” she offered, pointing to the coffee maker.

           I eyed it with disdain, then shrugged. “Yes, please.”

           Sally was wheeling the white board out of her office, and all kinds of important-looking things were scribbled on it. “Are we all here yet?”

           “I sent Barton down to the laboratory to get Winner and Yuy,” Wufei said, rising to his feet from behind his desk.

           “Okay,” Sally said.  “Maxwell, Warner, you look like shit.”

           “But you look gorgeous,” I said, trying to look winsome and charming.

           Sally snorted.

           “I just went to bed an hour ago,” Daniel complained.

           “Poor baby,” Sally said, dropping a huge file on Daniel’s desk, making him jump.  “Maybe you’re in the wrong line of work.”

           Daniel looked confused, tired, and a little bit like he needed a hug.

           “Here ya go,” Andrea said, handing me a mug of coffee.

           “Thanks, darling,” I said, accepting and downing the swill that our office deemed ‘coffee’.

           “Hail, hail, the gang’s all here,” Sally said, watching as Trowa came into the office with Quatre and Heero in tow.  “Let’s get started, then, shall we?”

           Wufei joined Sally at the white board, pointing to some squiggles.  “At 0300 hours, shots were reported at the Vice President’s residence.  Her body was found shortly afterwards.  A group calling themselves Black Freedom posted a video online, taking credit for the assassination.”

           “Black Freedom?” I snorted.

           “Maxwell, a woman is dead,” Wufei snarled at me.

           “It doesn’t make the name any less stupid.”

           “We’re dispatching a team to Earth immediately to investigate the scene,” Sally cut in, knowing that Wufei and I were heading towards yet another argument.  “Maxwell and Schbeiker, that’s you.  Yuy will lead forensics.”

           I was halfway through a high five with Hilde about our free vacation to Earth, not to mention the potential to discharge our firearms on bad guys, when I realized that Heero was coming with us.

           Heero Yuy, dressed in women’s jeans and a lab coat, holding a mug from that godawful sci-fi Gundam series that had aired last year. Heero Yuy, who wrote short novellas for lab reports and made sure you read every inane detail.  Heero Yuy, who Quatre thought for some inexplicable reason was the man of my dreams.

           I didn’t miss the grin that Quatre shot me at the ‘happy’ news.

           God help me.

 - 6 -

             I was at the spaceport thirty minutes after Wufei concluded our briefing.  Neither Duo nor Hilde had arrived, so I waited awkwardly by myself.

           Quatre kept sending me messages with excessive smiley faces.

           I turned off my phone, crossing my arms over my chest and tapping my foot impatiently.

           Hilde and Duo came strolling in twenty minutes later, arm-in-arm and laughing about something or other.

           Probably me.

           “Hey, Yuy,” Hilde greeted me.  “Let’s go,” she said, pointing in the direction of the shipyard.

           “Fine,” I said, falling into stride with them.

           “You don’t have to be so bitchy about it,” Duo muttered.

           “How am I being bitchy?” I asked, feeling both irritated and nervous.  Duo always brought out the worst in me.

           “You with your sour looks and your crossed arms,” Duo said dismissively, scanning his ID to open the gate to the shipyard.

           I wanted to retort, but Duo was already halfway to the ship.

           Hilde and I scanned our IDs and followed.

           The ride to Earth wasn’t much better.  Duo and Hilde joked and laughed up in the front, while I sat in the back silently.

           I just wanted to be in my lab, autopsying bodies or helping Quatre build new top secret machinery.

           When we landed, we were greeted by the South American branch of the ESUN Bureau of Investigation, and were escorted to Vice President Fernandez’s house.

           “Why does it pay so damn well to be a politician?” Duo muttered as we pulled up to the estate.

           “Kickbacks?  Money laundering?  Extortion?” Hilde suggested

           “Shit, we got into the wrong business.”

           “Most people are already rich before they become politicians,” I said, because they were both clearly missing the point. “Relena’s salary as Vice Foreign Minister is less than what you make.”

           “Oh, so you have to buy your way into politics?” Duo said with a snort.  “Makes sense.”

           “And then you get even richer with the kickbacks and money laundering and extortion?” Hilde said.

           “Relena isn’t like that,” I said.

           “Relena, Relena, Relena,” Duo said, getting out of the car.  “Not everyone can be as perfect as your precious Relena.”

           “And not every politician is as corrupt and self-serving as you think,” I said, following him up the winding walkway.

           “You two are cute when you argue,” Hilde said, pinching Duo’s cheek.

           Duo grimaced at her.

           “We’re not arguing,” I said, because we weren’t.

           Suarez, our ESUNBI guide, stopped us at the front door, which was crosshatched with yellow crime scene tape.  “We’ve preserved the scene as best as we could,” he said, pulling the door open and breaking the tape.  “That’s our forensics team, now,” he added, gesturing to the van that had just pulled into the driveway.  “They’re at your disposal.”

           “Okay, Yuy, you take the lead,” Hilde said. “Duo and I want to take a quick look at the crime scene, then we’ll head out.”

           I nodded, feeling more comfortable already. Collecting fibers, that was something I was good at.

           “Dr. Yuy,” Suarez said, gesturing politely for me to go inside.

           “Don’t touch anything,” I warned, and I could feel Duo rolling his eyes as he came in behind me.

           The body had already been taken to the morgue, so I set the forensics team on scouring the crime scene, a second story bedroom.

           “Looks like it was two guys, one waiting in the garden while the other scaled the wall and climbed in the window,” Hilde reported to me.

           “Okay, I’ll check the garden and the outlying area next,” I said.  I was examining the blood splatter as she talked, only half-listening but sure to recall it later.

           “Duo and I are going to head into town,” Hilde continued.  “Meet us at the hotel whenever you’ve finished, and call us if you find anything important.”

           “Yes,” I said, waving her off.

           “See ya,” she said, striding out of the room.

           Hilde and I had been working together for years, and I felt at ease with her.  She trusted me to do my job, and I trusted her to do hers.

           When I’d finished at the crime scene, one of the forensic investigators took me to their lab.

           Hilde and Duo came to get me when it had gotten to midnight.  I hadn’t noticed the passage of time.

           “Time to get some sleep, Yuy,” Hilde reprimanded me.

           The three of us went back to the hotel, where we found that Une had reserved two rooms for us.

           “Whaddya say, Hil, just like old times?” Duo asked, waggling his eyebrows at her.

           “You’re a boy and you smell,” Hilde said.  “I’ll take the single.”

           “Hildeeeeee,” Duo gasped out, aghast.

           I was with Duo, I would much rather have had the single room.

           “Well, then I guess it’s just like even older times,” Duo said, giving me an amused look after he got over pouting.

           “Don’t remind me,” I said.

           “Duo is the worst roommate,” Hilde chimed in.

           “Don’t I know it,” I muttered, pressing the elevator button for the eighth floor.

           “In what way am I possibly the worst roommate?!” Duo protested.

           “In every way,” I said flatly.

           Hilde snorted.

           “Hilde Schbeiker, don’t be telling lies,” Duo said, waggling his finger at her.  “We had good times in the scrapyard.”

           “Yeah, real good times,” Hilde said.  “Like how I had to wash all your clothes and your dishes, and clean up your room so we wouldn’t get cockroaches.  Good times.”

           “I’m not that messy.”

           “You used to leave half-eaten sandwiches in my pillow,” I interjected.  “What possible reason would there be to put a sandwich in a pillow?”

           “To save them for later, obviously,” Duo retorted.

           Hilde was cracking up as the elevator door opened.

           “It was my pillow!” I snapped.

           “Yeah, well I didn’t want them in my pillow,” Duo said with a shrug.

           “Holy Christ,” Hilde gasped out, exhausted from laughing.

           I was secretly pleased, despite the annoyed look on my face.  Duo and I had always communicated best by being contrary with one another, and when I stopped with the stuttering and social awkwardness, apparently we still could.

           “Maybe you two should room together since you’re best friends now,” Duo muttered.  “We’re in 810,” he said, pointing to the sign outside of the elevator that directed rooms 801-820 to the left and 821-840 to the right.

           “And I’m conveniently in 811,” Hilde said as we all moved towards the left.

           I stopped mid-step, reaching for Hilde’s arm and yanking her towards me.

           Hilde was going for her gun with her other arm, and Duo already had his out and pointed.

           The sound of gunshots splintered the quiet of the hallway.

           We were all back in the alcove with the elevator, the only cover we could take.

           “Fucking amateurs,” Duo muttered, pulling another gun out of the holster at the small of his back and pressing it into my hands. “Should’ve waited until we were separated and in our rooms.”

           “I-I can’t take this,” I said, pushing the gun back at him with shaking hands.

           “I can’t babysit you, Yuy,” Duo snarled, whirling around the corner with his gun pointed, firing shots before quickly ducking back behind the safety of the wall.

           “They’re shooting from a room, so they’ve got more cover than us,” Hilde murmured into Duo’s ear.

           They were busy planning strategy while I was shaking like a coward.

           Count back from ten and reset.  Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.

           I took a deep breath, my hands steadying. I hadn’t held a real gun in years, yet it still felt like second nature to me.

           “Okay, on three,” Hilde whispered.

           “Three!” Duo said, and they both rushed into the hall, sliding their bodies into doorways as they fired.

           I was providing cover fire for them, when I felt a prickling at the back of my neck.  I whirled around to face the other end of the hallway, firing off three shots in rapid succession without registering what I was doing.

           The man cried out, dropping to the floor. His gun clattered from his hand, and a bullet went wild down the hallway.

           There was so much blood.  I knew right away that I’d hit something vital.  The man was dying, a pained gurgling sound coming out of his throat.

           No, not man.  Boy.  He couldn’t have been any older than I was during Operation Meteor.

           I dropped my gun and vomited.

           Duo was suddenly at my side, pulling me back into the alcove.  “Yeah, Wu, we’ve got two shooters, one dead and one incapacitated.  Schbeiker’s been shot, but it’s just a flesh wound, or so she said as she bled all over me.  She’s cuffing the first shooter…  Mm, no one else is making an appearance, but we can’t be sure that they’re the only two…   Yeah, thanks.  I’ll check back in later,” Duo concluded, turning off the radio in his ear.  “Heero, you okay?”

           “Do I look okay?” I asked harshly.

           “Dumb question, I know,” Duo said, rubbing my back as I sat with my head between my knees, trying to breathe deeply.  “But we’re not out of this yet, okay?  So can you be Super Soldier Heero Yuy for a little longer?”

           “No,” I said flatly, but I was already counting again.  Ten nine eight seven six fivefourthreetwoone. I took a deep breath, and I was calm. I shrugged Duo’s hand away from me.

           “You’re good?”

           “Yeah.”

           “Good.  We need to cover Hilde to the elevator,” Duo said, pointing with his finger to the right while he pointed his gun to the left.

           I took watch of the right side, eyes glancing over the crumpled body in my sweep but never lingering on it.

           Hilde whistled at us.

           Duo whistled back.

           Hilde started making her way down the hallway cautiously, the first shooter handcuffed and being pushed along in front of her.

           I kept focused on my side of the hallway, eyes taking in all of the doors.  I could feel Hilde’s approach, knew that she was almost there, just as a door eased open.

           “Don’t move!” I ordered, gun, trained on the doorway.

           It was an older man, and he looked back at me uncertainly.

           “Police business, please stay in your room,” Duo interjected, though he wasn’t looking at the man.  He had the left side to watch.

           Hilde shoved the shooter into the alcove with us and hit the down button of the elevator.

           “What’s going on?” the man questioned.  “I heard the shots, and…”

           “Just stay in your room,” I said, echoing Duo.

           The man nodded, retreating inside and closing the door.

           “Holy fuck, that was unnecessary for my heart,” Duo muttered, backing into the alcove with his gun still trained in front of him.

           “ESUNBI has the first floor secured,” Hilde said, getting into the elevator with the prisoner.

           Duo and I got in, and we started descending.

           I didn’t let myself relax, because I knew if I turned off the machine, I would break down.

           “How’s the arm, Hil?” Duo asked, leaning against the back wall and looking casual.  In actuality, he was watching the now docile prisoner like a hawk.

           “Peachy keen,” Hilde said.

           “You and Heero head to the hospital, and I’ll escort our friend here to the interrogation.”

           “I’m fine-” Hilde started to protest.

           “Get it patched up and meet me at the station.”

           “Are you trying to give me orders?”

           “No one can make you do anything you don’t want to.”

           “True enough,” Hilde agreed, nudging the shooter out the door.

           There was a team of agents waiting for us. Hilde and I got pushed off towards one car, while Duo and the prisoner went towards another one.

           “You okay?” Hilde asked in the car.

           “Fine,” I said.

           “You seem… different,” she said, eyeing me up and down.

           I met her gaze evenly.

           “Less like a lab geek, more like the savior of the world and setter of his own broken bones,” she said.

           I continued to stare at her.

           Hilde smiled.  “Weirdly, I like you better as a dork.”

           “Hn.”

           Hilde touched my hand lightly, then curled her fingers around mine.

           I took a breath, exhaling it slowly.

           “It’s been a long time since you’ve been in a fire fight, huh?”

           “Yeah,” I said quietly.

           “You saved our asses, Yuy,” Hilde said.  “He was already firing when you took him out.”

           I suddenly wanted to vomit again, but I held it in, bile burning up my throat.

           Hilde studied my face, then turned to face forward, squeezing my hand.

           I squeezed back, watching the passing lights of the city.

           At the hospital, Hilde and I both got looked at by the doctor, and I got handed a pill and glass of water for ‘shock’.

           “I’m not in shock,” I muttered, but took the pill anyway.

           One of the ESUNBI agents interviewed me about the shooting, then Hilde emerged from getting her arm bandaged up, and we were off to the police station.

           “Told you they were amateurs,” Duo muttered as we came in.  “He was talking before I’d so much as started my bad cop/bad cop routine.”

           “What, you already broke him?!” Hilde asked. “Why didn’t you wait for me…?”

           “Sorry, Hil, looks like this case is wrapped up,” Duo said, standing up and leading us through the door we’d just come through. “He gave up Black Freedom’s headquarters on L2, and basically gave me a detailed biography of every member.  I know everyone’s favorite color, their zodiac signs, whether they’re a lefty or a righty...”

           “I knew I shouldn’t have gone to the hospital,” Hilde muttered.

           “But look at this gorgeous bandage,” Duo said, giving her a charming grin.

           The two of them went back and forth the entire way to the hotel.

           “God, is that the sun rising?” Duo muttered, shielding his eyes as he got out of the car.

           “Good work, agents,” the ESUNBI driver said.

           “Yeah, thanks for all the help,” Hilde said.

           “What help?” Duo muttered as the car drove off. “Anyway, can we just go the hell to sleep already?”

           We went up to the tenth floor where our new rooms were.  The eighth floor was still blocked off with yellow police tape.

           My skin crawled as we got off the elevator.

           Duo opened the door to our room, bidding Hilde goodnight before flopping straight onto one of the double beds.

           I took off my shoes at the door, then went to the bathroom to wash up.

           Duo was fast asleep.

           I pulled out my phone and tried looking at websites and playing some games.  I felt anxious, and it was hard to concentrate.  I tried lying down and closing my eyes, but my eyelids projected an endless series of images.

           I should have gotten more pills at the hospital.

           I sat curled up in the corner of the bed, watching Duo sleep.

[bountyofbeads]

Every parent should read this important article regarding how we mistakenly indoctrinate our young men in society.

The Miseducation of the American Boy

Why boys crack up at rape jokes, think having a girlfriend is “gay,” and still can’t cry—and why we need to give them new and better models of masculinity

Story by Peggy Orenstein | Published January/February 2020 Issue | The Atlantic | Posted December 26, 2019 |

Updated at 9:30 p.m. ET on December 20, 2019.

I knew nothing about Cole before meeting him; he was just a name on a list of boys at a private school outside Boston who had volunteered to talk with me (or perhaps had had their arm twisted a bit by a counselor). The afternoon of our first interview, I was running late. As I rushed down a hallway at the school, I noticed a boy sitting outside the library, waiting—it had to be him. He was staring impassively ahead, both feet planted on the floor, hands resting loosely on his thighs.

My first reaction was Oh no.

It was totally unfair, a scarlet letter of personal bias. Cole would later describe himself to me as a “typical tall white athlete” guy, and that is exactly what I saw. At 18, he stood more than 6 feet tall, with broad shoulders and short-clipped hair. His neck was so thick that it seemed to merge into his jawline, and he was planning to enter a military academy for college the following fall. His friends were “the jock group,” he’d tell me. “They’re what you’d expect, I guess. Let’s leave it at that.” If I had closed my eyes and described the boy I imagined would never open up to me, it would have been him.

But Cole surprised me. He pulled up a picture on his phone of his girlfriend, whom he’d been dating for the past 18 months, describing her proudly as “way smarter than I am,” a feminist, and a bedrock of emotional support. He also confided how he’d worried four years earlier, during his first weeks as a freshman on a scholarship at a new school, that he wouldn’t know how to act with other guys, wouldn’t be able to make friends. “I could talk to girls platonically,” he said. “That was easy. But being around guys was different. I needed to be a ‘bro,’ and I didn’t know how to do that.”

Whenever Cole uttered the word bro, he shifted his weight to take up more space, rocking back in his chair, and spoke from low in his throat, like he’d inhaled a lungful of weed. He grinned when I pointed that out. “Yeah,” he said, “that’s part of it: seeming relaxed and never intrusive, yet somehow bringing out that aggression on the sports field. Because a ‘bro’ ”—he rocked back again—“is always, always an athlete.”

The definition of masculinity seems to be contracting. When asked what traits society values most in boys, only 2 percent of male survey respondents said honesty and morality.

Cole eventually found his people on the crew team, but it wasn’t a smooth fit at first. He recalled an incident two years prior when a senior was bragging in the locker room about how he’d convinced one of Cole’s female classmates—a young sophomore, Cole emphasized—that they were an item, then started hooking up with other girls behind her back. And the guy wasn’t shy about sharing the details. Cole and a friend of his, another sophomore, told him to knock it off. “I started to explain why it wasn’t appropriate,” Cole said, “but he just laughed.”

The next day, a second senior started talking about “getting back at” a “bitch” who’d dumped him. Cole’s friend spoke up again, but this time Cole stayed silent. “And as I continued to step back” and the other sophomore “continued to step up, you could tell that the guys on the team stopped liking him as much. They stopped listening to him, too. It’s almost as if he spent all his social currency” trying to get them to stop making sexist jokes. “Meanwhile, I was sitting there”—Cole thumped his chest—“too afraid to spend any of mine, and I just had buckets left.

“I don’t know what to do,” he continued earnestly. “Once I’m in the military, and I’m a part of that culture, I don’t want to have to choose between my own dignity and my relationship with others I’m serving with. But …” He looked me in the eye. “How do I make it so I don’t have to choose?”

I’ve spent two years talking with boys across America—more than 100 of them between the ages of 16 and 21—about masculinity, sex, and love: about the forces, seen and unseen, that shape them as men. Though I spoke with boys of all races and ethnicities, I stuck to those who were in college or college-bound, because like it or not, they’re the ones most likely to set cultural norms. Nearly every guy I interviewed held relatively egalitarian views about girls, at least their role in the public sphere. They considered their female classmates to be smart and competent, entitled to their place on the athletic field and in school leadership, deserving of their admission to college and of professional opportunities. They all had female friends; most had gay male friends as well. That was a huge shift from what you might have seen 50, 40, maybe even 20 years ago. They could also easily reel off the excesses of masculinity. They’d seen the headlines about mass shootings, domestic violence, sexual harassment, campus rape, presidential Twitter tantrums, and Supreme Court confirmation hearings. A Big Ten football player I interviewed bandied about the term toxic masculinity. “Everyone knows what that is,” he said, when I seemed surprised.

Yet when asked to describe the attributes of “the ideal guy,” those same boys appeared to be harking back to 1955. Dominance. Aggression. Rugged good looks (with an emphasis on height). Sexual prowess. Stoicism. Athleticism. Wealth (at least some day). It’s not that all of these qualities, properly channeled, are bad. But while a 2018 national survey of more than 1,000 10-to-19-year-olds commissioned by Plan International USA and conducted by the polling firm PerryUndem found that young women believed there were many ways to be a girl—they could shine in math, sports, music, leadership (the big caveat being that they still felt valued primarily for their appearance)—young men described just one narrow route to successful masculinity.* One-third said they felt compelled to suppress their feelings, to “suck it up” or “be a man” when they were sad or scared, and more than 40 percent said that when they were angry, society expected them to be combative. In another survey, which compared young men from the U.S., the U.K., and Mexico, Americans reported more social pressure to be ever-ready for sex and to get with as many women as possible; they also acknowledged more stigma against homosexuality, and they received more messages that they should control their female partners, as in: Men “deserve to know” the whereabouts of their girlfriends or wives at all times.

Feminism may have provided girls with a powerful alternative to conventional femininity, and a language with which to express the myriad problems-that-have-no-name, but there have been no credible equivalents for boys. Quite the contrary: The definition of masculinity seems to be in some respects contracting. When asked what traits society values most in boys, only 2 percent of male respondents in the PerryUndem survey said honesty and morality, and only 8 percent said leadership skills—traits that are, of course, admirable in anyone but have traditionally been considered masculine. When I asked my subjects, as I always did, what they liked about being a boy, most of them drew a blank. “Huh,” mused Josh, a college sophomore at Washington State. (All the teenagers I spoke with are identified by pseudonyms.) “That’s interesting. I never really thought about that. You hear a lot more about what is wrong with guys.”

While following the conventional script may still bring social and professional rewards to boys and men, research shows that those who rigidly adhere to certain masculine norms are not only more likely to harass and bully others but to themselves be victims of verbal or physical violence. They’re more prone to binge-drinking, risky sexual behavior, and getting in car accidents. They are also less happy than other guys, with higher depression rates and fewer friends in whom they can confide.

It wasn’t always thus. According to Andrew Smiler, a psychologist who has studied the history of Western masculinity, the ideal late-19th-century man was compassionate, a caretaker, but such qualities lost favor as paid labor moved from homes to factories during industrialization. In fact, the Boy Scouts, whose creed urges its members to be loyal, friendly, courteous, and kind, was founded in 1910 in part to counter that dehumanizing trend. Smiler attributes further distortions in masculinity to a century-long backlash against women’s rights. During World War I, women proved that they could keep the economy humming on their own, and soon afterward they secured the vote. Instead of embracing gender equality, he says, the country’s leaders “doubled down” on the inalienable male right to power, emphasizing men’s supposedly more logical and less emotional nature as a prerequisite for leadership.

Then, during the second half of the 20th century, traditional paths to manhood—early marriage, breadwinning—began to close, along with the positive traits associated with them. Today many parents are unsure of how to raise a boy, what sort of masculinity to encourage in their sons. But as I learned from talking with boys themselves, the culture of adolescence, which fuses hyperrationality with domination, sexual conquest, and a glorification of male violence, fills the void.

Read: Today’s masculinity is stifling

For Cole, as for many boys, this stunted masculinity is a yardstick against which all choices, even those seemingly irrelevant to male identity, are measured. When he had a choice, he would team up with girls on school projects, to avoid the possibility of appearing subordinate to another guy. “With a girl, it feels safer to talk and ask questions, to work together or to admit that I did something wrong and want help,” Cole said. During his junior year, he briefly suggested to his crew teammates that they go vegan for a while, just to show that athletes could. “And everybody was like, ‘Cole, that is the dumbest idea ever. We’d be the slowest in any race.’ That’s somewhat true—we do need protein. We do need fats and salts and carbs that we get from meat. But another reason they all thought it was stupid is because being vegans would make us pussies.”

LEARNING TO “MAN UP”

There is no difference between the sexes’ need for connection in infancy, nor between their capacity for empathy—there’s actually some evidence that male infants are more expressive than females. Yet, from the get-go, boys are relegated to an impoverished emotional landscape. In a classic study, adults shown a video of an infant startled by a jack-in-the-box were more likely to presume the baby was “angry” if they were first told the child was male. Mothers of young children have repeatedly been found to talk more to their girls and to employ a broader, richer emotional vocabulary with them; with their sons, again, they tend to linger on anger. As for fathers, they speak with less emotional nuance than mothers regardless of their child’s sex. Despite that, according to Judy Y. Chu, a human-biology lecturer at Stanford who conducted a study of boys from pre-K through first grade, little boys have a keen understanding of emotions and a desire for close relationships. But by age 5 or 6, they’ve learned to knock that stuff off, at least in public: to disconnect from feelings of weakness, reject friendships with girls (or take them underground, outside of school), and become more hierarchical in their behavior.

By adolescence, says the Harvard psychologist William Pollack, boys become “shame-phobic,” convinced that peers will lose respect for them if they discuss their personal problems. My conversations bore this out. Boys routinely confided that they felt denied—by male peers, girlfriends, the media, teachers, coaches, and especially their fathers—the full spectrum of human expression. Cole, for instance, spent most of his childhood with his mother, grandmother, and sister—his parents split up when he was 10 and his dad, who was in the military, was often away. Cole spoke of his mom with unbridled love and respect. His father was another matter. “He’s a nice guy,” Cole said—caring and involved, even after the divorce—“but I can’t be myself around him. I feel like I need to keep everything that’s in here”—Cole tapped his chest again—“behind a wall, where he can’t see it. It’s a taboo—like, not as bad as incest, but …”

Rob, an 18-year-old from New Jersey in his freshman year at a North Carolina college, said his father would tell him to “man up” when he was struggling in school or with baseball. “That’s why I never talk to anybody about my problems.” He’d always think, If you can’t handle this on your own, then you aren’t a man; you aren’t trying hard enough. Other boys also pointed to their fathers as the chief of the gender police, though in a less obvious way. “It’s not like my dad is some alcoholic, emotionally unavailable asshole with a pulse,” said a college sophomore in Southern California. “He’s a normal, loving, charismatic guy who’s not at all intimidating.” But “there’s a block there. There’s a hesitation, even though I don’t like to admit that. A hesitation to talk about … anything, really. We learn to confide in nobody. You sort of train yourself not to feel.”

I met Rob about four months after he’d broken up with his high-school girlfriend. The two had dated for more than three years—“I really did love her,” he said—and although their colleges were far apart, they’d decided to try to stay together. Then, a few weeks into freshman year, Rob heard from a friend that she was cheating on him. “So I cut her off,” he said, snapping his fingers. “I stopped talking to her and forgot about her completely.” Only … not really. Although he didn’t use the word, Rob became depressed. The excitement he’d felt about leaving home, starting college, and rushing a fraternity all drained away, and, as the semester wore on, it didn’t come back.

When I asked whom he talked to during that time, he shrugged. If he had told his friends he was “hung up” on a girl, “they’d be like, ‘Stop being a bitch.’ ” Rob looked glum. The only person with whom he had been able to drop his guard was his girlfriend, but that was no longer an option.

Girlfriends, mothers, and in some cases sisters were the most common confidants of the boys I met. While it’s wonderful to know they have someone to talk to—and I’m sure mothers, in particular, savor the role—teaching boys that women are responsible for emotional labor, for processing men’s emotional lives in ways that would be emasculating for them to do themselves, comes at a price for both sexes. Among other things, that dependence can leave men unable to identify or express their own emotions, and ill-equipped to form caring, lasting adult relationships.

By Thanksgiving break, Rob was so distraught that he had what he called a “mental breakdown” one night while chatting in the kitchen with his mom. “I was so stressed out,” he said. “Classes. The thing with my girlfriend.” He couldn’t describe what that “breakdown” felt like (though he did say it “scared the crap” out of his mom, who immediately demanded, “Tell me everything”). All he could say definitively was that he didn’t cry. “Never,” he insisted. “I don’t cry, ever.”

I paid close attention when boys mentioned crying—doing it, not doing it, wanting to do it, not being able to do it. For most, it was a rare and humiliating event—a dangerous crack in a carefully constructed edifice. A college sophomore in Chicago told me that he hadn’t been able to cry when his parents divorced. “I really wanted to,” he said. “I needed to cry.” His solution: He streamed three movies about the Holocaust over the weekend. That worked.

As someone who, by virtue of my sex, has always had permission to weep, I didn’t initially understand this. Only after multiple interviews did I realize that when boys confided in me about crying—or, even more so, when they teared up right in front of me—they were taking a risk, trusting me with something private and precious: evidence of vulnerability, or a desire for it. Or, as with Rob, an inability to acknowledge any human frailty that was so poignant, it made me want to, well, cry.

BRO CULTURE

While my interview subjects struggled when I asked what they liked about being a boy, the most frequent response was sports. They recalled their early days on the playing field with almost romantic warmth. But I was struck by how many had dropped athletics they’d enjoyed because they couldn’t stand the Lord of the Flies mentality of teammates or coaches. Perhaps the most extreme example was Ethan, a kid from the Bay Area who had been recruited by a small liberal-arts college in New England to play lacrosse. He said he’d expected to encounter the East Coast “ ‘lax bro’ culture,” but he’d underestimated its intensity. “It was all about sex” and bragging about hooking up, and even the coaches endorsed victim-blaming, Ethan told me. “They weren’t like that in class or around other people; it was a super-liberal school. But once you got them in the locker room …” He shook his head. “It was one of the most jarring experiences of my life.”

As a freshman, Ethan didn’t feel he could challenge his older teammates, especially without support from the coaches. So he quit the team; not only that, he transferred. “If I’d stayed, there would’ve been a lot of pressure on me to play, a lot of resentment, and I would’ve run into those guys all the time. This way I didn’t really have to explain anything.” At his new school, Ethan didn’t play lacrosse, or anything else.

What the longtime sportswriter Robert Lipsyte calls “jock culture” (or what the boys I talked with more often referred to as “bro culture”) is the dark underbelly of male-dominated enclaves, whether or not they formally involve athletics: all-boys’ schools, fraternity houses, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, the military. Even as such groups promote bonding, even as they preach honor, pride, and integrity, they tend to condition young men to treat anyone who is not “on the team” as the enemy (the only women who ordinarily make the cut are blood relatives— bros before hos!), justifying any hostility toward them. Loyalty is paramount, and masculinity is habitually established through misogynist language and homophobia.

As a senior in high school, Cole was made captain of the crew team. He relished being part of a unit, a band of brothers. When he raced, he imagined pulling each stroke for the guy in front of him, for the guy behind him—never for himself alone. But not everyone could muster such higher purpose. “Crew demands you push yourself to a threshold of pain and keep yourself there,” Cole said. “And it’s hard to find something to motivate you to do that other than anger and aggression.”

I asked him about how his teammates talked in the locker room. That question always made these young men squirm. They’d rather talk about looking at porn, erectile dysfunction, premature ejaculation—anything else. Cole cut his eyes to the side, shifted in his seat, and sighed deeply. “Okay,” he finally said, “so here’s my best shot: We definitely say fuck a lot; fuckin’ can go anywhere in a sentence. And we call each other pussies, bitches. We never say the N-word, though. That’s going too far.”

“What about fag?” I asked.

“No,” he said, shaking his head firmly.

“So why can’t you say fag or the N-word but you can say pussy and bitch? Aren’t those just as offensive?”

“One of my friends said we probably shouldn’t say those words anymore either, but what would we replace them with? We couldn’t think of anything that bites as much.”

“Bites?”

“Yeah. It’s like … for some reason pussy just works. When someone calls me a pussy—‘Don’t be a pussy! Come on! Fuckin’ go! Pull! Pull! Pull!’—it just flows. If someone said, ‘Come on, Cole, don’t be weak! Be tough! Pull! Pull! Pull!,’ it just wouldn’t get inside my head the same way. I don’t know why that is.” He paused. “Well,” he said, “maybe I do. Maybe I just try not to dig too deeply.”

Although losing ground in more progressive circles, like the one Cole runs in, fag remained pervasive in the language of the boys I interviewed—including those who insisted that they would never use the word in reference to an actual homosexual. Fag has become less a comment on a boy’s sexuality, says the University of Oregon sociology professor C. J. Pascoe, than a referendum on his manhood. It can be used to mock anything, she told me, even something as random as a guy “dropping the meat out of his sandwich.” (Perhaps oddest to me, Pascoe found that one of the more common reasons boys get tagged with fag is for acting romantically with a girl. That’s seen as heterosexual in the “wrong” way, which explains why one high-school junior told me that having a girlfriend was “gay.”) That fluidity, the elusiveness of the word’s definition, only intensifies its power, much like slut for girls.

Recently, Pascoe turned her attention to no homo, a phrase that gained traction in the 1990s. She sifted through more than 1,000 tweets, primarily by young men, that included the phrase. Most were expressing a positive emotion, sometimes as innocuous as “I love chocolate ice cream, #nohomo” or “I loved the movie The Day After Tomorrow, #nohomo.” “A lot of times they were saying things like ‘I miss you’ to a friend or ‘We should hang out soon,’ ” she said. “Just normal expressions of joy or connection.” No homo is a form of inoculation against insults from other guys, Pascoe concluded, a “shield that allows boys to be fully human.”

Just because some young men now draw the line at referring to someone who is openly gay as a fag doesn’t mean, by the way, that gay men (or men with traits that read as gay) are suddenly safe. If anything, the gay guys I met were more conscious of the rules of manhood than their straight peers were. They had to be—and because of that, they were like spies in the house of hypermasculinity.

Mateo, 17, attended the same Boston-area high school as Cole, also on a scholarship, but the two could not have presented more differently. Mateo, whose father is Salvadoran, was slim and tan, with an animated expression and a tendency to wave his arms as he spoke. Where Cole sat straight and still, Mateo crossed his legs at the knee and swung his foot, propping his chin on one hand.

This was Mateo’s second private high school. The oldest of six children, he had been identified as academically gifted and encouraged by an eighth-grade teacher to apply to an all-boys prep school for his freshman year. When he arrived, he discovered that his classmates were nearly all white, athletic, affluent, and, as far as he could tell, straight. Mateo—Latino and gay, the son of a janitor—was none of those things. He felt immediately conscious of how he held himself, of how he sat, and especially of the pitch of his voice. He tried lowering it, but that felt unnatural, so he withdrew from conversation altogether. He changed the way he walked as well, to avoid being targeted as “girly.” “One of my only friends there was gay too,” he said, “and he was a lot more outward about it. He just got destroyed.”

Guys who identify as straight but aren’t athletic, or are involved in the arts, or have a lot of female friends, all risk having their masculinity impugned. What has changed for this generation, though, is that some young men, particularly if they grew up around LGBTQ people, don’t rise to the bait. “I don’t mind when people mistake me for being gay,” said Luke, a high-school senior from New York City. “It’s more of an annoyance than anything, because I want people to believe me when I say I’m straight.” The way he described himself did, indeed, tick every stereotypical box. “I’m a very thin person,” he said. “I like clothing. I care about my appearance in maybe a more delicate way. I’m very in touch with my sensitive side. So when people think I’m gay?” He shrugged. “It can feel like more of a compliment. Like, ‘Oh, you like the way I dress? Thank you! ’ ”

One of Luke’s friends, who was labeled “the faggot frosh” in ninth grade, is not so philosophical. “He treats everything as a test of his masculinity,” Luke told me. “Like, once when I was wearing red pants, I heard him say to other people, ‘He looks like such a faggot.’ I didn’t care, and maybe in that situation no one was really harmed, but when you apply that attitude to whole populations, you end up with Donald Trump as president.”

W’s AND L’s

Sexual conquest—or perhaps more specifically, bragging about your experiences to other boys—is, arguably, the most crucial aspect of toxic masculinity. Nate, who attended a public high school in the Bay Area, knew this well. At a party held near the beginning of his junior year of high school, he sank deep into the couch, trying to look chill. Kids were doing shots and smoking weed. Some were Juuling. Nate didn’t drink much himself and never got high. He wasn’t morally opposed to it; he just didn’t like the feeling of being out of control.

At 16, reputation meant everything to Nate, and certain things could cement your status. “The whole goal of going to a party is to hook up with girls and then tell your guys about it,” he said. And there’s this “race for experience,” because if you get behind, by the time you do hook up with a girl “she’ll have hit it with, like, five guys already. Then she’s going to know how to do things” you don’t—and that’s a problem, if she tells people “you’ve got floppy lips” or “don’t know how to get her bra off.”

A lanky boy with dark, liquid eyes and curly hair that resisted all attempts at taming, Nate put himself in the middle of his school’s social hierarchy: friends with both the “popular” and “lower” kids. Still, he’d hooked up with only three girls since ninth grade—kissing, getting under their shirts—but none had wanted a repeat. That left him worried about his skills. He is afraid of intimacy, he told me sincerely. “It’s a huge self-esteem suck.”

It would probably be more accurate to say that Nate was afraid of having drunken sexual interactions with a girl he did not know or trust. But it was all about credentialing. “Guys need to prove themselves to their guys,” Nate said. To do that, “they’re going to be dominating.” They’re going to “push.” Because the girl is just there “as a means for him to get off and to brag.”

Before the start of this school year, Nate’s “dry spell” had seemed to be ending. He’d been in a relationship with a girl that lasted a full two weeks, until other guys told him she was “slutty”—their word, he hastened to add, not his. Although any hookup is marginally better than none, Nate said, you only truly earn points for getting sexual with the right kind of girl. “If you hook up with a girl below your status, it’s an ‘L,’ ” he explained. “A loss. Like, a bad move.” So he stopped talking to the girl, which was too bad. He’d really liked her.

After a short trip to the kitchen to watch his friend Kyle stand on a table and drunkenly try to pour Sprite from a can into a shot glass, Nate returned to the couch, starting to relax as people swirled around him. Suddenly Nicole, the party’s host and a senior, plopped onto his lap, handing him a shot of vodka. Nate was impressed, if a little confused. Usually, if a girl wanted to hook up with you, there were texts and Snapchats, and if you said yes, it was on; everyone would be anticipating it, and expecting a postmortem.

Nate thought Nicole was “pretty hot”—she had a great body, he said—though he’d never been especially interested in her before this moment. Still, he knew that hooking up with her would be a “W.” A big one. He glanced around the room subtly, wanting to make sure, without appearing to care, that everyone who mattered—everyone “relevant”—saw what was going down. A couple of guys gave him little nods. One winked. Another slapped him on the shoulder. Nate feigned nonchalance. Meanwhile, he told me, “I was just trying not to pop a boner.”

Nicole took Nate’s hand and led him to an empty bedroom. He got through the inevitable, cringey moments when you actually have to talk to your partner, then, finally, they started kissing. In his anxiety, Nate bit Nicole’s lip. Hard. “I was thinking, Oh God! What do I do now?” But he kept going. He took off her top and undid her bra. He took off his own shirt. Then she took off her pants. “And that,” he said, “was the first time I ever saw a vagina. I did not know what to do with it.” He recalled that his friends had said girls go crazy if you stick your fingers up there and make the “come here” motion, so he tried it, but Nicole just lay there. He didn’t ask what might feel better to her, because that would have been admitting ignorance.

After a few more agonizing minutes, Nicole announced that she wanted to see what was going on upstairs, and left, Nate trailing behind. A friend handed him a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Another high-fived him. A third said, “Dude, you hit that!” Maybe the hookup hadn’t been a disaster after all: He still had bragging rights.

Then he heard a senior, a guy Nate considered kind of a friend, loudly ask Nicole, “Why would you hook up with Nate?”

She giggled. “Oh, I was drunk!” she said. “I was so drunk!”

They were calling him an “L.”

By Monday morning, Nicole had spread the word that Nate was bad at hooking up: that he’d bit her lip, that he didn’t know how to finger a girl. That his nails were ragged. “The stereotype is that guys go into gory detail,” Nate said, but “it’s the other way around.” Guys will brag, but they’re not specific. Girls will go into “what his penis looked like,” every single thing he did.

Nate said he felt “completely emasculated,” so mortified that he told his mom he was sick and stayed home from school the next day. “I was basically crying,” he said. “I was like, Shit! I fucked up.”

No question, gossip about poor “performance” can destroy a guy’s reputation almost as surely as being called a “slut” or a “prude” can destroy a girl’s. As a result, the boys I talked with were concerned with female satisfaction during a hookup; they just didn’t typically define it as the girl having an orgasm. They believed it to be a function of their own endurance and, to a lesser extent, penis size. A college freshman in Los Angeles recalled a high-school classmate who’d had sex with a girl who told everyone he’d ejaculated really quickly: “He got the nickname Second Sam. That basically scared the crap out of all the other guys.” A college senior in Boston recounted how he would glance at the clock when he started penetration. “I’d think, I have to last five minutes, minimum,” he said. “And once I could do that, I’d think, I need to get to double digits. I don’t know if it’s necessarily about your partner’s enjoyment. It’s more about getting beyond the point where you’d be embarrassed, maintaining your pride. It turns sex into a task—one I enjoy to a certain degree, but one where you’re monitoring your performance rather than living in the moment.”

Eventually, Nate decided that he had to take a stand, if only to make returning to school bearable. He texted Nicole and said, “ ‘I’m sorry that you didn’t enjoy it, [but] I would never roast you. Why are you doing this?’ ” She felt “really bad,” he said. “She stopped telling people, but it took me until the next semester to recover.”

HOW MISOGYNY BECOMES “HILARIOUS”

No matter how often I heard it, the brutal language that even a conscientious young man like Nate used to describe sexual contact—you hit that!—always unnerved me. In mixed-sex groups, teenagers may talk about hooking up (already impersonal), but when guys are on their own, they nail, they pound, they bang, they smash, they hammer. They tap that ass, they tear her up. It can be hard to tell whether they have engaged in an intimate act or just returned from a construction site.

It’s not like I imagined boys would gush about making sweet, sweet love to the ladies, but why was their language so weaponized ? The answer, I came to believe, was that locker-room talk isn’t about sex at all, which is why guys were ashamed to discuss it openly with me. The (often clearly exaggerated) stories boys tell are really about power: using aggression toward women to connect and to validate one another as heterosexual, or to claim top spots in the adolescent sexual hierarchy. Dismissing that as “banter” denies the ways that language can desensitize—abrade boys’ ability to see girls as people deserving of respect and dignity in sexual encounters.

For evidence, look no further than the scandals that keep popping up at the country’s top colleges: Harvard, Amherst, Columbia, Yale (the scene of an especially notorious 2010 fraternity chant, “No means yes; yes means anal”). Most recently, in the spring of 2019, at the politically progressive Swarthmore College, in Pennsylvania, two fraternities disbanded after student-run publications released more than 100 pages of “minutes” from house meetings a few years earlier that included, among other things, jokes about a “rape attic” and the acquiring of roofies, “finger blasting” a member’s 10-year-old sister, and vomiting on women during sex.

When called out, boys typically claim that they thought they were just being “funny.” And in a way that makes sense—when left unexamined, such “humor” may seem like an extension of the gross-out comedy of childhood. Little boys are famous for their fart jokes, booger jokes, poop jokes. It’s how they test boundaries, understand the human body, gain a little cred among their peers. But, as can happen with sports, their glee in that can both enable and camouflage sexism. The boy who, at age 10, asks his friends the difference between a dead baby and a bowling ball may or may not find it equally uproarious, at 16, to share what a woman and a bowling ball have in common (you can Google it). He may or may not post ever-escalating “jokes” about women, or African Americans, or homosexuals, or disabled people on a group Snapchat. He may or may not send “funny” texts to friends about “girls who need to be raped,” or think it’s hysterical to surprise a buddy with a meme in which a woman is being gagged by a penis, her mascara mixed with her tears. He may or may not, at 18, scrawl the names of his hookups on a wall in his all-male dorm, as part of a year-long competition to see who can “pull” the most. Perfectly nice, bright, polite boys I interviewed had done one or another of these things.

How does that happen? I talked with a 15-year-old from the East Coast who had been among a group of boys suspended from school for posting more than 100 racist and sexist “jokes” about classmates on a group Finsta (a secondary, or “fake,” Instagram account that is in many cases more genuine than a “Rinsta,” or “real” account).“The Finsta became very competitive,” he said. “You wanted to make your friends laugh, but when you’re not face-to-face,” you can’t tell whether you’ll get a reaction, “so you go one step beyond.” It was “that combination of competitiveness and that … disconnect that triggered it to get worse and worse.”

At the most disturbing end of the continuum, “funny” and “hilarious” become a defense against charges of sexual harassment or assault. To cite just one example, a boy from Steubenville, Ohio, was captured on video joking about the repeated violation of an unconscious girl at a party by a couple of high-school football players. “She is so raped,” he said, laughing. “They raped her quicker than Mike Tyson.” When someone off camera suggested that rape wasn’t funny, he retorted, “It isn’t funny—it’s hilarious!”

“Hilarious” is another way, under the pretext of horseplay or group bonding, that boys learn to disregard others’ feelings as well as their own. “Hilarious” is a haven, offering distance when something is inappropriate, confusing, depressing, unnerving, or horrifying; when something defies boys’ ethics. It allows them to subvert a more compassionate response that could be read as unmasculine—and makes sexism and misogyny feel transgressive rather than supportive of an age-old status quo. Boys may know when something is wrong; they may even know that true manhood—or maybe just common decency—compels them to speak up. Yet, too often, they fear that if they do, they’ll be marginalized or, worse, themselves become the target of derision from other boys. Masculinity, then, becomes not only about what boys do say, but about what they don’t—or won’t, or can’t—say, even when they wish they could. The psychologists Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson, the authors of Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys, have pointed out that silence in the face of cruelty or sexism is how too many boys become men. Charis Denison, a sex educator in the Bay Area, puts it another way: “At one time or another, every young man will get a letter of admission to ‘dick school.’ The question is, will he drop out, graduate, or go for an advanced degree?”

Midway through Cole’s freshman year in military college, I FaceTimed him to see how he’d resolved the conflict between his personal values and those of the culture in which he found himself. As he’d expected, most of his classmates were male, and he said there was a lot of what passed for friendly ribbing: giving one another “love taps” on the back of the head; blocking one another’s paths, then pretending to pick a fight; grabbing one another’s asses; pretending to lean in for a kiss. Giving someone a hard time, Cole said, was always “easy humor,” but it could spiral into something more troubling pretty quickly. When one of his dorm mates joked to another, “I’m going to piss on you in your sleep,” for instance, the other boy shot back, “If you do, I’ll fucking rape you.” For better or worse, Cole said, that sort of comment no longer rattled him.

Although he had been adamantly against the epithet fag when we met, Cole found himself using it, reasoning, as other boys did, that it was “more like ‘You suck’ or ‘You’re lame.’ ” However, at least one of his friends had revealed himself to be legitimately homophobic, declaring that being gay was un-American (“I didn’t know that about him until after we became friends,” Cole insisted). And Cole had not met a single openly LGBTQ student at the school. He certainly wouldn’t want to be out in this environment if he were gay. Nor, he said, would he want to be Asian—the two Asian American boys in his dorm were ostracized and treated like foreigners; both seemed miserable.

“I do feel kind of like a cop-out for letting all the little things slide,” Cole said. “It’s a cop-out to not fight the good fight. But, you know, there was that thing I tried sophomore year … It just didn’t work. I could be a social-justice warrior here, but I don’t think anyone would listen to me. And I’d have no friends.”

The #MeToo movement has created an opportunity, a mandate not only to discuss sexual violence but to engage young men in authentic, long-overdue conversations about gender and intimacy. I don’t want to suggest that this is easy. Back in the early 1990s, when I began writing about how girls’ confidence drops during adolescence, parents would privately tell me that they were afraid to raise outspoken daughters, girls who stood up for themselves and their rights, because they might be excluded by peers and called “bossy” (or worse). Although there is still much work to be done, things are different for young women today. Now it’s time to rethink assumptions about how we raise boys. That will require models of manhood that are neither ashamed nor regressive, and that emphasize emotional flexibility—a hallmark of mental health. Stoicism is valuable sometimes, as is free expression; toughness and tenderness can coexist in one human. In the right context, physical aggression is fun, satisfying, even thrilling. If your response to all of this is Obviously, I’d say: Sure, but it’s a mistake to underestimate the strength and durability of the cultural machinery at work on adolescent boys. Real change will require a sustained, collective effort on the part of fathers, mothers, teachers, coaches. (A study of 2,000 male high-school athletes found significantly reduced rates of dating violence and a greater likelihood of intervening to stop other boys’ abusive conduct among those who participated in weekly coach-led discussions about consent, personal responsibility, and respectful behavior.)

We have to purposefully and repeatedly broaden the masculine repertoire for dealing with disappointment, anger, desire. We have to say not just what we don’t want from boys but what we do want from them. Instructing them to “respect women” and to “not get anyone pregnant” isn’t enough. As one college sophomore told me, “That’s kind of like telling someone who’s learning to drive not to run over any little old ladies and then handing him the car keys. Well, of course you think you’re not going to run over an old lady. But you still don’t know how to drive.” By staying quiet, we leave many boys in a state of confusion—or worse, push them into a defensive crouch, primed to display their manhood in the one way that is definitely on offer: by being a dick.

During our first conversation, Cole had told me that he’d decided to join the military after learning in high-school history class about the My Lai massacre—the infamous 1968 slaughter by U.S. troops of hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese civilians along with the mass rape of girls as young as 10. “I want to be able to be in the same position as someone like that commanding officer and not order people to do something like that,” he’d said. I’d been impressed. Given that noble goal, was a single failure to call out sexism a reason to stop trying? I understood that the personal cost might be greater than the impact. I also understood that, developmentally, adolescents want and need to feel a strong sense of belonging. But if Cole didn’t practice standing up, if he didn’t figure out a way to assert his values and find others who shared them, who was he?

“I knew you were going to ask me something like that,” he said. “I don’t know. In this hyper-masculine culture where you call guys ‘pussies’ and ‘bitches’ and ‘maggots’—”

“Did you say ‘maggots,’ or ‘faggots?’ ” I interrupted.

“Maggots. Like worms. So you’re equating maggots to women and to women’s body parts to convince young men like me that we’re strong. To go up against that, to convince people that we don’t need to put others down to lift ourselves up … I don’t know. I would need to be some sort of superman.” Cole fell silent.

“Maybe the best I can do is to just be a decent guy,” he continued. “The best I can do is lead by example.” He paused again, furrowed his brow, then added, “I really hope that will make a difference.”

_______

Peggy Orenstein is the author of Boys & Sex, Cinderella Ate My Daughter, and Waiting for Daisy: A Tale of Two Continents, Three Religions, Five Infertility Doctors, an Oscar, an Atomic Bomb, a Romantic Night, and One Woman's Quest to Become a Mother. Her website is peggyorenstein.com.

[takenews-blog1]

I By no means Noticed That In A Historical past Guide! Pictures They Completely May Not Present In Historical past Class

New Post has been published on https://takenews.net/i-by-no-means-noticed-that-in-a-historical-past-guide-pictures-they-completely-may-not-present-in-historical-past-class/

I By no means Noticed That In A Historical past Guide! Pictures They Completely May Not Present In Historical past Class

Sensual expression has lengthy been a mainstay within the historical past of this planet. Whether or not it was from the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Indians, or trendy People, eroticism has been expressed all through the centuries. Folks appear to be both intrigued with or appalled by photographs that depict eroticism.

How would we learn about these raunchy photographs in the event that they weren’t proven in historical past books? You must discover them elsewhere! The next photographs won’t ever be displayed in any historical past e-book.

It is a blast from the previous, however not the previous that you’d anticipate! This can be a precursor to lots of the erotic photographs that exist in the present day. The entire submission factor is a pastime for a lot of around the globe, and a few folks like to be humiliated! Some folks love one of these ache and gladly have bondage periods in an effort to fill that void of their lives!

Many people have ended up with the dreaded flat tire. Flat tires is usually a ache. You’ll have to get a bit soiled when altering a tire. Fortunately, we now have roadside help on this present time, however again then, you’ll have needed to get a leg up on the scenario to alter a tire!

Positive, this photograph of an affectionate couple could seem tame by in the present day’s requirements, however again then, it was particularly raunchy. Between the girl’s cheeky bottoms and the person’s tight grip round her waist, this picture was scan-dal-ous.

Smoking by no means damage anybody! However critically, it is a very early instance of erotic posing. Again throughout these instances, smoking was thought-about rebellious, together with consuming liquor. You should still see a picture like this, or one thing just like the picture beneath, not directly, form, or type in the present day.

Somewhat leg by no means damage anybody, however this isn’t just a bit leg, however numerous leg! This seems to be like an harmless image to our trendy sensibilities, however again in these days, this will have been thought-about a bit too raunchy and thus would have been banned. Throughout these instances, a girl was anticipated to be chaste, however this girl is way from that!

Now we have most likely heard this 1,000,000 instances. The saying has been handed down via time, and is related to self-importance. I’d guess that the girl within the picture beneath would ideally be getting ready to go someplace and taking a look at what might she ought to put on, or perhaps it simply could also be self-importance!

We’re trying right into a mirror of the previous. It is a previous that included prohibition, abstinence in numerous circumstances, and a time earlier than promiscuous exercise was widespread amongst people. Some folks couldn’t maintain it in, and this girl looks like a kind of people who threw warning to the wind!

All the pictures from again then couldn’t have all been considerably drab and bland. I consider you already know what I’m speaking about. Folks in classic pictures had a critical look on their face. No smiles, simply all seriousness. Effectively, this picture differs from the norm and for an excellent cause!

An excellent stretch can present blood to the extremities, particularly the decrease extremities! It is a classic deal with from a time of the distant previous. This may increasingly have been earlier than the health craze! After I say earlier than the health craze, I imply WAY earlier than the health craze!

Right here’s a beautiful girl who’s seemingly having a very good time posing. This seems to be like a girl of confidence, and a girl of sophistication. This looks like the kind of girl who might woo you along with her very presence. She has one thing up prime, which can have been an issue to some for the time that this photograph was taken. Some girls might need been jealous as a result of the hubby might need been looking at this!

I’ll have an order of legs and a again please! Okay, just a bit humor there. I’m keen to wager that this picture was taken close to or across the sixties. The beehive kind hairdo is an entire giveaway! As time passes alongside, footage grew to become a bit extra raunchy however nonetheless tolerable for most individuals. We actually have come a great distance, haven’t we?

Somewhat avant-garde from the previous. This can be rather less erotic from the opposite photographs featured on this article, but it surely does peak the curiosity of some people. Greater than possible this picture was alleged to be geared toward those that respect the humanities. Somewhat experimental artwork has gone a great distance.

A fur to cowl up the fur! When you didn’t get it, then don’t harp on it! That is most likely a style mannequin. It might look like there have been fashions who labored underground again then, they usually most likely took a lot of these footage extra for enjoyable than revenue undoubtedly.

The candy influences of slave and grasp photographs! Again previously, slave and grasp kind photographs, or S&M, was thought-about immoral and really taboo. As with every part, ideas and perceptions of eroticism adjustments through the years. This was on the sting of maximum, for a classic photograph, carrying laced up excessive boots and such.

This may increasingly have been one of many early influences for latex and corsets for kinky style and pleasure. The entire masochist motion started someday across the 1800’s, and its influences began to broaden over the subsequent 100 years. The entire masochistic uniform factor has even changed into a enterprise.

In lots of circumstances, no partying was allowed again then. Proof of this was the ethical majority that existed again in these days and in addition the Prohibition Period. The era of the ale drinkers have been frequent again in these days and there have been every kind of dangerous associations that went together with the consumption of intoxicating drinks.

This girl might need been attempting to set a style assertion. Rubber boots and stockings and fur and a beret. A few of these photographs spark different curiosity, particularly for the males. If you don’t get the place I’m coming from, then you will need to assume actually onerous and the reply will come to you very simply!

This may increasingly have been one other paradigm shift on this planet of modeling. There was a time when being full-figured was thought-about dangerous. A voluptuous girl was undoubtedly out of the query. However as with every part, as time progresses, this look is now the norm.

This was taken maybe within the fifties. This photograph would have prompted an enormous stir amongst folks again then. Though two girls are laying in mattress and being as sensual as they need to be, this could have sparked a debate as a result of the morality ambiance of the time would have stated this was associated to homosexuality.

4 pretty girls displaying what’s beneath. These appear to be leggings greater than common panty hose which are worn, so the impact of this photograph was supposed to get an increase. An increase from the ethical majority of the time and a special type of rise for different folks, if you already know the place I’m coming from.

.

It will probably get highly regarded within the kitchen. When you can’t take the warmth, then put on rather less clothes! Hey, somebody has to do the cooking, and so getting out of the kitchen just isn’t an possibility. Bear in mind these espresso pots with the little gentle bulb factor on the highest? A few of chances are you’ll not keep in mind, however hey, these have been the times earlier than the Keurig machine and Okay-cups

Somewhat avant-garde earlier than avant-garde caught on! The halter prime is made to garner consideration. I’m guessing that it garnered an entire lot of consideration again in these days! Really, a few of the halter prime model of clothes could have gone again even additional into antiquity, perhaps even again to the time when the Grecian empire existed. I don’t assume the kitchen stuff across the waist got here alongside simply but!

This picture could have been aimed in the direction of servicemen. By servicemen, I imply the gents who proudly served in our armed forces. Being distant from residence and in perilous conditions may be very inhumane, but it surely was vital to guard the nation. Some younger males wanted a bit leisure time, and so photographs just like the one beneath grew to become frequent to have a look at throughout these robust instances.

Right here’s the stunning Raquel Welch. Raquel is a sultry icon of epic proportions. On this picture she is taking part in the function of a cowgirl. This photograph was most likely taken earlier than the interval of colour media. The attitudes in the direction of photographs like this might need begun to alter someday throughout or after the second world battle.

Lingerie is designed not just for the girl however to realize the eye of the person as properly. Lingerie, just like the one pictured within the picture beneath, is specifically designed to get the eye of the male. Somewhat revealing and a bit pores and skin to pique the curiosity. The final word purpose is that the person can get an increase!

That is so humorous! A woman driving a man on all fours! There are some individuals who prefer to be submissive, and that is an early instance of the role-playing fetishes that grew to become well-liked as time went on. This horse doesn’t want 1 / 4 so that you can trip! Lots of one of these function taking part in nonetheless happens in the present day.

.

That is clearly a kind of rebellious photographs aimed on the local weather of the instances. As it’s stated, the squeaky wheel will get the lube! Somebody clearly was defiant to the cultural norms of the society throughout this time period. This may increasingly have been a type of erotic revolution of kinds

I’m positive this could have had detrimental repercussions within the days of outdated. A girl having a person being submissive to her each beck and name! This was the interval close to or a bit previous the age of the ladies’s suffrage motion. If girls couldn’t vote again then, they undoubtedly couldn’t have their heel on a person’s behind!

A woman tries to kind, and a man will get a bit sensitive feely. Again then (I don’t consider as a lot now), this was referred to as getting contemporary! Right here we have now this man getting contemporary with this girl, and he or she appears to get pleasure from it. He’s grabbing a very good portion of leg, and he or she appears to be high-quality with it!

Chains and corsets are the proper mixture of kink and class! There appeared to be an enormous pattern in the direction of the bondage and S&M style when it got here to taboo photographs again then. That’s actually dangerous to be shackled up with no key! Effectively, as they are saying, totally different strokes for various people!

Bettie Mae Web page (April 22, 1923 – December 11, 2008) was an American mannequin who got here to prominence across the 1950s and was recognized for her pin-up pictures. Bettie was sometimes called the “Queen of Pinups.” A paradigm of kinds occurred due to her title. It’s good to be related to one thing optimistic, particularly if you end up tremendous sizzling!

This might have been taboo previously as properly. Shows of affection have been thought-about taboo in america again within the early twentieth century. There was a perception that one factor led to a different and that one particular person’s view would corrupt society as an entire. These people don’t appear to thoughts a bit!

This image represents the fantasy of many males: two girls in a kinky place! The ethical majority would have been appalled at one of these picture throughout this time if somebody had came upon about this. I’m keen to wager that the folks on this picture had this photograph taken behind closed doorways. This may increasingly have been part of some non-public assortment.

As acknowledged earlier than, public shows of affection have been a no-no again within the early twentieth century. Issues have been a bit extra family-oriented throughout these instances and the household unit was a central theme. A man attempting to get a smooch from a girl behind a e-book was most likely a standard factor.

A woman who’s in love along with her leg! Legs have at all times been an object of need in america, and this picture illustrates this. There appears to have been a little bit of a paradigm shift on the subject of fascinating physique components. The large craze grew to become the bust again within the mid and late twentieth century and now the bum-bum is making waves.

A leggy girl takes in some cigarette smoke. Smoking was thought-about dangerous again then as a result of it was thought-about a type of riot. Practically something that was related to smoking was thought-about rebellious and was just about unwelcome, however the smoking craze caught on years later.

Okay, everyone knows this isn’t Supergirl, however it could be Superfreak! The style appears a bit crude for the time, and it seems to be like there could have been some experiments with latex throughout this time as properly. The costumes look a lot better in the present day for my part.

Okay, this photograph is unquestionably not from the eighties, aka the large 80’s! This photograph could also be from the 40s and even the fifties. Have you ever observed that many of the photographs from this text don’t embrace blondes? This can be from the period when blondes have been changing into the merchandise of need in pictures.

Right here is one other bizarre photograph the place there’s a dominant girl and one other animal-clad girl. As an alternative of a horse, we have now the cat (perhaps as a result of the cat represents the girl in a way, we all know one other phrase for cat). My guess is that the entire animal factor is supposed to be degrading and to offer the particular person a sense of being belittled.

This girl is clearly attempting to be progressive on the subject of spankings! She could give it a attempt, and it could or could not work, however it’s the effort that counts. That is a kind of instances when another person could also be wanted. Whippings are so a lot better when you have got each arms free!