SHUT THE HELL UP!!!!

Anyone who says either “you’re too young to know what you want yet” or “you’re too young to know who you are yet”. Seriously, you just really really need to be shot.

Who the hell are you to say that to anyone? Okay, even if said person-younger-and-therefore-stupider-than-you does in fact not know what he/she wants or whatever, whatever the hell that even means, you know who knows this even less than they do? YOU, dumbass!

It’s a typical silencing and invalidation technique towards young people, an excuse to belittle absolutely any life choices they make by convincing them they are incapable of making sound choices and as such they’ll definitely regret it in like a week. I mean, it’s a terrific way to instill life-halting insecurities and uncertainties into people, making them feel they are never “ready” to do anything, but hey, at least they aren’t making personal decisions that, even though such decisions don’t involve you in any way, make you personally uncomfortable because you just have to pry into their lives, right?

Besides, a richer life is one where to make decisions and see the good and the bad as a result of them, not one where you abstain from everything because an older “wiser” person told you to.

Also, such sayings buy into the idea that once you are an adult, you do have everything figured out and always make the right choices and always know what you want. I’m nearly 29 and I can’t say any of that is true of me. I mean, I believe the “Wear Sunscreen” piece even say “don’t worry if you don’t know what you want to do with your life, most people at 22 don’t know what they want to do with their lives, some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don’t.”

Every goal is subject to change, no matter how old you are when you set them. Perspectives change. Situations change. Ideas change. Certainly youth get told this all the time, but what they are rarely told is that the changing nature of these things doesn’t stop at a certain age. You’ll be 60 and have changing ideas still, even different from those when you were 40. You’ll never stop evolving as long as you’re alive and have a sufficiently working brain. Why would you want life otherwise?

I mean, it’s a risk, too. When it comes to choosing a career or getting married or buying a house or any other long-term choices, there can be pause to think that maybe things will change in a few years and this choice will no longer feel right. But that’s unavoidable unless you want to go through life pretty much never making any choices. The right thing is to make choices anyway as best you can, and do try to think about what might change later (though a nearly impossible feat due to humans’ inability to see the future), and of course always be mindful that things could change and be ready to change with them should that happen.

And, of course, making choices is how life happens and life experience is gained. Which makes statements like “you’re too young to know what you want (so don’t make any choices yet)” all the more astoundingly stupid. The speaker is not only belittling your judgment as being immature but wants to make sure you stay that way forever.

A little while ago, I reread Alex Koroknay-Palicz’s “The delay between the inarguable and the acted-upon”, about a professor who seemed to agree with all the reasoning behind lowering the voting age yet wouldn’t explicitly come out and say he believed the voting age should be lowered. Why? Because it felt like such a fringe view to take, and nobody wants to be the lone supporter of a fringe issue.

In other words, something we youth rights people hear all too often!

Alex goes on to suggest the solution is to have more high-profile people voicing support for our issues and organization, as well as making what positive changes for youth rights we can already. I agree with the second part wholeheartedly, since making real changes to ageist policies is a pretty clear “yes, we’re serious about this, and, yes, this is in fact realistic” sign.

But I wonder about that need of having more “important” people voicing support of our issues and making sure people know about this. I mean, it’s a good idea, sure. The trouble is that it implies that the support of someone who isn’t a journalist or professor or politician or whatever has little or no value. Also troubling considering you don’t generally find people who anyone would consider youth fitting into those categories. He says that average youth rights supporters are seen as “eccentric and Aspergerish”, obviously ableist language (originally said in the aforementioned professor’s piece), and trivializing to the support of those who don’t have some “important” career, or those who aren’t yet old enough to be allowed to.

I’m not saying this to pick on Alex, and he didn’t really do anything wrong here. And even so that piece is from three years ago! I’m saying that when we’re looking to make youth rights more mainstream, in whatever way, it can be so easy to sell ourselves short, to see ourselves as inadequate and in need of some more prestigious or more popular power to validate us. I’ve seen many examples of it. And it’s sad.

Most common (to step away from Alex’s piece for the moment) is the urge to water down what we’re about in order to seem more pleasing or less threatening to the general public. Gibson Katz has said a number of times he found some of the deeper or more controversial discussions on the forums troubling, that we need to be more mainstream while all that makes us seem out of touch. Now and then people find something troubling in our positions, official or implied, and advise us to drop it because it’s controversial. The idea is that if we take more “moderate” (I fucking hate that word in a youth rights context, but that’s a gripe for another time!) stances, we’ll become more mainstream. That we should keep quiet about the more “radical” (see previous parentheses) stuff.

Now that I think about it… that’s probably the absolute worst thing we could do! In general and for making our cause more mainstream.

Remember the famous Chris Rock bit about Robitussin? He claims that, as a child, Robitussin was the only medical care they could afford and they used it for everything. And that his dad would say that, when you’re out of Robitussin, put some water in the bottle, shake it up, more Robitussin!

Cute, but the reality is, you don’t actually have more Robitussin when you do that. You just have a medicine bottle full of water with maybe a few drops of Robitussin. Negligible drops. What little Robitussin may have remained is rendered useless because it’s so watered down. It’s really not Robitussin anymore. And it’s not something the makers of Robitussin would want to sell as medicine, since saying it’s just like water isn’t the best selling point! At that point, it’s not good as water or as cold medicine!

What does this have to do with youth rights? When we water down what we’re actually about, people can get mixed up as to, well, what it is we actually believe. Not to mention that everyone has different ideas as to what should or shouldn’t be “removed” for being “too controversial”. Because every bit of it is the important bit to someone, it all should stay.

That’s not to say there aren’t times when a “less-threatening” approach needs to be taken, but pretty much the only such time is when working on specific legislation. For example, with curfews, of course, we believe everyone should be free to move around at any time of day, that it’s not up to government or parents to restrict this, but if there’s a curfew proposal, that’s when you tell the lawmakers just about anything they want to hear if it means knocking that thing down, even if having to use the wretch-inducing “it’s a parent’s decision if the child is out, not the government’s”. Again, only then is that line appropriate, as it’s for purposes of real policy change, and there’s supposed to be an understanding among youth rights activists that we don’t actually mean that when we say it. Any other times, such as writing essays or making videos or debating or anything else that serves more as promoting the youth rights viewpoint, it’s of course not acceptable, and to include it is to water down our issue in a context whose whole point is educating about it, so it’s counterproductive!

And I’ve explained why I say a specific number for #16tovote on the 16th here. It’s more a tricky strategy.

When there’s a desire to hide “controversial” aspects of our philosophy, often there’s necessarily also a certain amount of uncertainty in being a proponent of that philosophy. It’s not to be unexpected, since being a youth rights supporter can be a lonely thing when you are the only one you know. But the solution to that is to spread the philosophy, fundamentals and all. You can’t very well spread a philosophy you are unsure or ashamed of, because it’ll show, and it’ll really show when you water it down. Why take you seriously?

There is something to be said for playing to your audience, but that’s not the same thing. That’s not diluting your message to be more pleasing, but simply focusing on the parts that are more likely to resonate with a given audience.

The right way to go is be comfortable enough with it that you can easily explain why this viewpoint is right, how you came to this conclusion, and any other information to back it up. The right explanations can make the seemingly craziest ideas reasonable and easier to swallow.

What does this have to do with what I started with, with Alex and his piece on the not-quite-a-youth-suffrage-supporter professor? Well, the professor doesn’t want to out and admit he supports lowering the voting age because he feels (felt? again, that piece is three years old, no idea what that guy is thinking now) he’s alone. And there are many more like that we have yet to bring into our midst. But if those of us who are supporters keep watering down or hiding what we believe, hoping this will bring more people into the philosophy (something that, in the eight years I’ve been with NYRA, I have yet to see any strong proof of its effectiveness), we’ll never find other supporters because we won’t recognize each other!

If we want to be more mainstream, and keeping our message as intact as possible in the process, we need to simply BE youth rights supporters, in whatever way we truly are (which is different from person to person, so that takes care of any concerns of ideological purity). It doesn’t matter what our professions are. While it’s always nice to have college professors or pediatricians or whoever as supporters, your support is valuable and extremely important no matter who you are or what you do. Because, after all, people with “important” occupations or positions are still people, and people don’t want to express views that it seems nobody supports. If it’s more clear that there are a lot more supporters to this viewpoint than one thinks, that they are not alone, then who cares how eccentric you may seem? And that delay between inarguable and acted-upon will be a whole hell of a lot shorter.

But then I realized. Yes, I do!

Youth rights has been such a major part of my life over the past several years that it’s hard to even pinpoint any single sources of inspiration anymore. And even before I found NYRA, there were many little things here and there, the recognition that people thought little of me during my teen years and before, and, of course, my 8th grade English teacher saying “There’s no such thing as a typical teenager.”

But there is an underlying motivation, and it’s a simple one.

In short… I know this is right.

And I know it works.

I’ve met youth who were raised in whatever way in less oppressive conditions than average. In 2006, Alex and I were tabling at a conference and next to us was a table for Albany Free School, and with an adult or two from the school was a group of ten-year-old students from there. These kids? They were actually pretty mature and socially competent. They saw our NYRA table and were happy that we existed and related their frustrations at an Albany mall that had a youth curfew (Fuck you, Crossgates!) and they bought a bunch of our buttons. I don’t remember many more details than that about them, but I recall being pleasantly amazed at these ten-year-olds, the product of a non-oppressive school and probably non-oppressive families (if they had parents cool enough to send them to the non-oppressive school). It was nice to be reminded all the info flyers in front of me on my own NYRA table weren’t just spouting nice-sounding ideas that had little basis in reality, but were encouraging real changes to the way young people are thought of and treated, encouraging freedom and respect, and here were comfortable, competent, dignified kids at the table beside us, having grown up with that respect, as living proof of it.

Unschoolers, too! Whether it’s that teen rebellion isn’t necessarily a thing or just the continual accounts of unschooling families of the quality of life of unschooled youth as compared to traditional school students (yeah, I know there’s a “consider the source” factor here), the comparison between the unschooled youth who are generally more included and their choices respected as opposed to the voiceless traditional students who are coerced and dictated to at every turn.

The youth who are living with rights and respect at home and school ARE in fact happier, more fulfilled, more competent, and actually understand the value of these things and of freedom. They are truly empowered.

Right, there are certainly a lot of self-identified youth empowerment groups out there. A lot of them, though, have a rather different idea of youth empowerment. Their definition is sometimes really “youth empowerment to support and speak about what we want them to“. Other times it’s just giving the illusion that youth are being listened to but it’s little more than an “awww, isn’t that cute?” stunt. Yeah, none of this is youth empowerment. It’s just more youth exploitation but with a nice ring to it.

The only true youth empowerment is their autonomy and choices being respected and seen as valid.

Anything short of that, they are dangerously disempowered. Disempowered people have no hope. They just do what they have to in order to get by with as little pain and suffering as possible. If their voices will fall on deaf ears no matter what they say, why bother to say anything? If their choices will be always overridden, why bother to choose? When your single most important job in the only life you’ve thus far known is to obey and please the big people in your home and school, what real self do you even have? Where is the self-confidence to live?

And, when you think of all the teen problems people go on and on about, aren’t they all, whether bullying or gangs or whatever else, just the ordinary results of any severely disempowered population?

Okay, the (false) youth empowerment groups have that much right. But they either don’t seem to get what empowerment actually is or they think only some youth deserve it. And often the desire to empower or help youth in any way isn’t for its own sake, to actually make life better for fellow human beings, but to be the great saviors to those they believe are helpless and need to be rescued from all the bad things. Whether they like it or not. Because, to those child protectionist types, they see it as little more than saving puppies, as they see those they are saving as equally voiceless and incapable of having much in the way of preferences for things.

True youth rights very much IS about youth empowerment AND even youth protection. And it’s the only correct way to do it. Child protectionists, while intentions are generally good, tend to completely ignore young people’s actual desires when it comes to protection, and protection without the consent of who’s being protected is an act of abuse and exploitation. They also tend to exaggerate what’s dangerous to youth, such as mistrusting strangers even though friends and family are far more likely to be abusive. Or they think internet child predators are lurking on every corner, so they advocate parental privacy violations. And they advocate a load of other intrusive measures “for their own good” even though how such measures truly maintain safety is questionable.

You really want youth protected? Then they should be EMPOWERED to PROTECT themselves! They should stop being raised in heavily restrictive, coercive, oppressive homes and schools, and start being treated like human beings with valid feelings and choices, so they can develop the social competence and self-confidence to protect themselves in an adverse situation. I mean, they’re going to have to do that once they are adults anyway, and therefore impeding this is only going to hurt them later, aside from how much this already hurts them now.

And that’s what youth rights mean to me. It means young people will not only stop being hurt, but start being truly respected as members of society like the rest of us, and being allowed to flourish freely at younger ages rather than living day in and out only by what the adults want for them. And I’ve seen the youth produced by a pro-youth rights upbringing. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s what the world needs!

If I thought I’d die tomorrow, I’d be paralyzed with panic and terror. Stop telling me to live that way!

Yeah, we’ve all heard the popular saying “live as if you’ll die tomorrow”. The idea is that you’re supposed to live your life to the fullest because it’s precious and for all you know, you really could die tomorrow!

Just one problem. Think of any time in your past when something suddenly went wrong, like maybe you lost control of your car or almost fell off a high place or something like that, where, however briefly, you really did think you were going to die. You survived this, of course, as I find it unlikely any of my readers are ghosts. When death is imminent, you’re in a state of irrational mind-zapping horror and hopelessness. You’re not thinking “you know, I should totally go scuba diving!”

Paired with this is the saying “learn as if you’ll live forever”. This, too, is faulty.

In fact, maybe it should be the other way around. Maybe the whole quote should be “Live as if you’ll live forever. Learn as if you’ll die tomorrow.”

Why? Well, for one, telling people to live with the idea of death being just around the corner is just cruel. That’s not a motivator. That’s the equivalent of “give up all hope”. It also implies that it’s wrong to sit still or be idle for too long, that if you “waste” any time, then oh noes, you’re wasting your life that could be totally gone in the next 24 hours!

Oh, but along with this requirement that you must soak up so much life in every second comes having to learn as much as you can. So you must do lots and lots of stuff because you’ll totally die tomorrow, but be sure to, say, learn to speak Croatian because you never know!

If I’m going to die tomorrow, why the hell do I need to speak Croatian?!

No, if my death is imminent, any learning I’d be interested in doing, provided I could drag myself out of hopeless misery and depression, would be along the lines of saving my life!

Or maybe the afterlife requires one to speak Croatian? Such a small percentage of the world’s population can speak it. English, Chinese, Spanish, French, and Arabic speakers all make up such a huge chunk, yet I suppose without the Croatian for some reason, we’re all screwed. Because, hell, if religion says we need to satisfy some vague requirement of “good” for a favorable afterlife, who knows what other crazy rules there might be? Zagreb might be a holy city!

In fact, I’m not aware of much concern over not “living life to the fullest” as far as the afterlife goes. Once you’re dead, how much will you really care about what you did or didn’t do while you were alive? The only ones who care about this are those who are still alive and most likely can still do some cool stuff. You know which living people wouldn’t bother? The ones who are about to die! Because by then, what’s the point?

So, yeah, live like you’ll live forever, like you’ll always come back, like you’ll have more chances. Would you rather live life rushing around trying to see and do as much as possible because the clock is about to run out, or live it at a comfortable pace, where you’ll still see and enjoy plenty anyway because you aren’t stressed the fuck out?

As for learning, yeah, for that one, learn like you’ll die tomorrow. Or no, that’s not quite right. Learn as though you might die tomorrow or sometime soon. If tomorrow’s death is a sure thing, not much point, but if it’s merely a possibility, learn so you can avoid it! Like maybe what to do in a life threatening situation or safety tips or whatever else. You know, so you can live forever for all that living you want to do! Problem solved!

These kids are definitely suffering. I’m not going to deny that. I was bullied and taunted constantly from grades six through nine (and it was one of the reasons I ended high school early). Yeah, when you have hair like mine, it’s inevitable! That and in 9th grade when I unwittingly admitted I didn’t know what “giving head” meant when someone used that term, the next several weeks consisted of that group of people asking me on a daily basis “do you give head?”

Here’s the interesting part. I can also think of times I was bullied (albeit differently) by teachers and other staff! In fact, I was more worried about that than anything my fellow students did because the students were not in a position of authority over me or my future. In high school particularly, the teachers were decidedly cold, uncaring, and dismissive. Though it didn’t stop them from being excruciatingly controlling and even willing to give you a lower grade simply because they did not like you.

I’ll bet the last two paragraphs would elicit different reactions from most people. The student bullying paragraph would be “OMG bullying is so horrible!!1!!” The one about teacher bullying? Nope, that would my own fault! The bit about the cold teachers would be (and was) treated with “So what? Welcome to high school! Get over it!” And them being controlling and spiteful? “Oh, that’s ridiculous! Teachers wouldn’t do that. You were probably just a bad student.” That’s even if you consider how little information I even gave about the incident, a verdict based entirely on one being a teacher (adult) and one being a student (teenager).

As said above, much of the focus on bullying lately is specifically anti-LGBT bullying. Yet, like any bullying scenarios, all anyone cares about is when the bullies are other students, when perhaps more often, the bullies are also ADULTS the youth knows, perhaps his/her own parents. A fact that a lot of people like to downplay or even outright ignore. Because, when it comes down to it, this focus on bullying lately, like so much else, is another “we must save youth” crusade and another “youth are horrible” crusade. Where adults play only the heroes who say “it will get better” and pat themselves on the back for that while barely doing shit to make it better now. While not even making a glance at how they, as adults, are part of the problem.

I also mentioned above that the bullying was among my many reasons for leaving high school early, but even so, I caught some flak from people for this decision, that by leaving school and not getting a high school diploma I surely ruined my life somehow! Adults love to “agree” that life as a “typical teenager” is hard and something they’d never want to return to (while somehow ALSO often saying these are the “best years of your life” and openly wishing to be 16 again for some reason). But woe to the teenager who chooses to deviate from that life somehow! Oh, they’ll feel sorry for you if other students are bullying you, but if you show any sign of wanting to, you know, leave this situation, suddenly you’re evil and ruining your life!

Bullied students shouldn’t be forced to leave, though. The bullying needs to stop entirely, of course. That begs the question, if we’re to focus on the student bullies for the moment, why they are bullying in the first place. In middle school, some of my taunters would only tease me if they were in a group, and in the few cases where I’d be interacting with only one of them in a separate situation, we’d actually often get along just fine! Would lead some to figure, okay, he just teased me to look cool in front of his friends. In fact, it was very rarely a single person teasing me at any situation. So, what was it? Peer pressure? I’m sure that was part of it, but definitely not all of it.

I never really knew the backgrounds of most of them, particularly the high school ones, but the ones I did know came from bad homes. The ones who didn’t, well, their homes were probably bad some other way. Or maybe not even bad. So often student bullies are portrayed as being inherently evil, that it’s just the age or whatever. But, again, I got along with some of them sometimes. They were still human, and I knew it then. No, the bullying wasn’t so much an inherent trait. It could at least partly been them getting carried away with joining their friends. But clearly it was also them fulfilling some need, some desire to maintain their superiority by demeaning someone else. They came to believe that this was how to be, perhaps the right way to be. In a culture that worships beauty, especially female beauty, they came to believe aesthetic imperfections, especially female ones, had to be ridiculed. While not the case with me, in a culture that still points out homosexuals as other and sinful, they came to believe homosexuality or deviations from gender norms had to be teased and shamed away.

So many things about our culture encourage bullying and devaluing the lives of anyone who is in any way different. Many people have these beliefs, and many of these people are parents. These parents may be teaching their boys that it’s wrong for them to behave “like a girl” in any way. Mothers may be obsessing over daughters’ appearances, that they must look perfect or else there is something wrong with them. And the kids are being told that their parents are controlling these things because they care, so that it’s a good thing they are doing it, that it is right for deviations to be changed. So we have boys harassing other boys who are effeminate in the slightest, or girls harassing other girls for the slightest fashion faux-pas. Their parents basically taught and encouraged them to do this! Not to mention the parents bullying their own kids in general to make themselves feel good and superior, so the kids learn this is the way to make their own selves feel good and superior. That they must prey on the weak to prove their worth.

It may even be more direct. Galen has admitted that, as a teacher, he’s known parents who actually wanted their children to be bullies. Because they saw it as either “bully or be bullied”, so they chose the former.

So I’m getting tired of all these articles and whatnot implying parents are totally innocent, saying things like “help your teen stand up to bullies” or “encourage your child to defend a bullied classmate”. First of all, my parents and other adults all had their little advice for me when I was being teased back then, and not a single word of it was helpful to me. Most of it was either bitter retorts, ignoring them, or, the old standby, “just feel good about yourself”. Feel good about myself? I was friggin’ twelve! My entire life at that point had only been as my parents’ biological baggage and another little ant marching lockstep through the K-12 system, with any of my creative or other unique qualities being only as worthwhile as adults in my life could brag about them to make themselves look good. How was I supposed to just feel good about myself? I didn’t know what the hell that meant! And you can’t just command someone to feel a certain way (although because I was, again, twelve, people were sure they could command the most impossible of me and wonder why I couldn’t deliver yet still make me feel like a failure, which would only make me feel all the worse about myself). Of course, this begs the question of what I think now that I should have done then or what my parents or others should have said. And, well, I don’t really know. You never grow out of being affected by meanness or being the cause of it. And every situation is different. What might be the “right” solution for one bullied student might be totally wrong for another.

And, complicating it further, often the definition of bullying, especially when it’s outside adult looking into student situations, can be incredibly broad, and as such, often those who are being bullied are ALSO bullying someone else!

So one might ask why school environment can be so mean? Well, that’s easy. Because the adult world is pretty mean as well. And pretending adults are innocent, especially when they are bullying kids, when parents like this get applauded, only makes that problem worse and therefore makes school bullying worse.

Instead, we have adults pointing fingers at the youth themselves, not only the bullies and not caring at all why they are bullying, but sometimes even at the other students who in a given situation for whatever reason didn’t intervene “enough” when they saw bullying. Really, adults? How often do YOU intervene in other people’s arguments? It’s sad, but not a lot of people will step in even when someone is getting hurt. To sit there and expect your much-less-experienced-at-life child to just stand right up and do it is just downright delusional and ignorant. I’m not saying it wouldn’t be nice. I’m not saying that the few times people have stuck up for me or I for them haven’t been wonderful. But it’s not something people should be coming down hard on kids for if they fail to do so. When they’ve been raised by parents who told them all their lives “just mind your business, doesn’t involve you”. A lot of it comes down to adults setting higher standards and requirements for kids, ones that are often unrealistic, than they do for themselves. And complaining that it’s the kids’ failing when they don’t live up to it.

And bullying them for it.

And oftentimes, the problem could be fixed if they would just shut the hell up and come up with a fix. But they don’t. They care about the problem less than what ego points they can get out of it.

But the thing is, okay, moron. Let’s pretend for a moment that your spouse or colleague or whoever is 100% wrong and caused everything. Okay. Now what? Let’s say said person is either out of the picture, punished, or is otherwise powerless now, or whatever was the supposed intention of the blame. Hey, guess what? The problem isn’t solved! And you only delayed it being solved by dicking around with pointing out blame and not actually giving a crap about fixing it. Which, at least now if not before, makes it your fault!

Imagine that!

You know what bugs me? Seeing all the Disney princesses lumped together. Snow White. Cinderella. Aurora (maybe). Jasmine. Ariel. Belle. Pocahontas (maybe). Well, that’s not all the princesses, missing Eilonwy and a few others, but you get the idea.

But, yeah, the thing is… not all of those characters are the same. For one, Snow White and Cinderella are from around World War II, while Ariel, Belle, and Jasmine are from the early 90’s. A lot of feminism happened in the interim. And it shows.

You really cannot compare Snow White (from 1937) with Jasmine (from 1992). You cannot paint those two with the same brush. Because, simply, Snow White sucks, and Jasmine is awesome.

Snow White has no personality or brains. She’s just… there. Absolutely all she does is clean, sing, swoon over the prince, scream, cry, clean, sing, sleep, scream, clean, cook, sing, scream, clean, fall into apple coma, go with prince when he wakes her up with a kiss to some cloud castle.

Jasmine, on the other hand, very much does have a personality and brains. Not to mention that just about every line of dialogue she has could be read as “Fuck you, patriarchal society!” She’s cynical and defiant. While she’s the only female character in that movie, she’s also the only character who seems the slightest bit intelligent.

Jasmine’s primary concerns are that she’s being forced into marriage by her idiot father (who claims she has no choice and doesn’t realize until the end of the damn movie he’s the sultan and can ignore or change that law), while Snow White’s primary concern is, I don’t know, a scary looking tree?

Even when Jafar has all these powers and demands submission, Jasmine still refuses to bow to him, while Snow White happily takes and eats an apple from a strange old woman after being fed some bullshit about it being a wishing apple.

And Snow White is in her subsequent apple coma and useless while the dwarfs chase after the old witch, while Jasmine is the one who pretends to suddenly be totally hot for Jafar to distract him while Aladdin grabs the lamp (which doesn’t totally work because Aladdin is a dumbass and didn’t quite pick up on the fact she was pretending).

Oh, and while Snow White might sing all sweetly and bring the birds and deer to her, yeah, Jasmine has a TIGER! A tiger who will rip you apart even if you just slightly annoy her.

What do all the other princesses wear? Cutesy little dresses. What does Jasmine wear? PANTS!

The more modern princesses in general are an improvement, sure. Cinderella is very submissive like Snow White, though at least in her case the old magical woman who shows up actually helps her. Don’t remember a lot about Aurora, but if I remember right, she doesn’t do much either. Though she is for some reason the only one who has a mom. Of course, it was like the 1940’s, so women in general weren’t expected to do much other than have men define their worth, so there you go. While Ariel, Belle, and Jasmine are a few steps up, what with Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem having already had their say in society. Jasmine’s clearly the winner out of them still, of course.

Belle is still a bit submissive but not as much as the earlier princesses and there’s more depth to her character (and her dad’s actually nice and non-coercive). Ariel is definitely defiant but not great at the whole critical thinking thing, but that can probably be forgiven seeing as she’s desperately trying to escape a severely oppressive home. And, like with Jasmine, it’s revealed at the end her dad had the ability at any time to give her what she wanted (legs) but chose not to in order to keep her under his thumb.

But then there’s Mulan, who’s even better than Jasmine, who can carry the story on her own, is strong and smart, is the heroine, and, rather rare for a story with a female lead, anything about a love interest is backburner.

And, of course… she’s not a princess!

And now, for a candy munching, romance crunching edition of…

SHUT THE HELL UP!!!!

There’s no such thing as the “friend zone”!

It’s called… she’s just not into you romantically/sexually, but you can’t accept that, so you instead misogynistically pathologize it.

It’s the idea that a girl who to chooses to remain platonic friends with a guy has put him in the supposedly dreaded “friend zone”, but he doesn’t want to be her friend because he wants to be her boyfriend, and he hates it oh so much when she dates some other guy or expresses dissatisfaction with said other guy or with prospective romantic partners in general, because how dare she say that when she turned him down!

Come off it. Seriously, girls, just like guys, are just into someone that way right now or not. It’s not more complicated than that. There are no special “zones”. Nor is there something about being someone’s friend that kills the possibility of it being something else later (though that of course depends on the people involved).

We’ve all heard it. The self-proclaimed “nice guy” can’t understand why a girl he’s interested in isn’t interested in him. So instead of just, you know, accepting that it’s not going to happen and moving on with his life, he assumes she’s the one who has some “female problem” and that’s the real reason she’s not into him. Because why else would she turn down such a Nice Guy like you?

But wait, there’s more!

Bundled with this “nice guys get put into the friend zone” myth comes the “why do all girls want to date assholes?”. You see, the idea is that girls are attracted only to guys who are total jerks and not attracted to guys who aren’t. Lord knows just about every sitcom and other corner of pop culture likes to peddle this meme, and plenty of people I know seem to believe it, though they claim this is something they learned from real life. Uh huh. Or even whenever someone posts a list online of skills girls should have or the like, some people will pipe up with “they should learn how to tell which guys are assholes/douchebags”.

Okay, that’s enough. Let’s rip apart this ridiculous bullshit now.

First off, whenever you hear a guy lamenting that girls just want to date jerks, consider the source. It’s almost always a guy whom some girl just turned down and/or said girl is now dating some other guy. Um… of course he’s going to think that other guy is a jerk! And of course he’s going to think of himself as an angel. No guy identifies as the “jerk” in these situations. And the other guy could be the second coming of Jesus and you’ll still assume he’s a dick who treats the girl like shit… because she’s not with YOU. This isn’t some “great truth about women”. This is just… some asshole (who thinks he’s a nice guy) can’t get over himself and just accept that sometimes people you’re into aren’t into you and is whining about it.

Second of all, guys don’t just fall into one of two neat little categories of “nice guy” and “asshole”. For one, everyone has a different definition for these terms and how a particular guy might identify as either. I was having a conversation about this with someone a while back, and we were both using the term “nice guy” until well into the conversation we realized we each had completely different definitions of “nice guy” (and proceeded to argue over whose was “right”). But even so… all guys are both! All people, regardless of gender, are sometimes assholes and sometimes nice (plus, you know, a zillion other characteristics humans can have). If the girl you want is with some guy, sooner or later, yeah, he will do something that makes him seem like a total jerk. And you’ll use this as proof that he’s a jerk and therefore wrong for her and that she should be with you. Except… sooner or later, you’d be a jerk to her, too! And that other guy would be like “I’m such a nice guy, why did she leave me for that asshole?” OMG PARADOX!

Thirdly, you simply are not seeing the whole picture. Why is she with him and not you? Oh, lots of reasons. Reasons that are her own, based on compatibility, attraction, and lots else. Reasons completely different from those of any other girl (or guy for that matter). Just like you have your own reasons for being into her yet perhaps completely ignoring any others girls who probably do like you. This is where things are complicated, but what to do about it isn’t complicated and still boils down to… she’s not into you, it’s nobody’s fault, get over yourself, move on.

But all that is seemingly harmless lamentations due to heartache, which is understandable really. Yet what all this implies, especially as this is a widespread trope, is much more problematic. The bottom line in the whole “girls snub the nice guys and want to date jerks” is basically “girls are inherently incapable of making sound relationship decisions”. It’s often taken a step further, assuming that girls’ supposedly universal attraction to bad guys means they actually LIKE being treated like shit by their boyfriends and husbands, even though “they always say they want nice guys but not really LOLOLOL”.

So let me get this straight. You’re this great wonderful Nice Guy… yet you’re promoting a worldview that essentially says the female object of your desire (and perhaps everyone female) is hopelessly unable ever to make the right choices about guys, that her choices are wrong because YOU decide they are wrong despite having significantly less insight into the situation than she does, and that – get this! – the way to a girl’s heart is to abuse her!

Yes, let me state that one again. The people claiming All Girls are attracted guys who are jerks to them are basically saying that the way to get and keep a relationship with a girl is to degrade, insult, and otherwise mistreat and abuse her. This is being touted as actual dating advice, and very very seldom do any of these people stop to think about what they are saying. They are promoting domestic and intimate partner abuse and even violence. They are telling guys this is the way to maintain a relationship. Because “oh noes, if you’re nice to a girl, she’ll leave you for some jerk because jerks are what she REALLY likes!” I mean, do you really not get how DANGEROUS this is?!

And what of the girls who have to hear this message all the time? That any choice of intimate partner she makes is wrong, that that person is a jerk and she’s snubbing some nice guy for him, that her reasons for this choice are delusional. This is one big widespread form of gaslighting, meant to break down someone’s self-confidence by convincing them they are unsound or crazy, for the purpose of controlling them. And when self-confidence is so broken down that you’re doubting your own intuition and rationality, it can lead to thoughts like “well, he’s constantly insulting me and slaps me sometimes, but I must just be overreacting, he’s really nice and I should be grateful, I think I’ll buy him a present!”

So I’m not saying girls like that don’t exist, but it’s a result of constant social conditioning that her own thoughts and feelings are invalid or false. Does that happen to every girl? Not by a long shot. And certainly not in the same exact ways. But don’t let the point there be lost on you. It’s not so much “she likes being treated like crap” as “she’s been told over and over and over that her ability to sense when she’s being treated like crap is broken and it’s so unfair for her to turn down a nice guy, and his feelings are more important and rational than hers, so if she senses he’s being a jerk, she’s most likely wrong and should suck it up because she’s overreacting”. Next time you’re complaining that a girl is only attracted to guys who treat her like crap, pretending for the moment this is an accurate assessment of said girl… YOU MADE HER THAT WAY, ASSHOLE!!!

Yes, sometimes people, of any gender and any sexual orientation, get into relationships with those who aren’t right for them and probably downright hostile. But pathologizing and calling these people stupid or deluded doesn’t help them or anyone else in their situation. You know what they need in those times? A friend. A friend who is genuinely happy to be their friend rather than just being resentful they aren’t fucking you. A friend who recognizes that being a platonic friend is not a slight but just another form of loving affectionate relationship with a person. A friend who respects the choices they make in life are their own and is willing to help them in times of need, rather than feeling the need to butt into their business or resent them for their choices because those aren’t the choices you think they should be making. Hell, be the true friend you’re so sure their significant other isn’t. But, of course, don’t be this guy.

Of course, you know who always loves you? Candy hearts!

*munches candy hearts*

Tasty AND constantly telling me I’m awesome. Yay!

Main character passes through a scary night in a strange unknown place, having lost someone. Then main character, upon being discovered by those who live in said strange unknown place, who in real life are inanimate objects but for the movie’s sake they can talk, is now being held prisoner there! Sure, they try to make friends with this imprisoned visitor otherwise, but still, the main character is trapped, unable to leave, forbidden from contacting the outside world.

Those in this strange place are also under some hard times, have been for a while, and are always waiting for a miracle to save them.

Main character does finally escape and gets away faster and faster… only to get caught and returned, imprisoned again.

The main captor offers the main character better place to spend the night than the original prison-like conditions, a move the main character sees as a great kindness despite still being just as senselessly trapped there.

In fact, the main character even begins to fall in love with the captor! Despite still being, you know, a prisoner.

When at long last the main character is liberated… just turns right back around and returns to the place of imprisonment, having fallen in love with the main captor and befriended the former jailers. And in doing so fulfills the miracle they long awaited.

The end.

OMG! Did you see that? Fell in love with the captor and returned even when finally freed? Stockholm Syndrome much, Disney?

So… what movie am I describing?

Yup, you know which one.

The movie I’m describing is…

…

Cars.

…

Wait… what?!

Wait, that can’t be right… I had to have been talking about a different one.

Nope, I mean Cars. Let’s review.

Race car Lightning McQueen gets lost one night, and is looking for his truck friend, when he winds up in Radiator Springs late at night and accidentally damages some property. Sally the Porsche sentences him to remain in the town trapped in order to fix the damaged street, and he is physically chained to the street fixing machine, unable to escape. Well, except when Mater unhooks his boot before chaining him and he bolts… only to discover they’d drained his gas to prevent his escape. And he has a big race he needs to get to, but no one in the little town cares since they just want their street fixed (yet apparently Lightning is the “selfish” one throughout all this). Okay, yeah, he did damage the street, but later in the movie it’s revealed they do have a phone in the town, and they could have called any of Lightning’s friends at any time to at least let someone know where he was, but they did not. Or did not at least until later when Doc did exactly that… which pissed off everyone else in town, because apparently Lightning could only be their friend as long as he was being held there against his will. Hell, they could have just let him go to his race and maybe court-ordered him to come right back afterward and fix the street. Not that it mattered since it was a mostly empty town, as the miracle they awaited was any passers through, as it was an old Route 66 town that was no longer along a main stretch once newer roads were built nearby. But then Lightning falls in love with Sally, and she offers him one of her hotel rooms to stay in rather than the impound lot, and then even though they ease up on security, he is no longer trying to escape, though he’s still imprisoned there since he still needs to fix the street. And soon after he finally does, a crapload of trucks and helicopters and press show up, after Doc finally let it be known he was there, and Lightning is taken to the race at last. Only to… want to go back to Radiator Springs. Oh, but it’s okay, they came to the race, too! And after that… he returns to Radiator Springs, to the vehicles that imprisoned him for several days and told him that he was the selfish one for wanting to leave and get back to his life, but at least him being a famous race car living there revitalized the little town, so they got their miracle at last.

Yup. That’s the Disney movie in which the main character succumbs to Stockholm Syndrome.

Wait, what’s that? You thought I was talking about Beauty and the Beast?

Sigh.

I don’t think so.

In Beauty and the Beast, sure, Belle is Beast’s prisoner, and he treats her like crap and they fall in love later. Sure. But let’s review.

Belle happens upon Beast’s castle when looking for her dad, who is actually imprisoned there, locked up. Belle’s subsequent imprisonment is as a trade, that he go free while she stay and be the prisoner. So she’s not so much imprisoned as she, well, just agreed to stay there. Especially since she’s allowed to just stay in a normal bedroom instead of being locked in the tower. In fact, shortly after this, when Beast roars at her for touching the magic rose, she promptly leaves the castle, and no one or thing actually stops her from doing this. She only returns since some wolves attacked her and then wounded Beast when he showed up and saved her from them, and in gratitude for that she helps him back to the castle and helps him heal and from then on they get along okay. But before that, sure, he’s roaring at her and making demands… for like a couple of hours. Really, she is put in the bedroom, stays for a while, he roars at her through the door when she refuses to dine with him, and he goes away, and she comes out a little later and they do the “Be Our Guest” thing, then she’s on a tour of the castle with Lumiere and Cogsworth when she sneaks away from them to the Beast’s west wing, goes into his room, he catches her and roars at her, and she says “fuck this shit, I’m out of here!” Seriously, pay attention to this movie, this all happened in the same night! At that point, she’d maybe been his “prisoner” for about six hours tops. And it was from this point on they were nice to each other. Yeah, technically still “prisoner” after this, right up until after the ballroom dance (which is, what, the next night?) when he “frees” her. Which pisses off Lumiere and the others, since they’re just as sociopathic as the Radiator Springs citizens, admittedly. But, yeah, is that really enough for Stockholm Syndrome? Yeah, she afterwards defends the magic mirror’s angry Beast image to the villagers, saying he’s actually sweet, which is seen as some proof of her being mentally ill. Because apparently a whopping 36 hours, consisting of dancing silverware, encounter with wolves, a snowball fight, and some ballroom dancing while an anthropomorphic teapot sings will just turn you to masochistic madness! So after Gaston goes splat in the canyon, Beast is dying from a stab wound and Belle says she loves him right before that last rose petal falls, and this magically revives him and turns him and everyone else in the castle human, and then they get married like the next day or something. The end.

Now, I’m not saying that relationship is healthy, though par for the course for Disney. Simba and Nala were in love, what, ten minutes after their reunion? Ariel was eyeing Eric for a while, but upon when they actually met and up to when they married, just three days. At least Aladdin and Jasmine were engaged for a little while (they didn’t actually get married until the third movie), but the engagement was after, what, some incognito chemistry in the marketplace and a magic carpet ride?

Yeah, if Belle were a friend of mine, I wouldn’t advise that relationship. I’d be like “Belle, you met him two days ago, and he obviously has temper issues. What, you thought that’d just go away because you two are in love? Yeah, maybe for a month or so. I mean, that whole enchantment happened because he was a dick! I mean, sure, he was ten years old at the time and the spell also affected everyone else in the castle for some reason, so the enchantress is no prize herself, but shit, there’s issues there!”

But if we’re going to complain that a Disney movie is displaying a Stockholm Syndrome romance, Beauty and the Beast isn’t the one to be looking at. Yet I’ve never once heard this stale old “complaint” about Cars. Is it because it just hasn’t been around long enough and that not that many people have seen it yet (I myself only just saw it for the first time this past weekend)? Is it that Lightning McQueen is male (why do cars have sexes?) and his captor/love object is female, so the dynamic is less noticed? Is it just fun to pick on Disney princesses? Is Lightning McQueen made out to seem like such a jerk that he probably deserves his imprisonment while Belle is painted as sweet and innocent?

I don’t know what it is, but aside from my often mentioned tiredness of stale overused jokes like the “LOL Beauty and the Beast is about Stockholm Syndrome!”, it’s just such a blatant double standard. I mean, hell, by the end, you could sort of say Beast learns something from the whole thing, but in Cars, only Lightning McQueen learns some kind of moral about “selfishness” and thinking of others, while the Radiator Springs vehicles who held him captive, including the lovely Sally, didn’t learn jack shit! And, in fact, they totally benefitted from the imprisonment. Seriously, what the fuck?

Still…

Edit (1-19-12): Ah, all better now!

Seriously, though, SOPA and PIPA must die.