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erikkillmongerdontpullout:

lovewitch2016:

hasan did make a very salient point in his show about how western muslim activists should stop saying things like “muslim is the new black” (he was like “uh no, black is the new black”) and that black muslims go through an amplified version of oppression that makes them an incredibly vulnerable group of people in the US (even more vulnerable than brown muslims). kudos to him for that because i feel like a lot of south asian stand up comedy relies on downplaying the hypervisibility of black people and i see both hindu and muslim americans do this. 

Yeah I believe black Muslims are the highest population of Muslim people in the US it’s just really inconceivable to leave them out

The closest analogy I can think of to Kylo Ren and Rey’s Force connection is not a romantic relationship. I was lucky enough to have a close, fulfilling friendship that became a romance, a relationship where I was and am free to share only things I want to share, opening up at my own pace. I share a lot about myself with my partner because we are very close and talk a lot, but there are still things I choose not to share, sometimes because I’m not sure how to phrase these things myself. There are also things that I just don’t want to tell anyone, and also things I share with other people than my partner because they are not of interest to him and I have other people to share them with. That’s how disclosure works in healthy relationships, by choice.

I know there’s this idea that romance is this all-consuming thing where your entire self is subsumed to a greater force and you have to share absolutely everything, against your will if need be. Anything less is thought to be withholding and inocomplete. I reject that; I know the early infatuation phase of a romantic relationship can feel like that, but it’s not sustainable in the long term. I mean literally, it’s not biochemically sustainable because the brain chemistry that produces that kind of romantic high lasts two, three years at best. Even more problematically, this conception of romance that rejects boundaries sets relationships up for failure. It sets up an unrealistic expectation of romance that leads to disappointment and resentment.

I think this conception of romance as an irresistible oneness that blows away all boundaries is where some people get the idea that friendship and romance are incompatible and that Finn can’t be Rey’s romantic partner if he is her friend. Friendship, after all, is about being two people with boundaries consensually negotiated between them. If you accept that a romance–at least a healthy one–is also about being two separate people with boundaries, the dichotomy disappears.

I have in my life experienced something like the unwilling bond between Kylo Ren and Rey, and not only was it not romantic because it was with a family member, it was not positive in any way. I have known what it’s like to be told my boundaries are not acceptable and that I must share my secrets and feelings. The specific leverage used was our family relationship and guilt rather than the Force, but these powerful ties from an unequal relationship left me feeling as helpless as if I had been tied up, unable to walk out of the room or put down the phone, fearing retribution if I did. I feared being called selfish, unloving, ungrateful, and cold as I had been called countless times since I was a child. I feared that any disapproval meant I was unlovable. These fears were as effective as physical bonds on me, keeping me in the chair while I was needled and pried at, keeping my ear to the phone and my finger away from the “off” button.

In many of these conversations I didn’t want to talk for so many different reasons, but my reasons are always brushed aside. Tell me about your boyfriend. No, because you made it clear you don’t like him, and I don’t want to get into another shouting match. Tell me about your career prospects. No, because you’re just going to pressure me into doing what you want. Tell me what you want to do in life. No, because you’re going to use it against me to tell me how unrealistic and naïve I am, and how that means I have to listen to you. Tell me about your political views. No, because you’ll just make it another indictment against me. Tell me what I’ve done that you hardly want to talk to me anymore? Please? You’re hurting me so much. I’ve been telling you for twenty years, and you have dismissed everything I said. I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Let’s finish this conversation. We’ve already been talking for an hour and I have things to do. You’re so ungrateful. Selfish. Cold. You’re making my anxiety and trauma worse, and no I won’t seek treatment because I don’t need treatment, I just need you to do as I say so I can stop being so fearful. Everything I do is for you, why won’t you see that?

I don’t accept this kind of prying invasion, this coerced intimacy, as love–romantic, familial, or otherwise. It is a form of exploitation that wears a person down to be made the more easily into a hollowed-out puppet. Feelings of love, to the extent they are involved, are just another strand–a powerful one–to make the binding the tighter. It’s my abuser’s actual argument that these bonds, the way I’ve been forced to share myself over the years, is a real and healthy love. It’s his argument that I’m responsible for saving and healing him by ignoring all the ways I’ve been hurt and changing my life to suit his need for control. I don’t accept that, not anymore, and I have fought for decades of my life to reject that logic. 

Being made to share your deepest self against your will is not romantic or healthy in any way. A healthy relationship has boundaries and the choice to share or not share. It is choice that makes disclosure powerful and intimate in its risk and vulnerability, like Finn’s confession to Rey, like the message Rey left with Chewbacca for Finn. Without choice the act of disclosure becomes humiliating and exploitative. It is the farthest thing I can imagine from romance.

Just gonna throw this out there, I didn’t see anything super off kilter about JF’s words. I totally agree that in a larger context it’s important to acknowledge that it wasn’t a healthy relationship & she cut him off, but I think it’s a totally fair point to say that ppl reach for an analogue like a romantic relationship b/c we can’t fully know the experience they are having b/c we don’t have the Force. Not that it’s super accurate, even he said that, just that there’s a reason people go there

My problem is that in going there, people have to ignore a LOT of what actually happened between the characters. I can think of much better analogies, like the forced intimacy of being made to share your feelings and secrets with someone who’s always looking to use them to control you and get at you. This is something I go through in a real life relationship that is extremely difficult to let go of, where I’m trying, so painfully and slowly, to set some minimal boundaries–something that the other person guilts ME over and calls ME cruel, abusive, and ungrateful for. I envy Rey’s ability to sever the connection in an instant and to feel nothing for the man who tried to break her down and mold her to his own ends, because for me it’s a decades-long process, not days or moments.

So yeah, I get some kind of feels when this shit gets put in a positive light. Reylows romanticize my most painful experiences and the manipulative tactics that scarred me for a lifetime. They validate my abuser’s own rhetoric, that he is a tortured soul who I am responsible for fixing by shaping my entire life around pleasing him, and I don’t like that and I speak against it. Fuck me, since that makes me a mean puritanical abusive harassing anti.

twitter*com/upsiedazies/status/1039408130176634881 this is the funniest shit i’ve ever read and i need someone else to laugh with me. apparently throwing a woman against a tree and torturing her is being respectful. and that’s literally the only woman he’s interacted with. that being said the quoted tweet is spot-on.

Omg the original tweet is after my own heart:

(Source, and much of the thread underneath is gold, too.)

(Source)

I guess I don’t see the big issue with Jason Fry? He’s like Steve Kloves who said he tried to change JKR’s mind about Romione because he wanted Harry and Hermione together and he finally had to shrug his shoulders and deal. Jason Fry is a reylow. That’s nasty, but when and if Finn and Rey get together, he’s going to have to suck it up like Kloves did. Again, I get it can be annoying to see this, but at the end of the day he’s a hired hand who likes reylow. Sad, but why are people so mad?

And even he’s been annoyed with reylows when they tried to put words in his mouth to paint Finn’s feelings toward Rey as unhealthy and Rose as justified in wanting to hurt him. He’s just another white person who thinks it’s totally romantic, or a romantic analogue, that a white guy treated a woman like shit physically and emotionally.

Here’s the thing about Fry’s comments that bother me so much. I don’t mind him bringing up that these two saw inside one another, and that there was a brief moment where it was assumed Rey and Kylo would support one another. That is all real. What bothers me so much is that he just IGNORES, like all of the Reylows, the rest of the story! Forget that the bond enabling this insight into each other was first, forced on Rey in a torture scene, and second, forced on the both of them by an evil (1/2)

overlord.  Ignores that Kylo purposely USED this forced
connection to put Rey down and raise himself up. Ignores that at the end
of it all, Rey closes off the connection because Kylo is a dirtbag.
Ignores that if a relationship is analogous, then that relationship
ended when Rey saw who Kylo truly was. I don’t mind the analogy. But he
needs to complete it. Instead, he’s disingenuously fanning the flame.
(2/2)

I agree, it was a very incomplete take that cherry-picks some parts and ignores others, while disregarding the larger context. From his description alone you would never infer that Kylo had assaulted, kidnapped, and tortured Rey, or that he had broken her down and exploited her to use her for his own selfish ends. Or that she severed the connection at the end of it all, for that matter.

I want to first say I am in no way downplaying what John and Loan Tran have had to deal with in their experience with this series, but don’t you feel for Daisy? Two middle aged white Bev are basically saying her character is only good for redeeming a male villain and they’re calling a ship she has openly disparaged “romantic” and “sexy.” I just feel for her.

I just hope she’s not super aware of that kind of fandom stuff. I wish I weren’t.