4/25/2021 Other People are not Your Tool
Adam has posted about this before on his own website, but there's hardly a movie out there that isn't, despite what it seems on the surface, about a man doing anything and everything to win over a woman. You can see his writing at inventati.org/1337gallery/musings.html and search "Obsession," you should find it, dated 02/08/300,020. In it, he details how music and movies, and to that I would add television, are a breeding grounds for misguidance on romantic relationships. He goes on to explain how this ends up playing out in reality: all the children, not just the girls, grow up with these really unrealistic examples and learn that's what love is. He explains how it then becomes a complete mess as adults, concluding with the statement that we are all unhealthy, mentally unstable individuals as a result of this. I couldn't agree more, and I wanted to testify with some of the experiences that damaged me which I then passed on to others.
Every Saturday night, my mom's thing was that we would all go to dinner & a movie. Afterward, there was either a trip to Barnes & Noble for perusing while sipping something from the cafe or a stop at Ben & Jerry's for ice cream. So not only can we see here that every week I'm being battered with a barrage of images about what will fulfill me and make me happy, but I'm associating it with being served a hot meal, buying things just for the sake of buying them, and sweet treats, all courtesy of the minimum wage slaves. Every week at the movies, I got a fresh take on the same message: the woman is the Queen of Heaven, the man is her object whose sole purpose in life is to exceed her expectations. When I think about it, it's hard to believe they can even come up with so many different ways to say the same thing, but here we are. The really unfortunate thing is that I really bought into it. My soul and individuality and ability to think for myself were stamped out well before this stage in my life, so I was empty, ready, and I shudder to say, willing to accept these messages of horror. I am reminded of the parts in the movie The Dark Crystal (young boy believes he is the last of his kind and overcomes evil so he can save the girl he just met, to be fair, he sets out on the quest to defeat evil before he meets the girl) when the evil Skeksis strap the innocent podlings into a chair then beam a laser onto their face which puts them in a trance-like state. The Skeksis are extracting the life-essence so as to consume it in order to sustain themselves, but the look on the podlings' faces is one of complete emptiness--just a blank, lifeless stare. With this same blank, lifeless stare, but applied to my consciousness, I accepted and believed what I was being told. That I wasn't happy, that I wasn't worth anything, and that the only way that would change was when a man would some way or another come into my life and be, not himself, but my robot. My slave. My sex-toy. No matter how you put it, the man is not a man, but the woman's waiter, butler, chauffeur, therapist, private chef, secretary, and dildo put on this earth to cater to her every whim! In this way, the woman is the Skeksis and the man is the innocent creature being drained of his life-essence. I believed in it so fully, like a good little slave, it became an obsession! I started having crushes in first grade, and by the time I was in 6th grade, and my man still hadn't come along to fulfill his destiny as my happiness-maker, I had endless fantasies about my crushes and what our married lives would be like. By the time I was 16, I had a near constant tingling sensation in my chest. I yearned so hard and so constantly for my happiness (a man) to come to me that there was almost nothing else I could think about. In dance classes, other girls' boyfriends would occasionally watch from the windows, and I pretended I had a boyfriend there who was also watching. Oddly, this really motivated me and I became one of the hardest working dance students in my class. Pretty fucked up that I would work hard for an imaginary person rather than because I wanted to. Every night when I went to sleep, I would snuggle up on my side with my back to the wall, pretending that it was actually a boyfriend behind me, spooning me. It didn't stop in adulthood. I came to expect help cleaning up messes of which I was the sole creator, attention whenever I wanted it regardless of the other's needs, status-enhancing jewels as the customary gift as opposed to gifts that are actually useful, the man to pay for everything, even if he was out of money and pouted or otherwise huffed around when I didn't get my way. These are just a few examples which barely scratch the surface of how sick I became and the havoc I have wreaked on blameless individuals. I blame Hollywood and television for instilling that in me, and I blame myself, once I saw the truth, for not putting in the effort to make myself less one-dimensional and to eliminate the grotesque expectations I had for a relationship. For who else is responsible, once you know better, but yourself? I hesitate to give these examples because on the one hand, I don't want to air my dirty laundry in public, but on the other hand, I don't want to come off like I am completely innocent here. I know that I am not the only one to have committed the transgressions which I have mentioned, I have seen them with my own eyes, in nearly every single couple I have ever encountered, and that is part of why I point them out specifically, as a calling-out. Sometimes I almost feel like the average adults of the world are doing this to the children (movie-going) on purpose, but reality is probably something closer to that they believe in this (the Queen-Servant relationship) because it is what was instilled in them from a young age. Our parents say they "only want what's best for us," but what they neglect to ponder is that they do not know what that is. So by taking us out on these "date nights," I think our parents think they're doing us a favor, treating us. Reality is that they are partaking in the warping of our minds without even realizing it because of the warped state of their own minds. Nice treat, there. The whole movie thing was compounded by the fact that I was surrounded by kids who were undergoing the same treatment. Being the gullible little suckers that we are, we all bought into it and reinforced it in each other. I remember learning the fortune-telling game "MASH" in about 3rd grade or so, maybe earlier. MASH stood for Mansion, Alley, Shack, or House. It's a little game we girls would play where you make a series of lists, four entries to each list. The lists were things like, what type of house you would live in (MASH), names of boys you had crushes on (so now we're all supposed to have crushes on boys), how many kids you would have, maybe a list of animals you would have as pets. I don't remember all the types of lists there were, and I'm sure they fluctuated with our imaginations, but the main two were MASH and the names of the boys. After the lists were created, you would do some sort of eenie-meenie-miney-moe type of counting. Each time the counting was done, you would cross off whatever line you landed on, eliminating that prospect from your future. You repeated the counting and eliminating until you had one item left on each list (and yes, boys are items at this point, see above about how film depicts this), and this was supposed to be your future. Of course it turned out differently every time, and the point wasn't to tell the future. The point was to sustain the illusion that being married in a heterosexual relationship with a house, children, and a pet was the key to your happiness. Nothing else will do. Comments are closed.
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