Month: July 2019

Ladylikeness is weak?

/ toseealife / Leave a comment

I was just scrolling though a comment section for MLP and I found someone trolling people about feminism.

A little context: The episode is called “A Dog and Pony Show.”

It ends with Twilight saying that just because someone is ladylike, it doesn’t make them weak.

And there weren’t too many people harping on about it. In fact, I didn’t see any feminist comments, but I did see someone who was clearly trying to get some kind of reaction by calling it feminist and saying “Face it, ladies are weak.”

What’s funny? No girls were taking the bait, but one other guy watching did.

Now, I really think this is not most men. I somehow doubt this particular dude even hates women, he probably just doesn’t like feminism.

But I can’t help but think, feminists overreact all the time to pretty innocuous stuff, but I guess it can go both ways.

It makes me think of a Girl Meets World episode Girl Meets STEM, which a guy who reviewed it said had a feminist message. He wasn’t against the message, but I had watched it and concluded the episode was actually warning girls not to swallow the man-hating pill.

As a woman, I really can’t call it anything else. If I talked about men the way many of these feminists and their shows do, I’d conclude I hated them.

And let’s talk about this.

A lot of women become feminists because they had poor father figures who did not respect them, some come out of abusive households.

It’s just as likely to produce weak women, but I’d also argue that not all feminists are particularly strong.

I have to think of what my Mom said of one woman (it wasn’t a feminist by the way, just some girl on a survival TV show talking about having a hard life) who said her experiences made her strong, but then after two days of the challenge was KO-ed.

My mom made the observation that just because you survived something it doesn’t make you strong.

I’ve talked about why I’m not a feminist before. I believe in equal rights, same as any smart person, I would hope. But its’ for the same reason I don’t like Black History month, I don’t see the point of flaunting it.

Black history should be taught along with other history, as it makes sense in the curriculum, not set aside for it’s own month. If we gave every ethnicity its own month, we’d have a hopelessly disjointed curriculum, and unless we do that, we’re still being biased. Better to dot hem all together as it chronologically makes sense, then we can give everyone attention.

And I don’t seem the point of flaunting womanhood either. It’s not like it’s something you could control being.

I think the real reason for many women who really hate men and demand special treatment is that their father did give them the kind of treatment they should have received. Girls want to be treasured (so do boys) and loved, when they aren’t, they can become depressed or angry, or both usually.

I remember, I was angry. At age 11 or so, I got called out on it. No one tried to find out why I was angry.

Looking back, my problem, among other things, was that my dad did not pour into my life… he was hardly in it at all personally, though he lived at my house and my parents have a decent relationship. But my dad, the older I got, paid less and less attention to me. Unless I was in trouble. I think you know the story.

And I never did the things teenage girls usually get in trouble for. You’d be surprised how little it took to get me sent on a guilt trip as a young teen.

Even to this day that has not changed. But I changed. I’m not living in anger anymore.

And in full honesty, I have had my times of being tempted to put men into a box. I also know men have the same temptation with women. A lot of them have had moms who didn’t do so well with them, girlfriends who didn’t, and so on.

I suspect that they are just quieter about it. Now that the culture is more in favor of women.

I really don’t think it make one gender worse or better that we’re both tempted to stereotype each other, it just make sense. Once bitten, twice shy. You have one bad experience with a man, it’s easier to make all men the face of your problem. And vice versa.

The best thing to do is not to play into it. Don’t be what they think you are. Nevermind if they interpret all your actions into their image of you, if you know you are doing it, then that’s what matters.

Justice, I’ve learned, can come slowly, but it comes.

As for the question of ladylikeness being weak, I really think it’s obviously not true. The examples are getting rarer now that girls are encourage to act like bros, a thing that suits some women, and puts others at a huge disadvantage.

From my experience, ladylikeness is power. I’m the type of girl who gets doors opened for her, has boys pick up things for her, and offer to carry things (that happens more as a general rule with the guy though.) I credit the guys for choosing to be chivalrous.

I am also the kind of girl who puts effort into her appearance to show I respect myself.

See, the beautifying thing women do, it’s not all about attracting men (though it has been minimized to that.) I think the movie I’ve seen do this best is Miss Congeniality, where Vic asks Grace if she respects herself when she doesn’t want to put any effort into her looks because the contest is rigged.

It’s not that much of a conundrum, really. Men will wear work clothes to work, dress clothes to the office, sports clothes to a sports event. They don’t even care as much as us usually, but it’s a simple matter of showing respect and support.

I think women dress up for the same reason. We embrace beauty as a way to show we appreciate it, and that we want to spread it around. We put care into our appearance to show we respect ourselves, and if we respect ourselves, we are likely to respect others.

There’s a reason decent men usually feel a healthy respect for a woman who dresses with care. It’s always worked for me. Though, I think they can also tell is you’re doing it because you’re insecure. I think anyone can usually tell that.

Ladylikeness is about respect, really. It’s about not opening yourself up to scorn by being unladylike, not because it’s okay to scorn a girl who acts more tomboyish, but because it is also okay to have style that is distinctly feminine.

One more thing: Ladies, for goodness sake, do not freak out if a guy says you look good! I know a lot of you don’t, but if you do, remember, even if he is being a jerk, you don’t have to let it get to you, and chances are he might just be complimenting you.

Personally, I don’t care. I know I look good, if you say it you’re just acknowledging the obvious. You don’t gain or lose  a lot of points either way. So long as it’s not said in a creepy tone.

Anyway, that’s my take on it for the time being, until next time–Natasha.

The Element of Wisdom.

/ toseealife / Leave a comment

I’ve gotten into MLP (My Little Pony) lately. I never thought I’d like the show, but I found it surprisingly insightful.

Weird.

Well, I never thought I’d be an anime person either.

Anyway, I’m not writing about the show, but it has a thing called Elements that represent things you need to have friendship, or any really healthy relationship.

And in the habit of using the show’s lingo, I call what I want to write about an element also.

It is an element of relationships, but it’s interesting to me that it’s also an element of writing a good story.

I noticed it over the past year because of getting into two different shows, which I’ve mentioned. RWBY and My Hero Academia.

A lot of people in the anime community like both, at least in the USA. RWBY has a pretty good sized fan base for the production level it’s on, and MHA is the top rated anime in the world.

And the only thing I’ve ever seen besides Frozen where I could say “It deserves the hype.”

But you aren’t here for me to talk about that, (I think).

And my real point is the difference between the two.

Before I say it though, let me clarify: I by no means intend to say that MHA or RWBY are exclusive examples. Any two shows you liked for different reasons you could make the comparison between, it is only because they are the ones I watch that I use them, I can’t very well explain a show I haven’t seen. But I’m not one of those fans who think the only good in anime or any genre has to come from their favorite. (Seriously, though, they are so good. If you are into that sort of thing.)

I like the shows for very different reasons. But the difference I see is that MHA has actually helped me figure out and work through some of my problems. It feels like no coincidence that I started watching it at the beginning of 2019, and this year has led to a lot of developments in my personal life that I’ve wanted to see happen for years. The show encouraged me to look at them more closely.

RWBY did help me realize some issues, but did not provide a lot of answers. To be fair, it is not as far along in some ways.

What struck me though, was that MHA makes the most of every opportunity to nail home a lesson, a meaning, and people who normally hate that are eating it up.

The writer is very good. He uses characters very much like I do when I write. He also is possibly even more preachy, in the best way, and I love it.

It had such a different feel from RWBY, and I wondered why, because a lot of plot elements are extremely similar.

Yet, there is one character on RWBY that I think explains what happened.

Everyone who watches RWBY knows after season 3 things changed. People argue whether it was for the better. I’m sure you’ve read series or seen shows where people got into the same thing after some big change.

For RWBY, as in many stories, a huge change was the death of fan favorite Pyrrha Nikos.

I’ve been in my share of fandoms, this is one of the first that I got reactions to negative changes in. I’ve seen other fans upset, but the torrent of grief, anger, desperate hope, denial over this was unlike anything I’ve seen before, and I haven’t seen it since.

Personally, I felt terrible over it. And I spent months wondering why. I felt like a real person died. More than that, I felt like the story changed drastically.

Everyone kept saying it got darker. But that is not strictly true.

No one else important has died since season 3, it’s now season 6. The heroes have won, instead of losing, as they consistently did before. And Ruby has gotten stronger. All in all, the actually story isn’t doing so badly. I’d say it looks worse for the villains, not better.

But despite that, everyone continues to feel uneasy. The fandom and the characters. No one quite trusts the writers anymore.

It was actually the guy who created the series idea to kill Pyrrha. He passed away that same season, and his friends have been carrying on since. Very decent of them–and also the show was too popular for the studio to drop.

They seem to be trying hard to make a good story.

I can’t blame them for what happened, though plenty of people do. It’s a puzzle.

Well, I moved back from RWBY for awhile, and got into MHA. But I still like RWBY, and I still wondered why it was different. Some shows don’t drastically change after a character dies. The tone remains the same. Some do. What was the difference?

It, I decided, is actually because there’s an element of story telling that certain characters tend to embody. Especially on an action packed show.

That element is Wisdom.

Pyrrha Nikos was a very loving person, that’s why people adored her. But I liked her also for her wisdom. She was the only character who seemed to have any sense of how to solve problems. As time went on, the mentor characters on RWBY were all shown to not really know what they were doing. One is even a liar. We all expected it, but the immediate feeling we got was that the characters are now lost.

They are directionless. They don’t know what to do, why to do it, or how. They are guessing. Going on instinct.

Their hearts are in the right place.

I used to think that was enough.

But it hit me that in stories, just as in real life, you have to have wisdom, not just good intentions. Wisdom tells you how to direct your intentions.

Pyrrha was this for RWBY. She was, actually, the only character on it who had peace enough to make her own choices. She guided other characters.

Her death changed a lot. No one knew where the show or the characters were going anymore.

It seemed like just outrage. But three seasons later, we see the same lack of assurance. Even in the characters. They are not bad, they are just wandering, uncertain.

The writing feels the same. Good, but hesitant.

There are some characters that just inspire writers, they guide them. I have them in my stories too. The character keeps me on track. Some stories have more than one, and those are the best.

RWBY had only one, and she died.

There is hope for RWBY, but the damage is real.

I think it hurts a story to lose its wisdom. The effect is that all the bad things in the story just beat up the protagonists, and there is no way to process them. To make sense of it so that you can keep going.

Dark and gritty stories are that way because they lack wisdom.

Proverbs 29:18 “Where there is no vision the people perish,

but blessed is he who keeps the law.”

 

Hosea 4:6 “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge”

To tell a story is always to tell someone your view of the world, even if by accident. It’s clear, hearing some stories, that the person telling them missed the point of their own story.

I am not accusing RWBY of this, rather, I do not think it knows what its point is.

I’ve seen other shows and series do it worse. At least it has some ideas, if nothing else.

But this is why I think it changed. And why MHA is different, that show has an amazing amount of wisdom. I am not used to shows saying things I have not even thought of myself. (Sorry, I think I think things through more than a lot of writers.)

But, I think if I hadn’t seen RWBY first, I would not have thought of it. I’m glad I watched both so close together.

Well, I hope you got something out of this, until next time–Natasha.

Check out some of my fiction writing on Kindle!

 

Real Talk: Intrusive Thoughts

/ toseealife / Leave a comment

So, Real Talk.

I watched the latest Sander Sides video. If you read The Snake Cycle (drybonestruth.wordpress.com/2019/05/19/the-snake-cycle/)  post I did, you know who Thomas Sanders is, if not, then suffice it to say he’s a YouTuber who makes Inside Out-like videos about life issues.

His latest, as of this date, is one about something called Intrusive Thoughts.

Apparently roughly 2% of the population deals with them, I personally think the number has to be much higher, and that the 2% just are the reported, extreme cases.

Intrusive Thoughts are weird, nonsensical, disturbing, and often violent gruesome or sexual thoughts that seem to come form nowhere, and persistently annoy or bother us, especially when we are stressed or going through a hard time, or feel low on self esteem.

The more you fight them, the worse they seem to get, yet you are horrified that you could even think of these things or think about doing them.

One example form the Sanders Sides was thinking of murdering someone, molesting someone, or eating them. (Ew.)

Now, I have a confession, watching the video my reaction was “So this is more commonly recognized as a problem than I thought.”

I assumed everyone had these thoughts, but that few people saw them as that unusual or problematic, beyond an annoyance.

I still think everyone does have thoughts like this. Is there really a person who’s never thought about killing someone?

Not seriously, but like, pictured it.

IF there is, they have less of a temper than me. I’m betting than you too. We make jokes on shows so often about killing people.

We often say “I’m gonna kill him/her.”

Do we mean it? Not usually. But just that that has become a figurative thing shows how often we have thoughts like that, and we minimize them.

But honestly, that’s not even the worst of these thoughts.

Apparently, some people have them in dreams too. I don’t typically dream them, if I do, I wake up.

I also don’t see my dreams as evidence of my deep desires or serious considerations. To me, a dream is more like the realm where all reason can be off the table for why anything happens. It’s where the  things you worry about can’t be kept at bay with distraction and common sense.

But, I also don’t fine them impossible to resist.

That’s what I want to talk bout.

The conclusion in the video is that you cannot reason your way out of Intrusive Thoughts, you also can’t fight them, you should never check to see if their gone.

It’s true, checking for a thought to be gone is to think it again, that’s only common sense.

They are like moths around a lamp, actually, if you turn the beacon off, they’ll go away, but turn it back on to look for them, and they’ll be back.

Unless it’s to remember where you put something, am I right?

I agree that these methods do not work to fight Intrusive Thoughts, but I do not agree that there is no way  to fight them.

I find Sander’s conclusion to be based on something that I do not agree with. That we can’t control what we think, that there is nothing to turn to besides ourselves when wre are thinking those things, and that thinking those things is okay.

I don’t mean that we should beat ourselves up when those thoughts pop up.

It is also hard to say where the line is. People who have these thoughts continuously can go crazy from it. They can cease to be bothered by the thoughts.

I believe I know why this is, I study character.

When someone has terrible thoughts or desires that beat on them relentlessly, more and more over time, they start to feel like a monster.

When a human being feels like that, they do one of two things. They try to fix it, to change themselves back from it, they may hide it or they may go to someone else (that is better), but they try to do something about it.

Or, they embrace it as a way to not fear themselves. C. S. Lewis mentions this in The Great Divorce, adding that to fear oneself is the last horror.

Imagine Dragons also has done some songs about just this feeling, one is called Monster, I’d say Polaroid is the same thing, toned down to a more relationship oriented version.

I think Intrusive Thoughts break some people, and they embrace them in order to stop fearing them. I doubt most perverts and psychos started off liking those feelings, but they may have given up fighting them so long ago that they only have distant memories as of hating them as a child.

I don’t think we are born enjoying the worst kinds of things, at least not most of us, but if we are not guarded as kids, things can creep in.

As a kid I did things I now know are serious perversions in adults, as a kid, I stopped as I realized it was wrong, I think the fact that I did it unknowingly helped. But I also had better influences.

If someone doesn’t they are likely to give in and end up with weird addictions, fetishes, or worse.

What years of being in Church and reading books about it has taught me is that just about everyone has these dark places in their life, either now, or in the past. I think the devil sneaks in to put us in chains at a young age.

What’s amazing is that none of us seem to realize it’s not just us.

It’s actually sad that humanity is so messed up as a whole, but it’s not, really, so very surprising.

It’s even less surprising that the influence of the Information age has made it easier and more common than ever. We’re exposed tho things by accident, some of us were exposed to them on purpose.

I say this because it does help to find the root of the problem. I’ve retraced a lot of my past problems.

Fear was major factor. To comfort ourselves we develop weird habits.

I really dislike how some shows are portraying this as funny, when it’s a very serious problem, an unhealthy coin mechanism.

Using masturbation as a comfort thing is one common example, even the BIG Bang Theory did it.

How many kids watch that? I know my cousins have.

That’s not even an Intrusive thought, it’s afar too common to be. I doubt the people who do it think about it overmuch. If they do, it’s because of guilt.

Things got a lot better for me once God started removing my fears.

The thing is, Thomas Sanders has been so open about things that bug him, that I can easily draw parallels between my experience and his.

He mentions being afraid of demons and other monsters. That was me once.

I do not think he has seen the connection between this and intrusive thoughts.

Though he did link anxiety with the problem, so he was close.

For some people, it’s an easy leap from “I fear this” to “I fear being like this thing that horrifies me.” And it can be easy to dull the pain of that by embracing it, easier to give up than to keep fighting.

And direct resistance to those thought doe snot work.

But I break with Thomas over saying these thoughts are our own.

I maintain that only thoughts I encourage and welcome are my own. Once I take ownership of them, I say they are okay, because they are part of me.

Even if, like Thomas, I say they are bad thoughts and that I am not completely good because I think them, I am still softening the blow by saying they are mine.

Plus, these thoughts to me are less about how bad I am, and more about how weak I am.

I think Intrusive Thoughts have two, maybe three sources.

1 . A huge contributor is the World. We are exposed to so much messes up stuff by wack jobs who like it because they gave in, that it’s almost an audible voice (sometimes it is audible_ telling us to give in and accept this way of thinking. A siren song of disturbing elements.

You think I’m exaggerating?

Oh no, think about it. 50 Shades of Gray has done a lot to make having kinky tenancies, as they are called, okay. Even sort of cool, in a you-do-you sort of way.

At the very least, they are talked of more even if mostly to say it’s messed up. PEple read it into innocent remarks on shows that are far from endorsing it.

I doubt that one book or movie is solely responsible, but it’s an example of how something can be popularized through such methods. And those thoughts people used to keep to themselves the now feel free to share, not to get help, but to revel in their own disturbing nature.

I see this on reviews of My Little Pony for crying out loud.

Ugh.

2. This will not sound reasonable to a skeptic, but I think the devil is behind plenty of it.

The very nature of intrusive thoughts reminds me of how Lewis portrayed the demonic in his book Perelandra. Pure evil is not rational, because Reason still comes from God, once God has been fully rejected, reason goes with it. Evil just revels in being evil, mindless, directionless, destructive.

Very much like Intrusive Thoughts. We human are rational, so they make us feel sick. But if someone gives up rationality, they cease to be bothered by it. We have plenty of ugly historical examples of this happening.

3. It’s possible that everyone is born with some capacity to fall prey to these thoughts because of our sinful nature. The fact that the thoughts so rarely are appealing at first makes it hard for me to believe it’s a temptation.

Its our fear of them that is the temptation. It’s easy to panic over it. We are weak, we can’t fight it off, so we panic.

But it’s that temptation that then opens to door to temptation to accept it in order to escape the fear. And then what we once found horrifying can become pleasurable.

I hate it as much as you do, but I can’t deny it’s a fact.

I never could resist temptation effectively until I ceased to fear it. My fear made me more likely to give in, if I was already paralyzed, what else could I do.

Fear is like a bully. You do as it says to make it go away and stop punching you, but it only comes back crueler next time.

Which brings me to my solution:

What actually destroys Intrusive Thoughts is…Joy.

I’m not kidding.

Once I began to get more grounded in who I was in Christ, and began to believe my identity was not based in these thoughts and fears, a strange thing happened.

I began to find them pathetic, and funny in a pathetic way.

Like “That’s the best you can do?”

And once I could laugh at them, the power of them disappeared. Even if I had them again, I knew they were ridiculous.

It is not the same as enjoying them. You laugh at these thoughts like you laugh at an angry dog behind a fence. The danger i rendered innocuous by how stupid it is to be threatening you when it can’t even reach you.

But always keeping in mind that if we go in the fence, the danger is real. To laugh at these thoughts is not to accept them. It’s to block them the way a clique blocks outsiders by mocking them. They are not taken seriously enough to be talked to.

Joy takes a while to build up to. But what started it for me was deciding I had to trust God with y thoughts.

And I think Sanders and I differ on this. I hope his method helps him, but I think one day I will be rid of this problem, and I do not think he will unless he looks outside himself.

Well, this was long, but good to talk about, until next time–Natasha.