#sometimes it's fun to test our morals or something so innocent and without consequences

[balkanradfem]

you need to start your turbo capitalist cutthroat chestnut business RIGHT NOW or I'm revoking your feminism membership card!!!111!

taken to feminist jail

[constablegoo]

@astralglam​​​​ filed a report .

mint: does your muse view themself as virtuous & moral? what do these words mean to them?

OHOHO. hey hi ily. this is, of course, one of odo’s deepest ongoing battles, and the moment he stops questioning it is the moment he becomes a founder.

the founders grant themselves god status.  GOD!  status. they just reach out and pluck it. Within their range of power, the founders become unquestionably Just and Virtuous and Moral, their Word becomes Law, it becomes “the way things are” and “fact” and they create their own reality stemming from thousands of years of intense xenophobia. they’re above it all. gods don’t make mistakes, right? sure, maybe changelings were hunted and feared ages ago but they still fear it, and that drive for Order and Control over the galaxy is now encoded into their genes and they place a companion structure into the genes of every other species they control, subjugating them to the founders’ own cozy position as Gods, or-- ‘gods’. the founder (i rly don’t like saying “female” founder so she’s THE Founder. she speaks for the link.) makes it quite clear on many occasions that the founders are not here to negotiate. they fully intend to control EVERYTHING at any cost. it is absolutely  chilling  when she cuts garak down with: “they’re dead. you’re dead. cardassia is dead.” and draws the line between the dominion and everyone else miles deep into the sand.

that same genetic coding is one of the first semi-concrete things odo comes to understand about himself and, horribly, he’s landed into conditions under the occupation that very easily could have taken advantage of a less meticulous or stubborn changeling. no, odo says initially (and incorrectly), i am not bajoran** and i am not cardassian and i stand apart from either side of this conflict and so i am bound to PURE Virtue and Morality because of it. he can’t be bribed or bought or won over, and he won’t allow for anything less than a kind of incorruptibility. this effectively wins him allies (and enemies) on both sides, however -- that’s just not how the universe works. the truth of it is that no matter how much he tells himself he is not a part of their regime, his working with the cardassians makes him a collaborator in that he has then recognized their authority and ultimately upheld their legitimacy, even if he never agreed with the cause, even if he was also on some level a casualty of it. at some point when he moves past ‘contract’ investigation and begins to work permanently, he falls into the trap of thinking Order is the same thing as Justice... huge yikes. in that moment he becomes a true and apathetic villain, but he’s subsequently haunted by the resulting execution of innocents. it shakes something up in him. years pass and he still wonders, what other mistakes has he made? what other less direct consequences of his ‘neutral’ arbitration exist? he (and everyone around him) has to live without really knowing, and it’s a constant reminder to him of the power he holds and it informs his understanding of what Real (and imperfect) Justice Means.

**sidenote but later in s7 he introduces himself as ‘from bajor’ and AAAAAA. its good. very good. yeah, you’re bajoran, odo. he gets it now.

Mirror odo is really the ultimate example of an odo having taken those instincts to extremes in an environment that rewarded him for them -- there is no guilt there, and even a sadistic kind of pleasure in it. i’d argue that gaia!odo is another, less extreme example of an odo who’s been alone too long and lost sight of things when he single-mindedly (and against kira’s wishes) chooses her (one person) over 8000. like holy shit? NOT ok? uhhuhhhhfff. anyway. very fortunately, neither of these are OUR odo, but act as great foils to reflect on the worst (bastard cop) qualities or potential qualities of our goo pushed to highly visible extremes, which star trek just loves to do all the time.

but regular/prime odo isnt exactly a rule-follower, either. throughout his life, he frequently takes things into his own hands, uses his abilities to his advantage, spies, wiretaps, eavesdrops, and yes, harasses [quark] sometimes -- he develops his own set of values and personal rules and follows them; even starfleet comes in wary of him and how he operates and hes on thin ice. but because of possibly his most redeeming quality, odo is able to adapt those self-ordained values toward something increasingly honest: for how rigid he can be in personality, he is HIGHLY influenced by the world around him,  listens hard  to what his friends and allies have to say and adapts that feedback; this allows him to evolve and grow and take important matters to heart. he becomes more flexible and better able to hold onto what’s really most important after locking into a decision, because above all else, he is passionately committed to doing the Right Thing. he PLEADS with himself in things past, “your job is to find the truth, not obtain convictions.” by his tendency to push back against what is laid down as ‘law’ (something he becomes more and more aware of and effective at doing) as not always being good or right, or necessarily even creating Order (the thing he’s driven genetically to want), he prepares himself to challenge the most deadly voice of authority -- that of his own people.

so... yes and no. odo’s role and persona as ‘your average security chief’ might dictate that he be virtuous and moral, but he so obviously can’t fit the same exact mold as others in his position -- he has these insane abilities and this mind-consuming nature and it requires he tread with extra care, but he also has a potential for more adaptive, more nuanced morality. he has to build up his own definitions to the words, constantly examine and tease and test them, or else he risks straying too far from what he really wants to achieve -- harmony, honest justice. he has to accept that he’s a part of the system he operates in (not, in fact, alone or isolated! something he actually wants), and know that he is not exempt from making the wrong choice, just like anybody else.

carnation: what is your muse’s relationship with their gender? how do they express or not express this relationship?

ODO AND GENDER!!! i love odo and gender. let’s take this one step at a time. he starts out as an amorphous glob -- he has no gender. there’s no basis for assignment, no culture of difference, and all the goos are goo. odo takes on the shape of the first living thing he sees / the thing he sees most frequently: dr mora. he adopts an image of masculinity from mora and he adopts the hair. that’s about it, and it’s pretty much arbitrary. (maybe the hair is simple enough for his skills, too?) the next people odo meets are also these very masculine, military, cardassian leaders, so again -- this is all he knows! this is neutrality. i imagine it takes him some time to work out what the differences in gender are, and sex, and orientation, romantic vs sexual stuff, all of that. it’s all got cultural baggage he knows nothing about and does not experience, and he’s also dealing with multiple, clashing cultures to boot. since he doesnt have any strong inherent leaning, he simply opts out. he/him becomes his default because thats where he started, thats what he’s been able to successfully present and how people know him, and, terrifyingly, under cardassian rule, it probably offered a bit of safety, too, which was obviously something he needed at the time.

way way way way way down the line in season seven, odo asks kira to (paraphrasing) look at me. what do you see? [i see you.] but this is NOT me, this is only a shape ive assumed in order to fit in. she says, yes, i know that. but this is who you have chosen to be. “a man. a good and honest man.” (i knowww shes not really talking abt gender here BUT) its hard as a trans person not to read the metaphor. he’s chosen to express SOMETHING. he’s chosen something other than what he was given (neutrality) and although he doesnt personally buy into what ‘masculinity’ “should be” (ie the ferengi, smh) / would certainly not argue he doesnt feel non-binary, this is how he has presented all his life, its how hes been treated, and it is what he has chosen to adhere to. there’s a choice in that, kira’s right, and now it reflects something about him.

parallel this, i’ll mention the “female” founder again bc of course there is no discernable reason for her to have a gender -- other than to appeal (im not talking sexually here although there’s,, obviously weird shit happening with the link... yike) to odo in the sense that until that point odo has lived with “gendered” individuals and, i think importantly, kira is with them when they first meet. i think its safe to say the founder saw her, figured she was a friend/ally to odo or at least familiar to him, and took her general representation to appeal as a friend/ally.

otherwise... why, honestly? the founder’s got NO love of humanoids lmao why would she bother.

anyway i’d like to see odo experiment a bit. because when hes safe, he can!! aside from his own doubts and insecurities about shapeshifting, at some point he really has no reason not to, at least a little bit. really, it should just be another thing to practice, much like becoming a convincing rock or a leaf, its just that there are other significances in the cultures around him. i’d just like to see him loosen up a little. have fun. grow ur hair out a bit, odo, why are u still looking like ur terrible dad.

[theconservativebrief]

When a third woman accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct this week, Kavanaugh supporters immediately stepped forward with a familiar defense: It couldn’t have happened, because surely if it had, someone would have said something at the time.

In a sworn declaration delivered through her lawyer Michael Avenatti, Julie Swetnick avowed that she witnessed Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh drug girls at high school house parties where the girls were later “gang raped.” Swetnick further says that Kavanaugh was present at a party where she herself was drugged and raped, although she does not directly say that he participated in her rape.

In a statement released by the White House, Kavanaugh (who has denied all three allegations against him) called Swetnick’s statement “ridiculous” and “from the Twilight Zone.” His denial was widely echoed by supporters to whom the idea that such terrible things could happen on a routine basis, and that no one would do anything to stop them or even avoid the parties, seems absurd.

If a crime happened, this argument presumes, surely everyone involved would have recognized that it was terribly wrong and someone would have spoken up at the time.

But if there’s one thing we can take away from the popular culture of the 1980s, when the alleged events took place, it’s that a sexual assault at that time might not have been immediately clear as what it was, for participants and observers alike. Some of the most popular comedies of the ’80s are filled with allegedly hilarious sequences that portray what in 2018 would be unambiguously considered date rape.

As long as everybody involved is acquainted with each other, these movies tend to treat those rapes as harmless hijinks. They don’t really count. They’re funny — even in movies as sweet and romantic as Sixteen Candles.

“I have a difficult time believing any person would continue to go to – according to the affidavit – ten parties over a two-year period where women were routinely gang raped and not report it,” tweeted Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) after Swetnick came forward with her story.

“One obvious question about this account: Why would she constantly attend parties where she believed girls were being gang-raped?” asked National Review editor Rich Lowry.

“Please someone help me with this,” wrote conservative writer David French. “Georgetown Prep boys frequently committed gang rape. Lots of people knew they were committing gang rape. And despite this common knowledge no one has talked publicly for three decades, until the day before a crucial Senate hearing. What?”

This argument has been a common response to accusations of sexual misconduct over the past year of #MeToo discourse: It couldn’t have happened, because if it had, someone would have said so at the time. But as German Lopez has written for Vox, there are plenty of issues in our criminal justice system that prevent survivors of sexual violence from reporting.

Survivors who come forward are likely to be harassed and blamed for not keeping their mouths shut, they are likely to face a hostile response from police officers, the process of investigating the crime can be so traumatic for the survivor that it’s sometimes called “the second rape” — and after all that, odds are low that the attacker is ever likely to face legal consequences for their actions.

It’s worth noting another reason that Kavanaugh’s accusers in particular wouldn’t have been comfortable coming forward about what happened to them in the early 1980s. The way our culture thought about rape at the time was fundamentally different than it is now.

In the 1980s, “rape” meant an attack from a stranger in a dark alley, not something that acquaintances did to each other at house parties where everyone knows each other. In 1982, it would have been difficult for women like Swetnick and Christine Blasey Ford to find the language to describe what had happened to them.

“I completely reject that notion,” said French on Twitter, when presented with the argument that the way our culture talked about rape in the 1980s was different than it is today. “I was in high school in the 1980s. Gang rape was viewed as a horrible crime then, too.”

It’s true that gang rape was considered a horrible crime in the 1980s — but in the abstract, when thought of as a crime perpetrated by a group of strangers on an innocent, sober, virginal good girl victim in a dark alley. But it’s simply not the case that the mainstream culture at large in the ’80s had the same ideas we do today about sexual assault — especially when it’s perpetrated by people who know each other, at parties, around alcohol.

We can tell that it’s not the case, because there are many beloved, iconic movies made in the 1980s that built entire comedic subplots over what we can better recognize today as rape scenes. And in those movies, rape wasn’t a horrible crime. It was supposed to be funny.

The ’80s were a decade of film comedy hugely informed by the recent success of 1978’s Animal House, which features a rape fantasy scene filmed in what critic Emily Nussbaum describes as “the perviest possible way.”

It was the decade that gave us Revenge of the Nerds, which, as Noah Brand put it at the Good Men Project, “has so much rape culture, you could use it to make rape yogurt”; it gave us Police Academy and its “nonconsensual blowjobs are a fun and light-hearted prank” ethos. And perhaps most disturbingly, it gave us the comedic rape subplot in Sixteen Candles, John Hughes’s much beloved and iconic 1984 teen romance.

Sixteen Candles isn’t a college sex romp like Revenge of the Nerds or Animal House. It’s a high school love story. It’s been celebrated for 34 years for its sweet, romantic heart. Yet it is entirely willing to feature a lengthy, allegedly hilarious subplot in which a drunk and unconscious girl is passed from one boy to another and then raped.

The drunk girl in question is Caroline (Haviland Morris), the girlfriend to romantic hero Jake Ryan, and if you know one thing about Sixteen Candles, it’s that Jake Ryan (Michael Schoeffling) is perfect. He is the impossibly cool, impossibly beautiful senior guy who is dating the impossibly beautiful senior girl — and yet, as soon as Jake Ryan hears that gawky, awkward sophomore Samantha (Molly Ringwald) has a crush on him, he immediately begins to like her back, defying all the laws of god, man, and high school popularity.

Jake Ryan is the embodiment of a fantasy so compelling it instantly made Sixteen Candles iconic: What if the object of all your romantic high school dreams decided to pursue you without you having to expend any effort whatsoever, just because they could see that you were, like, deeper and more special than the rest of the school? What if they somehow saw that without you ever having to have a conversation or interact with them in any way?

“Jake stands the test of time,” wrote Hank Stuever in the Washington Post in 2004. He quotes a 34-year-old woman who grew up on Jake Ryan: “Oh, gosh, Jake Ryan. Just thinking about it now, I get … kind of … It’s all just too good to be true.”

Jake Ryan’s reputation as the ideal dream boy of every teenage girl’s deepest fantasies has lasted for decades. Jake, writes Stuever, “is Christ, redeeming the evil sins of high school. Jake as the ideal. Jake as the eternal belief in something better.”

Yet Jake Ryan cold-bloodedly hands a drunk and unconscious Caroline over to another guy and says, “Have fun.”

In 1984, you could be a perfect dream boy and also be an accessory to date rape. They were not mutually exclusive ideas. In fact, they reinforced each other.

In the moral universe of Sixteen Candles, Jake is allowed to be callous to Caroline without losing his dream boy status because, Sixteen Candles briskly assures us, Caroline is not the right kind of girl. She has breasts, and she drinks. She’s potentially a little bit slutty. “She doesn’t know shit about love,” Jake explains. “The only thing she cares about is partying.”

The fact that Jake casually despises his longtime girlfriend doesn’t reflect poorly on him, because it doesn’t affect the fantasy at the heart of Sixteen Candles. What Sixteen Candles is selling is the dream of the unattainable guy falling in love with the everygirl. So for the fantasy to work, Jake must prove his deep and abiding love for Sam. Ignoring and degrading Caroline is an easy shortcut to that goal, because in the moral universe of Sixteen Candles, the more you degrade one girl — the whore — the more you can exalt the virgin.

So Caroline gets drunk at a party and passes out in her boyfriend’s room, where presumably she believes she will be safe. Jake, disgusted, comments that “I could violate her 10 different ways if I wanted to,” but now that the pure and virginal charms of Sam are in his sights, “I’m just not interested anymore.”

Instead, he passes her over to Ted (Anthony Michael Hall) — who is listed in the credits only as “the Geek” — reasoning, “She’s so blitzed she won’t know the difference.” The poor Geek has had no luck with girls, so Jake illustrates his generous magnanimity by installing the Geek in his own fancy car, with his own fancy unconscious girlfriend next to him, and says, “Have fun.”

In the car, Caroline regains consciousness long enough to ask who the Geek is, and Jake assures her that the Geek is, in fact, him, a casual manipulation that Caroline is too drunk to register as false. The pair drives off into the night, and Caroline climbs into the Geek’s lap and purrs, “I love you,” disoriented and out of it. The Geek looks straight into the camera lens and grins, “This is getting good.”

The next time we see Caroline, she’s unconscious again, and the Geek is having his friends photograph him next to her unresponsive body. “Ted, you’re a legend,” they gush.

The next morning, a newly sober Caroline and Geek conclude that they had sex the night before. The Geek asks Caroline if she enjoyed herself. “You know, I have this weird feeling I did,” Caroline says.

“She had to have a feeling about it, rather than a thought,” wrote Molly Ringwald in the New Yorker last year, in a long, empathetic reexamination of her work with John Hughes, “because thoughts are things we have when we are conscious, and she wasn’t.”

The camera lingers on the mismatched pair — the beautiful cheerleader and the Geek, who we all know never, ever would have had sex if the cheerleader had anything to say about it in her right mind — and waits for us to laugh. The joke is that they had sex despite the fact that the cheerleader didn’t want to. It’s funny.

The Geek’s culpability here is muddy. He is ostensibly relieved of responsibility for the encounter because Caroline is the one who came onto him — although he was sober enough to recognize that she wouldn’t do so if she weren’t drunk. And like Caroline, he was drunk enough to black out the next morning, throwing his own ability to consent into question — although he was sober enough to drive, and unlike Caroline, he wasn’t fading in and out of consciousness all night.

Whether or not the Geek is directly responsible for committing date rape, the fact remains that Caroline had sex she didn’t consent to, and the movie expects its audience to respond to that development with righteous glee. Jake — perfect, dreamy, too-good-to-be-true Jake Ryan — orchestrated the situation while in perfect control of his faculties. The movie expects that fact to make him only dreamier, because every time Jake degrades Caroline it proves more firmly that he considers Sam to be special and above degradation.

Here are the basic ideas embedded in this plot:

• Girls who drink are asking for it. Girls who have sex are asking for it. Girls who go to parties are asking for it. They are asking for it even if they only drink and have sex and party with their monogamous boyfriends. Whatever happens to that kind of girl as a result is funny.

• Boys are owed girls. A good guy will help his nerdy bro to get a girl. Her consent is not necessary or desired.

• To avoid being the kind of girl who gets raped, you need to earn male approval. If you earn male approval, other girls might be raped, but you won’t be, and that will prove that you are special.

• Once you earn male approval, it can be taken away — as Caroline’s goes away once Jake tires of her — and then you’ll go from being the kind of girl who doesn’t get raped to the kind of girl who does.

• A good guy can participate in this whole system and remain an unsullied dream guy.

• The kind of girl who gets raped has no right to complain about what happens to her. Also it isn’t rape.

That’s how mainstream culture presented rape, and thus affirmed rape culture, in 1984.

On many levels, it’s not far off from how larges parts of our culture think about rape today — but we bury those values now. In 2018, we no longer enshrine these values in stories of unambiguous rape that are embedded into beloved romantic classics. We offer alternative narratives and are capable of having conversations about date rape.

In the 1980s, though, alternative narratives were few and far between. They were mostly offered only by feminism, and in the 1980s, mainstream culture considered feminism shrill and unfashionable.

That doesn’t mean that people went to see movies like Sixteen Candles and immediately thought, “Wow, that looks like fun, I’d better go get a bunch of girls drunk and have sex with them without their consent.” Sixteen Candles is not singlehandedly responsible for the rape culture of the 1980s. But like all popular culture, it does both reflect and help to shape the social context in which it exists.

The dominant cultural narrative at the time of Brett Kavanaugh’s high school experience was the one offered by Sixteen Candles. And it taught any girl who went to a party and got assaulted by an acquaintance that whatever happened to her was surely her fault, that it proved that she was the wrong kind of girl, that it was funny, that she had nothing whatsoever to complain about, and that it absolutely wasn’t rape.

Under those circumstances, the mystery is not why “any person would continue to go to … ten parties over a two-year period where women were routinely gang raped and not report it,” as Sen. Graham argued. The mystery is why anyone ever came forward with their story at all.

Original Source -> The rape culture of the 1980s, explained by Sixteen Candles

via The Conservative Brief