The past is packed with monsters! Behemoths by the dozen! Let’s meet these fossils! (and their less colossal modern cousins)
Earth’s ancient history is full of giant versions of modern animals. Evolutionary forces (competition for resources, changes in climate) pushed these species to become incredibly large. And I’m not just talking about giant dinosaurs - there were huge mammals and marsupials too.
A lot of these giants lived in the Pleistocene, an epoch stretching from around 2.5 million to 11,000 years ago. Mysteriously, the extinction of many of these animals coincides with humanity’s arrival as a dominant predator.
this formatting is making me uncomfortable but I have to tell you something / ask you something that is vital to my career as a student.
I re-read and edited that sentence for an hour, but you’ll probably just glance over it for half a second.
thanks!
- [name]
k
-professor
I have a stock format and structure I use.
Dear Person I am Writing To:
This is an optional sentence introducing who I am and work for, included if the addressee has never corresponded with me before. The second optional sentence reminds the person where we met, if relevant. This sentence states the purpose of the email.
This optional paragraph describes in more detail what’s needed. This sentence discusses relevant information like how soon an answer is needed, what kind of an answer is needed, and any information that the other person might find useful. If there’s a lot of information, it’s a good idea to separate this paragraph into two or three paragraphs to avoid having a Wall of Text.
If a description paragraph was used, close with a restatement of the initial request, in case the addressee ignored the opening paragraph.
This sentence is just a platitude (usually thanking them for their time) because people think I’m standoffish, unreasonably demanding, or cold if it’s not included.
Closing salutation,
Signature.
People always ask me how I can fire off work emails so quickly. Nobody has figured out yet that it’s the same email with the details changed as needed.
The last time I went to see Mad Max Fury Road (Sunday), I went with my mom and her husband (and my partner, but that should generally be assumed lolol). My mom admitted after the movie that she’d been afraid she wouldn’t like it but had faith that she would enjoy something I did so much. But of course she loved it.
What was interesting though, is that her husband, a man who loves action movies, didn’t seem so sure about it. Oh, he didn’t hate it, but he didn’t seem to find it spectacular either. He finally at one point said that he wasn’t sure he cared for how Max starts out the movie so weak—how he gets caught so quickly, so easily, and then is essentially useless for the first quarter of the movie. (See also this brilliant meta that addresses this very thing, though in a different way than I hope to.) I think he mentioned this in close proximity to me talking to my mom about how great it is that the movie is dealing with domestic/sexual violence, but we don’t actually see any sexual violence perpetrated against Immortan Joe’s prisoners—my Revolutionaries.
The juxtaposition of those thoughts made me realize that, on some level:
We experienced the violence and degradation of the Revolutionaries through Max.
Narratively, this is kind of obvious. It’s through Max that we get to see how awful the Citadel is and we get to see why the Revolutionaries wouldn’t want to remain there. But it’s so much more nuanced than that.
When people think about rape, what do they imagine? Often a woman tied up and being penetrated, hurt. We may picture them fighting back a bit (and probably getting hurt for it), but ultimately there’s nothing they can do. They get reduced to their body, and their body gets used up. In a very real sense, rape victims feel branded for life and often experience things akin to PTSD if not actually developing it.
What do we see happen to Max? He’s strung up, humiliated by the unceremonious cutting of all his hair (they did a really good job with the facial hair though, I might say). He gets silenced (gagged), and it’s implied he eventually gets branded. While he’s being held in chains, he’s being tattooed, a literal form of (mild) penetration. Later we know they stick needles in him, and his body is used for the purpose of life: to keep Nux alive and strong. This last act also parallels the very purpose of Immortan’s prisoners. Max is there to keep war boys alive: the women are there to bring war boys (though hopefully an heir apparently) into the world in the first place. Their bodies are used to sustain the physical bodies of others.
So Max undergoes a metaphorical rape in lieu of us ever seeing the women experience it. The place where depicting their rape could have narratively fit into the plot of this movie, we see the vulnerability of Max and the stripping of his agency instead.
This doesn’t mean that Max’s treatment should necessarily be compared and contrasted with the Revolutionaries’ experiences. They all had shitty lots under Immortan Joe’s rule, and that’s ultimately the point! One that I think the movie clearly handled well. Under joe’s tyranny, the bodies of the people around him are his commodities.
And it’s not something we see very often in media. Oh, some times we get torture scenes that star our male heroes, but they have a different flavor. They’re usually being questioned, or the villain is exacting their vengeance against our hero. They as an individual is vital to what is happening to them and is what propelled them to that place in their story. In contrast, the violence against Max has nothing to do with him as an individual, similarly to sexual violence. It’s about those in the Citadel using his body for their purposes—ultimately their domination over him and everyone else. In their society, he is replaceable in a way that other scenes in movies that depict the violation of men are not, and those depictions always further a man’s character arc and play on his importance.
In other movies, violence against our male heros happens along the way; it happens as a result of his actions; it happens because he has engaged with the enemies, put himself in their path. And that’s so very… male.
Max doesn’t engage the enemy, doesn’t get in their way. He just exists, and they chase him down. They take his vehicle though they’ve likely never seen him or it before. Max (and his car) simply exist and have entered Citadel territory; therefore, he and his things become Citadel property. The violence against Max is portrayed so much more the way we’re used to seeing violence against women, and it’s unnerving and unpleasant and probably made some men feel the affects and revulsion against that kind of violence in a way they never have before, because for once the face of that victim is male. For once, the character they’re supposed to imagine themselves as is getting attacked and violated without provocation, senselessly.
And this wasn’t something that struck me as too out of the ordinary right away. I definitely realized it’s not something we see very often, but it narratively didn’t bother me, seem out of place, or even that strange—though clearly there was something unique in that it was our main, male protagonist. But then again, I am invested in my female characters in my media, and I’m honestly quite used to seeing this be part of a woman’s narrative. Being dominated over and overcoming that is a very common story arc that starts a strong female character’s story, but it’s not a common one for our male heroes. Male heroes experience pain and brutalization as a plot point on their way through the story, not as a starting point, not as something to run away from.
And if you didn’t check out the meta I link to at the top, you should, because it highlights just how unique and important it is that it happens to Max. It’s unique and bold storytelling. It lets men (Nux too) be vulnerable and emotional and lost and to find themselves along the way instead of simply knowing who they are and who they should be and just being that.
And gosh, how refreshing is that?!
*ovation applause for whole post* (that meta link above is a must-read, btw!)
Max as proxy for the dehumanization of women is so very powerful, because it lets us process what “robbed of agency, violated to serve others’ desires & suffering dismissed as subhuman” really truly means - without filtering it through cultural gender coding. It was raw it was ugly and it hit hard. I’m sure it was lost on almost no women that Max on his stomach, on a table, with his hands held in front of him by multiple men, is a classic gang rape posture. The metaphor was pretty wafer thin right there.
It put me in mind of those studies on ‘defining pornography’ a few decades back. If you’re going to make the dividing line between erotica and porn be ‘dehumanization and/or humiliation’, you need your group of students or experts or legal officials to look at photos and agree, ‘yes, that woman is being dehumanized.’ And yet what they found was, people simply couldn’t agree where to draw the line….when the photos were of women. When they took the same explicit photos of men, people were almost unified as to where to draw the line. Why? Because we’re so used to seeing women being dehumanized in all kinds of ways in patriarchal culture, that we literally don’t see them as fully human to start with. Whereas men are perceived to be fully realized as a default, so anything that brought them below that baseline of dignity was much easier to recognize and agree upon.
When we watch Max dehumanized on screen, we have no doubt about what we are seeing. There is no cultural pseudo-erotic lens operating here, as there would be if a woman was on that table. We just see Max’s helplessness and his reduction to an object.
At that moment we have all the information we need to have on the plight of anyone held as prisoners or slaves at the Citadel.
“we’re so used to seeing women being dehumanized in all kinds of ways in patriarchal culture, that we literally don’t see them as fully human to start with” Damn, that’s a gut punch of truth. Excellent writings.
no of course not why would i have anything against cis gay men dressing up as women and illegitimizing my identity? Its not like because of them my mom can’t see me as anything other than one of them because their presence overshadows actual trans women’s lives. Its not like they actively erase trans women’s identities like that of Marsha P Johnson and claim they were drag queens. its not like they get to wear my identity as a dress when they want to and not experience any of the struggles of trans women, again illegitimizing my identity.
I fucking hate drag queens lmao.
Honesty, where do I begin with this tragedy. I’m not going to include the rest of the comments because they’re ugly and I’m tired.
I need you white women, you white queers, to understand the history of drag before you decide to decry it. You all clamor about “protecting ~poc~ at all costs” but rarely do you ever critically engage with our histories, which can be seen here and in the white feminist/queer demonization of drag culture in the west.
Drag is not intrinsically an attack on your identity as a woman, as a white person. I hate to break it to you, but the world does not begin and end on the backs of white identity. The drag culture you know absolutely nothing about was primarily pioneered by working class black and latin@ gay and transgender people as early as the 1940′s and earlier. It was, and still is, and will continue to be, despite all of your ahistorical rage, a space and a practice that served self expression, safety, and a form of self-employment for these communities since it was impossible for black and latin@ lgbt people, especially black and latina trans women, to maintain typical jobs. Storme Delarverie, the black lesbian Stonewall veteran, used to perform in drag as an entertainer to produce a living for herself since she was in poverty. Marsha P. Johnson, the black trans woman you and the rest of your detached white queer ilk liken yourselves to in the most grotesque, self-serving and voyeuristic ways possible as though she’s your personal political pawn and not someone who threatened the white supremacist LGBT hegemony you all exhibit every single day, made a living performing in drag shows and being a drag queen as she was homeless. Read up on her history before you invoke her name to support your historical revisionism and your anxious attacks on black and latin@ history.
It’s a testament to white queer selfishness that you can get up on your little tumblr platform and proclaim how you hate drag queens while ignoring how mainstream Gay Inc had pilfered the lives and bodies of black and latin@ people who pioneered drag in this part of the world. Critiquing the transmisogyny, misogyny, and so on of drag queens like RuPaul and others who have stolen drag from its origin and have turned it into mainstream Gay Inc fanfare is fine, but the fact that you all believe that this is the entirety of drag culture and therefore demonize it based upon that erroneous assumption is a repulsive display of the white supremacist onslaught upon black and latin@ gay & trans female history.
In other words, get your shit together before you open your mouth, Becky.
I really appreciate this response; I had been wondering about some of these points since I heard an interview with Big Freedia recently that touched on the complex nature and social functions of drag. I had been seeing these ‘drag-as-misogyny’ pieces popping about for some weeks before.
I remain curious to understand better how drag has functioned as a vehicle of expression of people who don’t identify exclusively as male or female. I’ve read that Marsha P Johnson sometimes lived as a man and went by Malcolm, Marshall, or Mikey. I don’t know whether to interpret that as a function of necessity in a hateful and dangerous world for gender-nonconforming, visibly queer and brown folks–or was it an uncoerced expression of her gender identity (not that these are mutually exclusive)? I want to regard writings about her life critically, since erasure and agendas abound in history as recorded by humans.
Big Freedia has said she is fine with she or he pronouns, but doesn’t want to be labeled trans, preferring not to be categorized at all.
I have a half-formed notion that, while powerful or even necessary for some folks, a proliferation of new names and gender theories that sets up an intellectualized system of axes and categories may feel too abstract to some people to seem applicable to something so intimate and real as authentic self-expression. Or perhaps, having been hurt repeatedly by being categorized, for some folks, categorization of any sort feels oppressive or limiting? Or rejecting the simultaneously 'real’ and illusory nature of categories can be an important part of a person’s culture and/or worldview (e.g. various non-dualism traditions)?
PART 1 As someone who studies film and literature, when those books regarding the Holocaust are taught in schools they aren't taught as history lessons - they are taught to get children to understand empathy and pathos in media, so they can better...
PART 2 understand how those sort of feelings are demonstrated, and how students can learn to identify that sort of thing. Also, learning about the growth of anti-Semitism in Germany would be a waste of time unless one lives in Germany.
Yeah. I agree 100%. Any Holocaust education program that doesn’t spend time on the history of anti-semitism, anti-romani racism and on the social psychology of obedience and confirmation bias isn’t doing its job. There are many outlets to learn about empathy or pathos, like Pixar movies.
I think there are five objectives every good Holocaust education program needs to include and that if it doesn’t include all three, it fails.
1. This happened. It actually happened in the proportions reported. 6 million Jews, 11 million people overall. These were not civilian war cascualties due to common reasons like famine or indiscriminate bombing but due to deliberate extermination as the primary goal, a goal that actively hampered the German war effort.
2. Hitler was not exceptional. The German people were not exceptional. There are a number of sociological and psychological facts at play that made it surprisingly easy to lead the country into genocidal violence and that those factors are inherent to the human condition and are not specific to that place in time. Many Europeans were happy to collaborate with the Nazis, often out of fear, but just as often because they shared the same prejudices and were more than happy to be rid of the Jews or the Romani. The lessons of the Holocaust should be as much cautionary as they are historical. People need to acknowledge that, if they are not vigilant, actions like this can be repeated and, indeed, they have in countries like Cambodia, Rwanda and Sudan. That doesn’t mean people should trot out Holocaust comparisons lightly, but it does mean that people need to understand that “Never Again” is a warning, not declaration of certainty.
3. The victims of the Holocaust were not saved. There was no serious effort by any allied country to save the Jews. While countries like Denmark and Albania deserve recognition for what they did to save Jews, the countries that actually defeated Germany fought Germany as a priority and did not make any extra efforts to liberate the camps. The USA knew about the Death Camps by 1942 at the latest and didn’t even bother to bomb the train lines to Auschwitz. D-Day was awfully late if liberating the camps was anything approaching a priority. I will give Eisenhower some credit for doing everything he could to document the Holocaust after he actually saw a camp, but it was too little too late as far as actually stopping or minimizing the Holocaust itself. It was all hypothetical to him until it was all too real. People didn’t want to believe, which brings me to my next point.
4. The victims of the Holocaust were real people. It’s important to recognize that Holocaust victims and survivors are diverse individuals. Every single one of them had the same complex mass of feelings, thoughts, emotions, loves, fears and needs as anyone else. Now try to imagine absolutely everything about yourself being taken away. Now imagine living in absolute terror for six years. Now imagine that everyone in your family, everyone you care about is with you, but they are, individually, in all their complexity, everything you love about them, everything about them that irritates you, put through the same hell. You don’t know who you are going to lose next. Maybe they’ll be separated from you at a train station and you will spend years looking for information to no avail. Maybe you’ll watch them die of starvation and disease while you somehow survive the same and spend the rest of your life wondering why it was you that made it through for decades afterwards. Imagine going home after all that, the sole survivor of your entire town and seeing some goy has stolen your home and says to you, “you’re back? You’re supposed to be dead.” And then they chase you off their property.
To so many people it’s just numbers. But this was a lived reality that scars and those scars are passed down.
5. The Holocaust was a culmination of centuries of persecution. It was neither a beginning nor an end. Treating it as such is to deny very real threats to modern day Jews and Romani. Judging oppression by its worst instances allows lesser instances to perpetuate. Pogroms, expulsions, vandalism, murder, these situations are all intolerable, but just because every one doesn’t leave millions dead doesn’t mean that they should compared against it.
There’s more I could get into. But the Holocaust is not an opportunity to “practice feeling.” Get your catharsis somewhere else.
Anonymous