Heteropessimism & Rey Palpatinism

[extrapenguin]

Yes hello, am very busy IRL still, proooobably shouldn't have signed up for ficinabox or swrarepairs but hey, I managed to complete my assignments and comment on my gifts! Even if I didn't manage to read a single other thing from the collections. But! I exist. And I even wanted to make a post!

1) I discovered a link to Tara Mooknee's video essay on Heterofatalism: WHY straight women aren't okay and watched it, though as always I think text is nicer and headed straight for her sources document. Of those, I enjoyed/found intriguing Indiana Seresin's original essay, Yuhe Faye Wang's essay, Sophie Lewis's related thoughts on the architectural enabling of hedonism (this one was kind of brain-bendy) and the WTFery of straight culture (looking at it from the outside with an exotifying tone), and this excerpt from Jane Ward's book that deals with how heterosexuality itself is new and how the idea that men could/should love women, rather than just exploit them via marriage, is new and the transition to this paradigm is still incomplete. It's 0% applicable to me, but idk, it's also completely new as a theoretical framework and I desperately needed to think about something unrelated to [list of things making me v v busy IRL].

2) While clipping through RotS for Reincarnation, I noticed that Palps uses the same saber technique in his one lightsaber fight that Rey uses in TFA, so I've been thinking about vidsongs for a vid about negative family relations/rejecting the family legacy for a bit. Nothing already in my music library has struck me, so I've looked at my vid_bingo bingo card and gone hunting for 00s songs. (I already know what I'll be doing for character study, have a WIP I could plonk for the free square, and metal/rock is, like, 99% of everything I vid and listen to.) So far my backup plan is to vid something to one of Apocalyptica's instrumentals, but the Rey Palpatine vid feels like it needs vocals, ideally female. I'll be going through the 00s discographies of Stratovarius and Apulanta anyway, as well as re-checking out albums from the 00s already in my music collection (Indica, Katra, Xandria, etc), but if you have any recs for female-fronted metal/rock bands active during 2000 to 2009, please share. (Metal Archives advanced search reveals 1270 albums from the period. Halp.)

Comments

[rosefox]

Thank you so much for those heterofatalism/heteropessimism links! SUPER interesting, and I really want to talk with my mother about them. When #MeToo was a new thing, she and I were discussing just how many men of her generation had mistreated women in some way, and I expressed sympathy that she and other women had been stuck choosing partners from such a toxic pool. "Oh, it was worse than that," she said. "We loved them." It's haunted me ever since, and I keep looking for an analysis of heterosexual women's lives under misogyny that includes their desperate need not just to be loved but to love. Lewis's wonderful essay on hedonism comes close, and a find-and-replace that swapped out sex for love would be an interesting experiment. I do think many people need good love just as much as they need good sex, and the conditions for the two to flourish are much the same.

[extrapenguin]

That sounds like an interesting continuation for the conversation you had! I know people like to love in addition to being loved, and perform acts of love in addition to receiving them. (The balance is, perhaps, a bit different for everyone, but everyone likes things from both columns A and B.)