Tag: relationships

It Doesn’t Matter

Trigger Warning: Sexual assault and abuse.

Content Note: Animated gifs.

A light tan, textured background has a stylized line drawing of a couple who appear to be a man and a woman, embracing, with a heart covering their faces. The black serif font says, "It doesn't matter who hurt you, or broke you down. What matters is who made you smile again." The word "smile" is in red. The lower left-hand corner logo says "Heart Centered Rebalancing."
A light tan, textured background has a stylized line drawing of a couple who appear to be a man and a woman, embracing, with a heart covering their faces. The black serif font says, “It doesn’t matter who hurt you, or broke you down. What matters is who made you smile again.” The word “smile” is in red. The lower left-hand corner logo says “Heart Centered Rebalancing.”

NO.

Animated gif of the character Titus from “The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” shaking his head “no” and also shaking his finger “no”

NO.

Animated gif of the character Lana from “Archer” saying “noooooope”

NO.

Animated gif of a white bird vigorously shaking its head from side to side.

NO.

Animated gif of sock puppet aliens from “Sesame Street,” looking at a rotary telephone and saying, “Nope nope nope.”

NO.

You don’t need to invalidate your partner’s (or your own) history of trauma in order for good times to also exist.

Animated gif of a star trailing a glittering rainbow from NBC’s “The More You Know” TV campaign from the ’90s

Three guesses about who wrote this:

  1. A person who once caused another person to break down and just wants them to get over it, already.
  2. A person who wants to be the person who makes someone else smile again, once they just get over that time they were broken, already.
  3. Brett Kavanaugh #topicalhumor2018# #ioriginallywrotethisin2018 #thatfeelslike20yearsago #abortionishealthcare #nomeansno

The categories of “having been hurt” and “being able to smile” are not mutually exclusive.

Why are they being presented as if they are? Let’s explore!

I get the sense that the author was going for a chiasmus-type thing, and failed, but they wanted the basic infrastructure to uphold the illusion of forethought.

I could probably find a more precise rhetorical term for this setup than “failed chiasmus,” and maybe some day I will learn it, and then update this post. Hold your breath for that. #itsbeenthreeyearsandistilldidntdoit

At any rate, let’s see how the basic point holds up without the syntactic support of not-quite-chiasmus.

“The identity of who hurt you and how they did it isn’t important, as long as you don’t forget that there are also people who make you happy!”

“It’s important to remember to smile after you’ve been hurt by abuse, and also that you remember to give humble li’l me sufficient credit for making you do it. Smile, that is!”

“The experiences that shaped you aren’t as important to me as the warm, fuzzy feelings I want you to be having right now!”

“Happy is better than sad!”

We’ll just table cisheteronormativity for now. (Which, I know, is basically all day every day in so many contexts, but this blog post isn’t gonna fix all those. If I find compelling evidence that this image and message were created by queer folx for queer folx, I’ll certainly update some of my commentary.)

I just doubt that the creators of this image were progressive or intentionally transgressive with respect to gender, sexuality, or intimate relationships. I think we’re safe to read this as a stylized rendering of a passionate cis-man-to-cis-lady embrace and also possibly they are getting married.

If this was a photo in this couple’s scrapbook, I would interpret the big ol’ heart sticker covering their faces as an effort to mask obvious tension, rather than as a cheerful decoration.

That dude just gives me bad vibes. I can’t read his body language as unaggressive.

He’s leaning down and leaning in. His hug looks restraining, and she kind of looks like she’s pushing back on his chest.

Just me?

Animated gif from Looney Tunes with the character Pepe le Pew forcefully hugging a black cat who he believes to be a skunk while she is trying very hard to escape his unwanted embrace
Animated gif of a scene from the film “Promising Young Woman” with a male character gently and creepily kissing the nose of the apparently nearly catatonic protagonist
Animated gif from Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” showing the character Gaston leaning aggressively in to plant a non-consensual kiss on Belle after he’s weirdly abruptly proposed to her, and she backs into the door and opens it outward behind her so that he falls outside

On a side note, when I looked for animated gifs à la Pepé le Pew, I was surprised at the frequency of this same posturing: taller man on left, leaning down, arms constraining if not restraining, lady looking up and backing away.

Ew.

Anyway, it turns out that it can matter that you were hurt and that you are ready to smile at the same damn time. The latter doesn’t cancel out the former.

It’s entirely reasonable to be suspicious of people who are aggressively insistent that you have to “get over it, already.”

And it’s entirely reasonable to remember that you can take the credit for learning to smile again all for yourself.

The Right People

On a light brown, dappled background, a typewriter font says, "Don't change so people will like you. Be yourself and the right people will love you." In the lower left-hand corner, there is a cartoon picture of a toaster with a face high-fiving a coffee mug with a face, while a piece of toast with a face jumps out of the toaster. The logo in the lower right-hand corner is for the site "Positive Energy."
On a light brown, dappled background, a typewriter font says, “Don’t change so people will like you. Be yourself and the right people will love you.” In the lower left-hand corner, there is a cartoon picture of a toaster with a face high-fiving a coffee mug with a face, while a piece of toast with a face jumps out of the toaster. The logo in the lower right-hand corner is for the site “Positive Energy.”

As always, I grant that there is often a nugget (or more) of valuable insight tucked into the questionable folds of these macros.

So I’ll affirm the message that your authentic self has inherent value.

But enough of that talk.

Do you really want to hang out with anyone who goes around designating whole-ass humans as “right” and “wrong”?

“Don’t change . . . and the right people will love you.”

I can’t help reading “change is bad” as the dominant message, when “you deserve love” is probably a more salient takeaway.

I get that the macro aims to convey a simple message. “Right” people will naturally gravitate to other “right” people, who love each other as they are. But this also implies the existence of “wrong” people with the “wrong” kind of love, and dang.

That just doesn’t hold water.

Sometimes, the “wrong” people can sound a lot like the “right” people because they are enabling you to suck and/or to not really be yourself.

Sometimes self-proclaimed “right” people, who give you lots of supportive lip service, secretly thrive on shaming you from their high, high horses (and I mean tall-type high, y’all, not stoned ponies).

A lot of change-resistant folx like to invoke the defense that “I’m just being who I am / telling it like it is!” when they’re really just being intransigent assholes.

Sometimes, changing in response to the fact that people don’t like you is called “growth.”

There are always people with a vested interested in your being ignorant, downtrodden, demotivated, and dependent, and so they don’t want you to grow.

And those people just might be your family and friends, whose opinions may seem exactly like the “right” ones to value.

Those apparently “right” people might be the loudest about delivering the words to your ears that “they love you just how you are,” without bothering to specify that what they love about how you are is your willingness to permit them to suck and/or not grow.

“Be yourself” is not necessarily bad advice, but don’t fool yourself into believing that you never need to change or that “right” people even exist.

In terms of the image chosen to accompany this quote, I feel like a coffee-maker should be participating in the good times.

I mean, we’ve got toast and toaster together. Coffee and coffee-maker feels like a natural parallel, right?

The coffee is just personified by its vessel, though.

I wonder why toast is a sentient entity, but coffee is not.

Granted, I’m not aware of any liquids with personalities, but none of these characters are technically living things anyway, so at that point I don’t see why a solid state is a necessary criterion for a face.

They also all have exactly the same face, and I’m struggling with that.

It is a very cheerful face, for what it’s worth.

Anyway, when you think about it, toast is really just bread that has changed to be better liked by those who encouraged it to change in the first place.

The bread / toast depicted here always had intrinsic value, but its appliance buddies certainly seem thrilled with the outcome of the toasting.

Does this technically make them the wrong people (or people-like things) for pressuring their bread friend to change according to their preference? Or are they the right people-like things because they love that the toast is being its authentic self?

We can’t know if the bread became toast with the goal of being better liked by the coffee mug and toaster (and I question whether the toaster is able to recognize the influence of its own cultural bias).

If the bread decided to change just to earn the shallow approval of its judgey friends, then the message is kind of like, “Have a little self-respect, Bread.”

But if the change was motivated by truth-to-self rather than desire for popularity, it’s good that the appliances approve of the change, right? “Yay for Toast!”

Where does our ability to evaluate motive begin and end?

All we know for sure is that the visible impact of Bread’s choices is that it is now Toast.

Everyone looks happy, but that doesn’t mean everyone is happy.

I really want to believe that Giant Coffee Mug isn’t judging Toast because of its own projected shame.

I want to believe that Toast is living its best life, surrounded by its supportive friends.

In that case, we all deserve the kind of love that Toast has.

Remember that you are both imperfect and lovable.