it's fascinating the way uk truly died after the early/mid 2010s. that was really the peak of their (modern) cultural relevance - florence and the machine, one direction, sherlock, dr who all had substantial american + global audiences. people really thought british people were cool and attractive bc the type of instantaneous + casual communication across countries between young people that's so prevalent today didn't exist back then. i'm not saying literal phone calls and message boards and twitter didn't exist obvs, but what i mean is bc social media use was less prevalent, less constant + immediate, and less developed, and the overall political climate was less polarized compared to now, that kind of on the ground highspeed cultural exchange wasn't happening.

80 million american teenagers suddenly learning overnight that british people eat beige chinese food and actually getting mad about it because british teenagers developed an irritating tendency over the past few years to make fun of them for having school shootings would and could not have ever happened in 2011.

legitimately irritated with the way that no matter what anyone advises, tumblr and every other social media platform has this innate, nearly religious need to hoist up any man who checks off their "says/does all the right things" boxes. it's something connected to this issue of neverending compartmentalization and labeling that dismisses any critical thinking and possibility of nuance in evaluating a person or a situation. women are so so eager to throw aside their gut feelings, or even just their personal dignity and healthy sense of distance, for a chance to worship at the altar of an "unproblematic king". it's insane how much of an overlap there is between evangelicals and terminally online leftists.

new gaiman article came out today. this is horrific, genuinely.

"In 2007, Gaiman and Stout took a trip to the Cornish countryside. On their last night there, Stout developed a UTI that had gotten so bad she couldn’t sit down. She told Gaiman they could fool around but that any penetration would be too painful to bear. “It was a big hard ‘no,’” she says. “I told him, ‘You cannot put anything in my vagina or I will die.’” Gaiman flipped her over on the bed, she says, and attempted to penetrate her with his fingers. She told him “no.” He stopped for a moment and then he penetrated her with his penis. At that point, she tells me, “I just shut down.” She lay on the bed until he was finished.

He then attempted to initiate anal sex without lubrication. “I screamed ‘no,’” Pavlovich says. ... After she said “no,” Gaiman backed off briefly and went into the kitchen. When he returned, he brought butter to use as lubricant. She continued to scream until Gaiman was finished. When it was over, he called her “slave” and ordered her to “clean him up.” She protested that it wasn’t hygienic. “He said, ‘Are you defying your master?’” she recalls. “I had to lick my own shit.”