Here’s an unpopular opinion that shouldn’t be unpopular: Not wanting sex is a reasonable boundary to set for literally any reason. Be it your trauma, your mental health, your sexuality, or any other factor. Your partners should respect that and they should respect you. This shouldn’t be a debate.
👏 No 👏 is 👏 a 👏 beautiful 👏 word 👏
Don’t be afraid to use it!
“As the Bechdel Test began to creep into the sightline of mainstream movie criticism, it was notable to see the surprise of some male critics that their favorite movies—One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Goodfellas, The Princess Bride, Clerks, the original Star Wars trilogy, the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, and even Tootsie, when you get right down to it—so soundly flunked it. For many women, the reaction was more of a shrug, along with relief that, finally, there was a simple way to help writers and directors step over an embarrassingly low baseline. To be clear, applying the rule isn’t about snatching away the well-earned status of Raging Bull or The Godfather or even This Is Spinal Tap. As Anita Sarkeesian, creator of the Web site Feminist Frequency, noted in a 2009 video about the rule, “It’s not even a sign of whether it’s a feminist movie, or whether it’s a good movie, just that there’s a female presence in it.” The latter point is something that many people fail to grasp when trying to explain away why their favorite movies don’t pass the test (“But Batman is the hero of the movie! Of course the women characters are going to talk about him!”): the Bechdel Test is not a judgment of quality or nuance. After all, the beautiful, moving Gravity fails the test, while a formulaic rom-com like 27 Dresses passes with no problem. But the test itself is a simple, bloodless assessment of whether female characters are deemed important to a story—and a way to conclude that, most of the time, they aren’t.”
— We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl®, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement (Zeisler, Andi)
This makes me happy that it has an explanation, because too many people misunderstand the point of the test. “It sets the bar too low!” They say. That’s the point. It’s the lowest bar possible and many movies can’t pass it.
do u ever wonder abt urself from an external pov??? bc like. everyone is p complicated and contradictory on the inside, but other ppl get a very simplified version of who u r based on ur interactions w them or what they see u doin
like if i was a cartoon character, what archetype would i be? if i was a design, if i was a DESIGNED person, what parts of me would be the most cohesive/emphasized, and which less significant traits would not be perceived at all???? its just bonkers to think abt i guess
what’s christmas even like in non-christian families? in completely non-religious families? like what do you tell your children? “well, kids, we’re eating a whole lot of food and spending a fuckton of money spoiling you because some other people somewhere believe their holy lord and saviour and the greatest person to walk the earth was born 2000 years ago. here’s a playstation.”
yeah pretty much
i legit didnt know non-christians celebrated christmas… literally never crossed my mind
We do, and basically it’s like “Hey kids, let’s decorate a tree, exchange presents, eat a fuckload of food, and get a picture with the creepy mall Santa that probably will be arrested next week”. I didn’t even know it was a religious holiday until I was 9
Christmas was celebrated here (in Norway) for several thousand years before Christianity got here. There was literally nothing Christian about it in the beginning, the Christians just figured it’d be easier to say that Jesus was born on a day that was already celebrated than to make up a new holiday and force it on people
Pretty much every culture in the northern hemisphere has had a celebration in the fuck-all heart of winter purely because it’s depressing as fuck when it’s cold all the time and dark for 90% of the time
So long before jesus was born someone was like
“k it’s cold and dark and the view outside is literally identical to our concept of hell but I made you this candle stop being sad”
Yep, Easter existed before Jesus died on this day. Basically pretty much every “Christian” holiday was put on a pagan holiday, like lots of churches were also built on pagan places of worship. That’s how they made Christianity a success. We call that marketing now.
Christmas is rooted in pre-Christian Solstice celebrations. By Dec. 25th, days are getting noticeably longer. Light is triumphing over the dark. Spring and life will eventually return. In the dead of winter, the promise of renewal. It’s an ancient and powerful thing, that has been integral to human culture and religion in every culture around the globe.
Christians couldn’t get people to stop celebrating their solstice feast days, so they replaced the ‘rebirth of the sun’ celebrations with a ‘birth of the son’ celebration. Literally all they did was tweak existing mythology and relabel old traditions.
Christmas is far, far older than Christianity. Don’t flatter yourselves.
when christian artists change the line in hallelujah from “maybe there’s a God above” to “I know that there’s a God above” >:c
#idk why i’m so unreasonably angry#maybe cuz it’s my fav line
it’s also because Leonard COHEN (!) was Jewish and this is a quintessentially Jewish line, and changing it to that level of Annoying Certainty is stripping it of its Jewish meaning and imbuing it with that particularly American smug evangelical Christian attitude that makes me tired, so very tired
THAT IS EXACTLY WHY
I don’t think I’ve heard any cover artist sing my favorite verses
You say I took the name in vain
I don’t even know the name
But if I did, well really, what’s it to you?
There’s a blaze of light
In every word
It doesn’t matter which you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah
I did my best, it wasn’t much
I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch
I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool you
And even though
It all went wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah
um woah
I will always hit the reblog button so hard for Hallelujah but ESPECIALLY mentions of the elusive final verses which are just about my favorite lyrics ever. Why do people always omit the best part of the song??
In Yiddish
In Hebrew
In Ladino
Yeah, I wonder why the verses that reference specific Jewish mystical and chassidic concepts that aren’t readily understood by American “I love Jews, you know, Jesus was Jewish!” Christians never get any airtime. Funny that.
You say I took the name in vain
I don’t even know the name
But if I did, well really, what’s it to you?
There’s a blaze of light
In every word
It doesn’t matter which you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah
These are specifically about Chassidic Jewish theories of the holy language, how each letter and combination of letters in Hebrew contains the essence of the divine spark and if used correctly, can unlock or uncover the divine spark in the mundane material word. And of course, there are secret names of God which, when spoken by any ordinary human would kill them, but if you are worthy and holy and righteous can be used to perform miracles or even to behold the glory of God face-to-face. The words themselves have power. Orthodox Jews often won’t even pronounce the word “hallelujah” in it’s entirety in conversation, because the “yah” sound at the end is a True Name of God (there are hundreds, supposedly) and thus too holy to say outside of prayer.
None of this is to mention how David’s sin in sleeping with Batshevah (the subject of much of the song, with a brief deviation to Shimshon and Delilah) is considered the turning point in the Tanach that ultimately dooms the Davidic line at the cosmological level and thus dooms Jewish sovereignty and independence altogether. From a Christian perspective this led to Jesus, the King of Kings, and that’s all very well and good for them, but for the Jews, the Davidic line never returned and is the central tragedy of the total arc of the Torah. Like, our Bible doesn’t have a happy ending? And that’s what this song is about? There’s no Grace - you just have to sit with the sin and its consequence.
Of course, Cohen is referencing all of this ironically, and personalizing these very high-level religious concepts. Like the point of this song is that Cohen, the songwriter, is identifying with David, the psalmist, and identifying his own sins with David’s. The ache that you hear in this song is that the two thousand year exile that resulted from one wrong night of passion and Cohen feels that the pain he has caused to his lover is of equally monumental infamy. Basically, in a certain light, the whole of Psalms is a vain effort for David to atone for his sin and I think Cohen was writing this song in wonderment that David could eternally praise the God who would not forgive him and would force him and his people into exile. But he ultimately gets how you have to surrender to the inexorable force of God in the face of your own inadequacies and how to surrender is to worship and to worship is to praise - hence, Hallelujah. You can either do the right thing and worship God from the start, or you can fuck up, be punished, and thus be forced to beg for His forgiveness. It’s the terrible inevitability of praise that’s driving him mad.
Like honestly, I identify with this song so strongly as an off-the-derech Jew, I sometimes wonder what Christians can possibly hear in this song, as it speaks so specifically to the sadomasochistic relationship that a lapsed Jew has with their God. It’s such a different song from a Christian theological perspective it’s almost unrecognizable, man. This song continues to be a wonder of postmodern Jewish theology and sexuality from start to finish. Don’t let anyone give you any “Judeo-Christian” narishkeit. This is a Jewish song.
(Sorry about the wild tangent it’s just 2AM and I love this song so dang much, you guys.)
holy shit. woah.
god im reading a text about romance fiction (especially targeted at young adults) for class and one sentence in it literally made my brain explode because ive been thinking about this kind of stuff too, how “Many people wouldn’t fall in love if they’ve never heard about it before.” and like…imagine there was no ideal/overaccentuated image of love and romance painted in postmodern mass media….how would we love? would it be purer? more authentic? what would we do differently? would we fall in love at all if we werent constantly being fed an ideal concept of love as the norm in mass media? like what is a natural process of human feelings and what is just a projection of how we want to love and want to be loved based on what we’ve seen on tv and read in books etc? in this essay i will
w … wh … where’s the rest of the essay, op?
it is so strange to me when people tell me they never had an ancient egyptian phase…like, what did you even do during your childhood?
this is oddly specific?? and over 3000 people relate???
That egyptology book was too golden and shiny to resist
