sometimes, when i want to really treat myself, i turn my phone brightness up juust a little bit. i feel like i’m splurging. like i’m living a king’s life. sometimes i turn it up all the way and i’m like, “this is what god’s phone screen looks like.”
do you ever read an article so bad that it makes you want to get a PhD so that you can publish a response and thinkshame the author’s opinions with authority
“thinkshame” is officially the greatest word we’ve come up with as a species.
so we know that Jasper popped out of her hole perfect. she is the Perfect Gem™. the biggest. the strongest. the toughest. the quartziest. even her hole is perfect.
and i realized, i know what that feels like.
i was a Smart Kid™. sure, i didn’t pop out of my hole perfect; i was also a Weird Kid™. but i was constantly told that i was smarter than other kids. that i was even a little bit better than other kids. i always heard “you’re too smart for the public schools!” “you’ve got the vocabulary of a kid twice your age!” “other kids don’t know as much as you.” “you shouldn’t correct people (but you are right).”
and i’d bet dollars to dolomite that that’s what Jasper heard too.
because Jasper, as we see her after Alone At Sea, is obsessed with strength. she’ll do anything to feel strong again.
beg back the gem who imprisoned her and tortured her? yup.
assemble an army of insane monsters? yup.
fuse with an insane monster just for more power? yup.
and that reminds me of things i’ve done. to me, this doesn’t look like a Jasper Is Obsessive thing. to me, this looks like someone who was constantly told they were good at something being confronted with a problem that they can’t solve.
Jasper couldn’t defeat the Crystal Gems, despite being the Perfect Gem™ (because her strength wasn’t the right kind of strength necessary to defeat them). i struggled since i hit my sophomore year of high school, despite being a Smart Kid™ (because my intelligence wasn’t the right kind of intelligence necessary to solve these problems). like hell i turned to external aids and used every underhanded trick i could in order to maintain my status as Smart. Jasper reminds me of myself, in that she is doing everything she can to maintain her status as Perfect.
i don’t think it’s just the Rubies who were so impressed with Jasper. i think all Homeworld was impressed with Jasper. “The Facet 9 Kindergarten Quartz That Could.” “popped out of
the ground with her helmet on.” “took out eighty Crystal Gems before the sun went
down.” that’s what she heard her entire life.
so Jasper couldn’t let anybody down. she had to be Perfect. and that’s why she did the things she did.
“Finally,” you say, “the epilogue we’ve been waiting for.” You go to click on the bright blue [S] Epilogue. It is nothing but this video. “Thank G-d,” you and the entirety of fandom say at once. “Thank G-d.”
Protip for men: if marriage is a horrifying concept for you and you think it is an evil trap, do not buy a ring and ask a woman to marry you
I’m way over seeing radical feminist bullshit on my dash. This isn’t even social justice or a real issue.
sorry that not marrying someone you dont loathe is radical feminism i guess?
women: don’t propose or get married if u don’t like the thought of marriage
men: what kind of sjw fuckery
the other bit that this implies is:
If you like your wife, act like it. Even around your friends. Be open and honest about liking your wife, liking spending time with her, and not being resentful of the shared work of building a household. Let your buddies know you can’t hang out with them because you’d rather be home with your wife, whom you like, because she is your legit bff, even though you know your buddies are gonna mock you for it.
Stand up to your buddies. Tell them mocking isn’t cool and you don’t want them to do it anymore. Challenge the other men in your life to be better men.
That is what “don’t get married if you think marriage is an evil trap” implies to men who are married. And while it’s all completely reasonable I imagine that it’s scary as fuck when it’s just so much easier to har de har har the little woman’s such a nag, ain’t she, don’t we all hate being married so much? with other men.
In that context, “don’t get married if you think marriage is an evil trap” is kindof a radical statement.
The number of guys I work with who are engaged who started pulling the “uh oh, life over soon, har har” shit that I have completely shut down with a simple “well if you don’t want to get married, then don’t”…*sigh* And they’re just like, hem, haw, welllll if I don’t then she might not stay with meee, which I respond to with “well, sounds like you need to have a pretty serious and honest conversation with your fiancee about your feelings then” and then the *panic!* look…When you remove that easy “hah hah ball-and-chain” narrative, watch the reaction. Some of them (to a female friend) will mumblingly admit that they love their fiancee and are excited to be married. Others…all you get is fear.
That’s the disservice we do men by refusing to teach boys how to explore their emotional needs. It hurts everyone. I watched three male friends walk into marriages I can tell they weren’t ready for and didn’t want, just because it was expected and they had no tools for emotional self-examination. Two of those marriages are (shockingly) in crisis, a couple years later. One has kids involved now. It’s more than a little heartbreaking. The marriages I see that are working? Are the guys with the emotional maturity to talk to their wives and who don’t care if everyone knows they’re in love with them.
SERIOUSLY.
Marriage is a smart move for heterosexual men. Married heterosexual men make more money and enjoy better career progression, better physical health, and better mental health. Married men live longer than unmarried men, and are happier. Married men are promoted above single men or men with unmarried partners, and earn thousands of dollars more.
When married men get cancer or heart attacks, they have a better chance of surviving than unmarried men; when they are sick, they enjoy better care and get better faster. Married men suffer less from social isolation, report higher life satisfaction, and are more resilient to crises. (Of course, “bad” marriages reverse some of these effects – a man in a bad marriage will have more heart problems and be unhappier than an unmarried man.)
And it isn’t just that the “good men” who get married are just naturally “good men” who succeed at life. Studies on identical male twins show that married twins prosper more, and relatively “unsuccessful” men who marry see their fortunes improve. [x][x][x][x][x]
That’s not even counting the daily benefits of being married.
Even in heterosexual marriages with complete gender parity – i.e. husband and wife both do equal amounts of cooking, cleaning and chores – the labor of running a home is still halved, which means more time for leisure or improvement. And most heterosexual households don’t practice gender parity – the women do more work [x]. It’s a real luxury to have someone cook your meals and run the household for you, which usually takes about 2.5 hours of extra work every day – so married men often have more time in their days.
Here’s the sad part. Marriage is known to make heterosexual women WORSE off than unmarried women. [x] [x] This has been discussed since the 1970s. A distinct problem is that married women often suffer a decline in mental health, but this could be confounded because married women are often distressed in heterosexual marriage, leading to more depression and anxiety than they’d normally have [x]. On average, heterosexual marriage is bad for women’s careers. It creates more work for women. Married women do have a better chance of surviving cancer and heart attacks than single women, but the benefit for men is greater. And since nearly 70% of divorces are initiated by women – not relationship breakups, which are equal between genders, but legal marriage breakups – women are the ones who want to get out. [x]
In conclusion, despite pop-culture insistence that women can’t wait to drag men to the altar so that they can Enslave Them For Life, men get a lot of benefits from marrying women. And women don’t benefit very much at all.
So why bother with all this performative, dramatic nonsense about marriage being bad and scary for men? Why pretend it’s “funny” for men to act like marriage is terrible, and that they hate their wives? To someone in possession of the facts, this Extremely Witty Banter is just going to make them laugh… at YOU.
