(no subject)

[shadowkat]

So I scanned Mark Watches...

* Odd, I actually enjoyed Beer Bad. It was hilarious. I didn't take it seriously. But I also went to college in the 1980s (like the writers of Buffy did) where we had 3.2 beer and people could drink beer at the ripe old age of 19 and serve it - as long as it was 3.2 - which was the case in Colorado and California. Do they still have 3.2 beer? It was misnomer, it did get you drunk, which is why I think they finally did away with it. I think. So my suspension of disbelief wasn't a problem - since I actually knew people who served beer on campus who were 19. Gotta love the 1980s. [It should be noted that I like absurd comedy. I found HIM to be hilarious too (not the Dawn scenes (I cringed during them) the Buffy-Spike-Wood and the Rocket Launcher sequence...that bit had me dying with laughter, as did the 70's split scene, and Willow trying to turn the Guy into a Girl before Xander and Spike stop her), as well as The Girl in Question. Also Doublemeat Palace made me laugh. But episodes like
Storyteller, The Zeppo and Superstar made me cringe. So I clearly hate parody, but love absurdity? IDEK. (Every time I use that phrase I feel like I'm referencing a company that makes audio cassettes. Today's slang sounds like an ad for IKEA, gotta love the information/technology revolution.)

* I clearly don't have a button regarding slut-shamming and casual sex, mostly because I don't understand why anyone in their right mind would want to engage in casual sex. I don't do it. Never have. Not how I am wired. So...

I have had and do have friends who engage in it. But in every situation, engaging in casual sex has devastated them emotionally. They've been hurt. One friend went so far to tell me that you feel dirty afterwards, like you want to take a shower. And another...kept wanting to make the sex more, she said it meant nothing at the time, but she was crushed when it didn't turn out to be more. I remember another friend telling me if you think you feel vulnerable sharing your thoughts with someone, try sex. There's so many ways they can hurt you.

So...It still makes no sense to me. Eww. You are basically using someone for your own sexual gratification - it's not about love, just getting off. It's about bodies, not the person. I can fantasize about it and do - it's great to fantasize about, but even then I turn it into a romance. So I don't understand it. I'm not saying it's wrong, just that I don't get it, people.

I'm struggling with a plot arc on SMASH as well, where two characters are destroying their lives just to have a hot affair - they aren't in love, they are just hot for each other. And they are destroying four lives...to what exactly? Get off?
So..why can't they say no? Admittedly, not an addictive personality, so addictions don't make a lot of sense to me. I have had a lot of addictive friends though.
What boggles my mind is people who engage in casual sex don't seem to get why it can be problematic? Mark's post bewildered me. I thought, oh, interesting perspective, you really don't get why casual sex can be a problem? Hello? STD? Pregnancy? Stalking? Obsessiveness? Consequences? You are being intimate with someone, entering their body, exploring it...and treating it like it's no different than eating a piece of really yummy chocolate or scratching an itch. (Seriously more people need to look into the fine art of masturbation.) Basically you are Fucking instead of making Love. I'm not saying you shouldn't do it. But you should realize that there are some serious consequences to it. That it can be emotionally devastating. That you could really hurt someone, including yourself. It's not safe. It's dangerous. I actually think Whedon did a good job of exploring that danger in Buffy and Angel from a heterosexual perspective, not so much a homosexual one unfortunately. Although Queer Ass Folk, Torchwood, and The L Word sort of did that.

I hope that doesn't sound terribly judgmental. Discussing sex on lj is dicey. Too many buttons.

* Mark's attitude towards Cordy and Xander makes me laugh and bewilders me, because I'm the exact opposite. Cordy reminded me of the people who made my life a living hell in high school. And yep, how she ends up is pretty much how a lot of them did. Not all. Xander reminded me of nerdy guy friends I hung out with. So, I was always more sympathetic towards Xander than Cordy. Xander made sense to me. Cordy felt like a commentary on spoiled entitled bratty cheerleaders aka mean girls that I went to school with. She was better developed in Angel and a rather good foil for Angel, who had similar issues. Also like Angel, Cordy was looking for redemption. Every character in Angel is looking for redemption - they are all broken souls. That's why Faith worked better in Angel than Buffy.

Xander isn't a broken soul. He's just a nerdy guy who has been bullied. I work with a lot of Xander's actually. His parents were from hell. He had little money. And he didn't test well. But he's resourceful. Cordy on the other hand seemed to be an entitled whiny bitca to me. I kept wanting to slap her. Harmony was worse - I really struggled with Harmony. There was a handful of characters that bugged me on that series - luckily they were all recurring so I could ignore them. It's very odd to read Cordy love and Xander hate, since I preferred Xander to Cordy, and struggled with Angel the Series after Doyle, Lindsey and Kate left. That said, Cordy and Harmony both worked better for me on Angel. As did Faith. Not a fan of bad girl trope either...because I don't understand it and have been hurt by a couple of bad girl's in my lifetime. So I struggle with the trope. Plus they tend to be written a bit on the cliche side, as do bad boy's admittedly...but being a heterosexual female, I find the bad boy more appealing (fantasy folks not in reality, I'm not self-destructive, well not in that way, at least.)


* Please do not hurt me if you vehmentally disagree. Mileage Varies. This is just an opinion. I've been known to change my mind on a whim. I'm being careful with comments this round and screening. Because...there's a few things I said in there that could result in some rather violent responses. So protecting myself or trying to. Maybe I should just flock? Will stay unflocked for now.

Comments

[spikesjojo.livejournal.com]

Gotta agree with you on a lot of this. I grew up in the sixites, and 18 was legal drinking age. Most college kids only did it on the side. I had a room mate with a very Carlos Castaneda view of life. So Beer Bad seems tame.

Casual sex - overall I agree with everything you say at this time in my life. I've seen what it can do. But I know that there was an earlier time of my life when I didn't have much of a sense of self and wanted to be loved. Like Buffy, I thought anyone who slept with me would love me.

Sexuality is a lot more open today in some ways. But it always has had the potential to blow up in your face, no matter what the commitment level. It's not so much that I don't judge as I really see everyone has to learn their own lessons, walk their own path. So maybe this is their lesson to master, and maybe their answer won't be the same as mine was.

And so much of my enjoyment of the series comes from watching Spike subvert the Bad Boy trope in so many ways....

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Thank you and I agree.

Sexuality is a lot more open today in some ways. But it always has had the potential to blow up in your face, no matter what the commitment level. It's not so much that I don't judge as I really see everyone has to learn their own lessons, walk their own path. So maybe this is their lesson to master, and maybe their answer won't be the same as mine was.

I think this is true. It's so different for everyone. How we view others, how we view ourselves, how we view sex.

I view sex as an intimate act...private. But a lot of people don't.
And I'm more open about it than some. Smut doesn't bother me - as long as it is voluntary and not coerced. I do have issues with prostitution but that's mainly because so much of it is coerced.

It's not a topic that is easy to talk about, because I think, like it or not, we do tend to judge each other. I can't decide what is worse sometimes the slut-shaming or the virgin-shaming. Heaven forbid you haven't had intercourse before the age of 40 in this society. People assume something is wrong. But there are quite a few people who haven't. Why do we shame those we can't understand, just because their experience is so different from our own? I wonder about this sometimes.

And so much of my enjoyment of the series comes from watching Spike subvert the Bad Boy trope in so many ways....

Me too. I loved how Spike subverted the bad boy trope...we had the cool guy that all women wanted, the sexual predator, the punk rocker - and he was being summarily rejected by the one person he wanted the most on a daily basis. When he finally gets her...he becomes in a weird way..her mistress or dirty secret. He takes on the female role, and she takes on the male. It was riveting. Particularly the whole female gaze bit - where he was nude and she was fully clothed or invisible.

[sophist.livejournal.com]

Well, I guess I'm about 50-50 with you. I don't have a problem with casual sex, I don't like Beer Bad. OTOH, I didn't like Cordy or Faith. In my view we weren't supposed to -- they represented Buffy's dark side. Hard to find that attractive.

BTW, I got the DVDs of Game of Thrones. You were right. Very well done, all things considered. I was worried about Danys character at first, but that worked fine.

[cactuswatcher.livejournal.com]

In Missouri 3.2 was what alcoholics bought on Sunday when no one could buy anything else. They didn't sell a lot, because most people planned far enough ahead to buy beer before Sunday. Students avoided 3.2. Getting regular beer wasn't a problem, A few bars in that town had a history of never checking IDs, though they were cracking down on bars that sold to minors when I started college. Someone who was 21 would always get it at a package store for the younger kids, anyway. When I went to grad school in Ohio, 3.2 was legal for 18-year-olds and I thought the kids there were somehow missing something. Bars for those over 21 in Ohio were much more like the bar in Beer Bad than the places that sold 3.2. You weren't likely to hear a pretentious conversation about anything above the loud music at a bar where there were freshmen.

I thought Beer Bad was a little anachronistic, but dead on about young people getting drunk and acting silly.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

That was more or less my experience of both Beer Bad, and drinking in college.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

BTW, I got the DVDs of Game of Thrones. You were right. Very well done, all things considered. I was worried about Danys character at first, but that worked fine.

I thought you'd like it. The people on my flist who struggled with GoT - had issues with what they call the "sexexploitation or sexespoistion" scenes. (Basically Little Finger directing the whores, and
the sex scenes with the guy whose name I forget.) It never bothered me. Seen far worse on HBO and Showtime. I think people didn't notice the sex as much in the books, because so much of it happens off the page, we hear about it sort of third or fourth hand. The violence is much the same way. The books are told oddly - a lot of the action happens off-stage.

Agree on Dany. I struggled with her story in GoT but I had similar issues with her story in the books. In some respects...I like her story much better here, better paced, also she's cast older. In the books she's about 14 or 15. For the TV series - they made the kids a little older than they actually were in the books.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Side Note: This has nothing really to do with anything but you typed 'Queer Ass Folk' to which I giggled for several minutes

hee. I blame my flist for this. They keep referring to it as QAssF or the equivalent.

I think the big pain failures in casual sex stems from people not talking. Honesty is so critical in that situation to avoid heartbreak and pain.

Quite true. Actually I thought Buffy and Angel did a good job of getting that across. Buffy is never really honest with Spike. Angel isn't truly honest with Buffy. And Parker lies outright. Riley and Buffy lie to each other...

Sex like anything that requires a degree of intimacy is about trust when you get right down to it. If there's no trust - it will end badly. If you betray the other person's trust - it ends badly.
This also happens in fandom interactions online - when you violate someone's trust - things go really badly. It's also about misunderstandings. If you aren't honest...or direct, then signals can get crossed and misunderstandings occur.

[sophist.livejournal.com]

For all that there is gratuitous sex and nudity in the HBO series, I thought they actually toned it down quite a bit from the books. They could have shown a lot more (e.g., Caitlyn Stark gets out of bed nude in the book), and they could have been much more graphic (with Danaerys).

The sexposition scene with Littlefinger did stand out. The scene between Ser Loras and Renly was unnecessary, BUT it clarified a point that I was unsure about in the book, namely whether Renly was gay. I assume this confirms it.

I think that part of the reason they toned down some of it was that the age of the girls would make it problematic. They've left Danaerys' age a little vague, but she's clearly older than in the book. And some there will be later scenes with Sanza which they'll have to modify for that reason (as well as plenty of others).

Oh, and I should add that I thought Him was hilarious too, and the Dawn scenes where she humiliates herself also make me cringe. Can't stand humiliation scenes.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

The sexposition scene with Littlefinger did stand out.

Agreed. It was poorly sound-edited and filmed.
You couldn't hear his monologue - which was rather interesting over all the damn moaning.
A distracting and grating scene. Add to it?
Unnecessary and sort of occ...since the character as established in the books is unlikely to have said any of that to anyone.
Little-Finger is a very cards close to his chest type. A true Iago.

But I liked the monologue...if only I could have heard it.

The scene between Ser Loras and Renly was unnecessary, BUT it clarified a point that I was unsure about in the book, namely whether Renly was gay. I assume this confirms it.

He could be bi. But yeah, more or less. Certainly confirmed it for Ser Loras. ;-)
(Which makes Sansa's lust for Ser Loras hilariously tragic.) And you're right it's not clear in the books.

For all that there is gratuitous sex and nudity in the HBO series, I thought they actually toned it down quite a bit from the books.

That was my reaction as well. The books are actually more graphic. Tyrion alone...not to mention in the book, Jaime and Cersie are completely naked when Bran sees them.

Can't stand humiliation scenes.

Me too. Problem I have with a lot of US sitcoms and comedy films.