- Joined
- Mar 10, 2023
"Oh my adoring audience does so make a drama over every little thing tee hee. Now, darlings, do chat me up offline for all the thrilling details tee hee. I'm fascinating!"
Grace Lavery / Joseph Lavery & Daniel M. Lavery / Mallory Ortberg - "Straight with extra steps" couple trooning out to avoid "dwindling into mere heterosexuality"
- Thread starter CobraPlissken
- Start date
- Joined
- Jun 13, 2016
LMAO. This was my first thought too. Plz slide into Joe’s DMs so he can tell you all the hot goss about this very real, important drama and his abuse revelations. I guess Joe gets point for female vague posting. Shame he didn’t go the full Monty and finish with “prayers plz.”
Important to note he now includes Danny in this “plz DM me” tweet because 95% of any personal interest in Joe is due to his relationship with Mallory. Nobody gives a shit about Joe’s solo personal tribulations with troll transphobes, but “ Danny and Grace” well, prick up your ears!
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2019
Sideshow is the worst pantomime dame.
John Inman and Quentin Crisp are spinning...
John Inman and Quentin Crisp are spinning...
- Joined
- Feb 14, 2023
Around the same time Joe did his tease about evil terf trolls, Mal locked her Twitter. It is now unlocked again, so we can enjoy pictures of „my son” Bobby Joe and tiresome joke tweets about Jane Austen. This literary tweet jumped out:
link | archive
And here is why Tard Baby didn’t leverage her fame to doing paid book reviews or essays in major reviews or papers, apart from her limited literary taste: she sucks at it. None of those statements express a desire to be male. One of them isn’t even said by a female character, for God’s sake.
What do they express? By themselves, not much. They highlight the social or possibly biological differences between the sexes. One of them uses the term gentleman, which was a distinct social status. To read your own gender transition theories onto these statements by themselves is farfetched. You would need much more from the texts themselves to support any argument that the characters are expressing a desire to be the other sex, as opposed to having the same social status, freedoms or biological advantages of a man while remaining in a female body. It’s a subtle point, but it’s what critical reading of a text requires, especially when it was produced in another society with its own theories about sex and gender.
And another thing: Tard Baby’s little linguistic tell. Note that she describes this as a desire to be a boy. The quotes are about being a man. She did not choose boy because space was limited, as each word is three letters. Did she choose it because to transition is to infantilise oneself, to reject adulthood and start over as an unspoiled adolescent? By itself, the word choice tells us nothing definitive. Set against the rest of the author’s oeuvre, a case could be made.
No wonder Mal is wiping arses all day.
link | archive
And here is why Tard Baby didn’t leverage her fame to doing paid book reviews or essays in major reviews or papers, apart from her limited literary taste: she sucks at it. None of those statements express a desire to be male. One of them isn’t even said by a female character, for God’s sake.
What do they express? By themselves, not much. They highlight the social or possibly biological differences between the sexes. One of them uses the term gentleman, which was a distinct social status. To read your own gender transition theories onto these statements by themselves is farfetched. You would need much more from the texts themselves to support any argument that the characters are expressing a desire to be the other sex, as opposed to having the same social status, freedoms or biological advantages of a man while remaining in a female body. It’s a subtle point, but it’s what critical reading of a text requires, especially when it was produced in another society with its own theories about sex and gender.
And another thing: Tard Baby’s little linguistic tell. Note that she describes this as a desire to be a boy. The quotes are about being a man. She did not choose boy because space was limited, as each word is three letters. Did she choose it because to transition is to infantilise oneself, to reject adulthood and start over as an unspoiled adolescent? By itself, the word choice tells us nothing definitive. Set against the rest of the author’s oeuvre, a case could be made.
No wonder Mal is wiping arses all day.
- Joined
- Apr 6, 2019
Humor me fellow threadgoers. Believe it or not I got decent grades in English class. I have read most of the books being referenced here. They are amusing enough, not a difficult or boring read. There are some interesting things about them. But can someone explain to me why there is this whole genre of dweeby basic bitch, midwit girls who were told they were very smart in high school, who are so totally obsessed with them?
It isn't just that they are by women. These same gals never get into Virginia Woolf, notably, or Gertrude Stein, or Edith Wharton, or Georges Sand (you would think they would be into her), or Sexton and Plath, or Edna St. Vincent Millay, or any of those other great names you would expect to see on a top 20 of women in literature. It's just Austen and the Brontes. And really only two books of the Brontes, at that.
What gives?
(It's like if a guy said he was really into classic literature but really he only meant Henry Fielding.)
- Joined
- Mar 10, 2023
They smell something wuthered in the eyre, I guess.
bei_rav
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Apr 28, 2024
Woolf's stream of consciousness style makes it somewhat harder to parse for your average dweeb. Georges Sand is cool but honestly just not as good, her aims as an artist are also just plain different than what Austen sets out to achieve. George Elliot is (imo) better but makes strenuous demands on her audience. A midwit who successfully reads and fully absorbs, say, Middlemarch, will level up in her empathic skills and basic human curiosity, such that she will not register to you in the category you have described. Think about The Mill on the Floss, that sets you up to cheer for the scrappy miller family against the evil rich guys trying to buy the mill. Then halfway through there's a deliciously jarring reveal that the evil rich guys are not only not evil, but will probably be way better at running anything they want to buy. And the best part is that Elliott isn't getting you to switch sides. She's showing you that painless change is just not possible and she makes you sit with that. I enjoy Jane Austen, and her reputation for superficiality is ill-deserved, but at the same time she would never go so hard and so dark.
I want to believe
- Joined
- Oct 27, 2021
What bei_rav said, but I speculate a simpler explanation: Austen/Brontes are commonly taught in high school. The others you mentioned (most of whom are in or near my top tier, though I appreciate the mid 19th c and before as well) are not so commonly introduced at that level (yes, exceptions, etc.).
- Joined
- Feb 14, 2023
Interesting question. Some random thoughts to add to the excellent points made by @bei_rav and @Friend of Dorothy Parker.
Primarily, these are midwits, remember. They aren’t that interested in stretching their brains. These novels are treated by them as a smart version of chick lit: they end in marriage, and they appear to be about romantic relationships. These novels use a mostly straightforward classical form, so less brain stress than eg Woolf. Wuthering Heights is the exception in a way, because it uses multiple embedded narratives. This reading, BTW, requires you to ignore a lot of subtle and disturbing stuff at play in the novels.
Secondly, identification with the authors. Austen and the Brontes were spinsters when they wrote. Charlotte Brontë married, but she wrote as a spinster. Compare them to the women you mentioned, who all had the sort of sexy, messy personal lives these girls don’t have.
Thirdly, they romanticise the times in which Austen and the Brontës wrote. War, poverty etc are all there in the books, but as with the disturbing themes, these get mentally edited out to create a pastel coloured view of the past, in which these girls would have been valued and married to Mr Darcy, unlike icky today times. Plus, you can dress up and shit!
Finally, what gets made into movies and TV series? The occasional Eliot adaptation is overwhelmed by the constant Austen, and as for Woolf? Forget about it. These are entry drugs and also create the cultural cachet. A woman into, say, Stein, has to explain who she was to non-literary types. Austen and the Brontës are easy signifiers of cultural superiority.
TL;DR these books act as the raw material for a fantasy world which the reader can project themselves into, because they are not as challenging as later modernist literature, and follow a classic form. This behaviour BTW is not that different to male readers of Dune or ŁOTR or capeshit, but it requires more conscious editing out of disturbing content, and has the added bonus of allowing you to pretend superiority because these are part of the canon.
- Joined
- Mar 24, 2016
Imagine if there was a whole genre of man who obsessed over the male main character novels from high school required reading.
Gatsby freaks and guys who just constantly went around quoting Of Mice and Men and Lord of the Flies, and little websites where they all traded bon mots about the hidden subtext of Gary Paulsen's Hatchet and what it would have been like if Miller's salesman had been selling solar panels and how an alternate ending would have completely changed your perspective on The Outsiders.
- Joined
- Apr 6, 2019
Sadly Holden Caufield-cels are real, I don't have to imagine.
- Joined
- Mar 12, 2021
Simple plots. They are all romcoms with literary cred. All the girls struggle in some way in finding a mate and do so by the end, often without giving up much of their strangeness or wit. The Brontes hit the same elements but with heightened gothicism for the ones who prefer darker fantasy.
Also as @monstrous bubo notes, identification with the authors is definitely part of the appeal. See Becoming Jane and more recently Dickinson where the authors are reimagined as self-inserts who align entirely with modern ideals, whose lives are sanded down into twee Feminist Lite musings. I was going to say maybe Mary Shelley avoids this because Frankenstein is easy to understand but less About Femininity than the others, but even she got a mid movie about her a few years ago that's just about her being so much better than Percy and Lord Byron.
- Joined
- Dec 31, 2018
Joe's "defense" of other people's thoughts is that they think the same thing about Joe that he thinks.
- Joined
- Dec 7, 2021
I also think it’s a generational thing. The Brontes have always appealed to a certain type of girl who was complicated, a little bit dark, a little bit feminist, and who favors stormy romances with questionable men. The golden age of Austen adaptations hit around the time when late Gen X/elder millennials were teenagers and young women, and the superficiality was appealing (pretty costumes, prickly Alan Rickman, Wet Mr. Darcy). To this day, I don’t know how many of them have actually sat down and read Austen or if their knowledge comes from the BBC and Hark! A Vagrant.
But when younger millennials and Gen Z read, they tend to go for ultra-lightweight super-derivative BookTok faire, like Sarah Maas and Cassandra Clare. The only Regency-era they like is Bridgerton, which they are obsessed with thanks to Netflix. I think the Austen girls and the Bronte girls are a dying breed. (Incidentally, one of the reasons why the Brontes, in particular, are still huge in Japan is because for many years, Jane Eyre was taught in high schools.)
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David Glowie
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jul 4, 2022
I was about to mention the Tilda Swinton adaptation of Orlando, which you'd think would be right up their alley, but then I looked it up and realised just how long ago it came out. Proving your point.
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2019
Sideshow acts like Quentin's Queen Elizabeth from Orlando.
- Joined
- Feb 15, 2019
A few comical photos from Lily's Instagram:
"This is my 'appreciating art' face."
Horrendous outfit from Joe as always. He could've looked normal but had to add the flappy patchwork duster (which he probably paid $3500 for). Meanwhile...is tard baby giving Joe a hover hand while he gazes lovingly at Lily behind the camera? lol. Her life sucks.
"This is my 'appreciating art' face."
Horrendous outfit from Joe as always. He could've looked normal but had to add the flappy patchwork duster (which he probably paid $3500 for). Meanwhile...is tard baby giving Joe a hover hand while he gazes lovingly at Lily behind the camera? lol. Her life sucks.
- Joined
- Mar 10, 2023
I wonder if anyone has congratulated Joe on being a grandpa yet? He looks far closer to being that than being the kid's mom.
Savoie
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Mar 25, 2024
Fucking hell, I get that a lot of personal upkeep shit goes out the window when a baby comes, but in that case stay home or at least get some dry shampoo up in there.